Hiding in the Tallgrass: Indigenous Windows into an Indigenous Middle Ground in Early America

Migrations begin the main narrative of Richard White’s seminal Middle Ground, as Algonquian refugees flee Iroquois violence and move into the heart of the western Great Lakes in the middle of the 17^th century. Fundamentally overturning an old and simplistic idea of Native American history in which Indians stayed in place and waited for European colonization to come to them, White’s narrative recast Indians into movers, actors, and shapers, rather than passive and static objects of historical forces. This new narrative began the rewriting of Great Lakes Native history with a focus on indigenous logics and motivations, resting on the acknowledgement that however important the French were in creating new cultures, they were not always the biggest thing happening in Indian worlds. The ­Middle Ground inspired new ways of exploring Great Lakes Indians as dynamic and moving along trajectories only partly shaped by colonialism.

One consequence of this renewed understanding of Indian migrations and trajectories has been the recognition that just as there were encounters between European newcomers and Native residents of the Great Lakes, so too were there important encounters between Native Newcomers and other indigenous peoples (and non-humans) long-resident in the dynamic region of the mid-continent. This paper proposes the notion that consequential indigenous middle grounds resulted when Algonquians moved west and into one of the most important cultural and ecological borderlands of early America. In particular, it examines a group of hide paintings long associated with the Illinois as a window into indigenous encounters and cultural creation in the middle of early America.