Re-“Grounding” Our Understandings of Cross-Cultural Encounter: Examining the Geographies of Native-European Interaction in the Great Lakes Region

This paper explores how particular local environments, and more broadly, the distinct maritime nature of the Great Lakes, shaped Euro-Indigenous relations from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, returning geography to the narrative of contact, interaction, and colonization. Native peoples harnessed the fluid geography of North America’s interior waterways for centuries to enhance their mobility throughout the midcontinent. Navigating overland between water routes, Native Americans established complex communication networks, facilitating the movement of people, goods, ideas, and diplomatic influence across the Great Lakes region. Portages, or carrying places, served as the geographic linchpins in this fluid system of interconnected lakes and rivers. This study highlights the geographic expertise which allowed Native peoples to master and utilize such spaces, as powerful actors in the region both before and after contact with Europeans.

Studying the cross-cultural interactions that took place at portages and other geographic conduits after contact reincorporates geographic factors into the history of the “middle ground.” With the arrival of Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century and the cycles of violence that followed, both Indians and Europeans sought to harness the region’s geography for their own purposes of travel, trade, and empire building. Local landscapes and strategic spaces of movement remained key factors for both Native peoples and would-be colonizers over the course of French, British, and American incursions into the region. This study examines the enduring importance of local ecological and geographic realities during both conflict and cooperation between Indians and Europeans. The project demonstrates how local landscapes and other non-human factors influenced where and how Indians and Europeans cooperated and clashed in the region, returning geographic considerations to our understandings of a spatial “middle ground” of Euro-Indigenous relations.