Tag Archives: Great Lakes

The Political Project of MCRC v. EPA, 1

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First in a Series

oretrucksAAA

Ore trucks from Lundin Mining’s Eagle Mine make their way down the Triple A road.

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I’ve just gotten around to reading the complaint filed on July 8th in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Northern Division, by the Marquette County Road Commission against the EPA. The complaint alleges that the EPA’s repeated objections to County Road 595 — that the road will threaten and destroy wetlands, streams and protected wildlife in its way — are “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of Section 404(J) of the Clean Water Act. The Road Commission asks the court to set aside the EPA’s Final Decision against the building of County Road 595, restore Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s authority to permit the road, and bar the EPA from further interference in the matter.

While it may take the court some time to decide whether MCRC v. EPA has any legal merit, the complaint is written to serve other ends as well: political objectives. The complaint is aligned with efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, to ease regulations, subvert the legal authority of the EPA and whip up anger against the federal government; and the plaintiffs appear to be connected, through their attorneys, to one of the most powerful Republican party fundraisers and a network of ultra-wealthy political donors.

The MCRC complaint directs ire against a familiar cadre of enemies — environmental “activists,” overreaching federal bureaucrats and the area’s indigenous community; and it pretends to discover a dark conspiracy, in which these groups meet “surreptitiously,” write “sarcastically” about mining interests, and collude to block economic development. In fact, it’s often hard to decide whether the arguments and evidence assembled in this complaint are meant to serve as legal fodder or support political posturing. So I thought I would try to sort through them in a short series of posts on the CR 595 lawsuit.

There is the tiresome pretense throughout the complaint that CR 595 would serve as something other than a haul route from the Eagle Mine to the Humboldt Mill, and that the road will benefit the public as much as the mining company. While the mining company says it is committed to making do with current infrastructure, the public clearly deserves some relief: trucks hauling ore on a makeshift route from Eagle have already been involved in a few scary accidents, and it remains a question whether cars can safely share the same road, especially an icy winter road, with ore trucks trying to beat the clock. People are understandably concerned, too, about big trucks loaded with sulfide ore barreling through the city of Marquette.

The public has another cause for grievance, and it makes for some angry foot stomping in the complaint: the MCRC spent millions to prepare for EPA reviews of the CR 595 application and failed repeatedly to win approval. Both time and money were wasted, the complaint says, not due to incompetence, stubbornness or denial, but because the EPA was never going to give the Road Commission a fair hearing. It’s in this connection that the complaint tries to lay out an “anti-mining” conspiracy between the EPA and environmental activists and the indigenous community in the Great Lakes Basin, and where the arguments become specious and contorted.

In subsequent posts I’ll address some of the ways MCRC v. EPA constructs this anti-mining strawman in order to mount a political offensive; and throughout this series, I’m going to be asking whether the “anti-mining” label correctly characterizes the evidence brought by the MCRC. I think it’s fair to say from the outset that it does not accurately represent the priorities and commitments of people and groups concerned about the construction of CR 595. It’s reductive, and turns road skeptics into industry opponents. To be against this particular haul road — or hold its planners to the letter of the law — is not necessarily to pit yourself against the entire mining industry.

The anti-mining label deliberately confuses haul-road opposition with opposition to the mining industry in order to coerce people into going along with the haul road or risk losing their livelihood, or at least the jobs and economic prosperity promised when mining projects are pitched. The MCRC complaint goes even further: it conflates mining with economic development — or reduces all economic development in the region to mining — and so runs roughshod over the thoughtful arguments of people like Thomas M. Power, who has studied the ways mining can restrict and quash sustainable economic development.

The anti-mining label fences ordinary people in, distorts and exaggerates their legitimate concerns, and does not recognize that people might come to the CR 595 discussion from all different places. Most don’t arrive as members of some anti-industry coalition; they are fishermen, residents, property owners, teachers, hunters, parents, hikers, snowmobilers, birdwatchers, loggers, parishioners, kayakers, merchants, and so on. Some are many of these things all at once.

The label is fundamentally disrespectful: it refuses to meet people on their own terms and fails to ask what any of the people who oppose CR 595 actually stand for. What do they want for the area? What do they value and love? What do they envision for the future? Where do they have shared interests? Where do they have real differences? How can we work together? The anti-mining label forecloses all those questions. Instead, people are divided. The label demands that everybody take one side or the other (and, as I learned in the course of my work on 1913 Massacre, in the Upper Peninsula that demand has deep historical roots in the labor conflicts of the early twentieth century; but, no worries, in this series of posts I’ll try to stay focused on the present).

I have always had trouble with the idea that “anti-” and “pro-” mining positions should govern the way we talk about the environmental regulation of mining. I myself can easily slip into this way of talking. But as I tried to explain in an exchange on this blog with Dan Blondeau of Eagle Mine, that way of thinking impedes and short-circuits important conversations about the ethics of mining. Playing the anti-mining card reduces the questions of whether and how mining can be done responsibly — in this place, by that company, at this time — to mere pro and contra. It’s a dangerous ruse: instead of identifying risks and addressing responsibilities, it generates social conflict.

Time Out of Mind

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I leave tomorrow for Lake Superior. On Thursday the 24th, Ken and I are going to show our film at Michigan Tech, where there’s a conference called Writing Across the Peninsula, and then, on Saturday the 26th, at the DeVos Art Museum in Marquette. I’m going up a little early to do some exploring, traveling north along the western shore of the lake to Palisade Head and then inland (west), through Finland and into the area around Ely, Babbitt and Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota. That’s where Polymet Mining has proposed a huge open pit sulfide mine. It will be my first visit and maybe one of the few chances I get to see the area before the mining begins. After that, it’s never going to be the same. Or at least not in my lifetime — or in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

Polymet recently disclosed in a Preliminary Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement that water runoff from its mine will have to be treated for the next five hundred years — “a minimum of 500 years,” just to meet water quality regulations. The proposal in its current form clearly violates Minnesota Rule 6132.3200, which requires that “the mining area” be “maintenance free” upon closure; but Polymet and its legions of apologists have already found some wiggle room here, arguing that state law allows for “perpetual treatment” as long as enough money is set aside and as long as the company can prove that it’s meeting federal and state water standards. For Polymet, it seems, this is just the start of a negotiation.

The Mining Examiner quotes Frank Ongaro, Executive Director of Mining Minnesota: “There’s no doubt it can be done, that it’s allowed. The concept is sound; the details have to be worked out by the experts.” I honestly don’t know how anyone can say things like this with a straight face. Five-hundred years: the experts just need to work things out. No doubt about it.

When I first heard about the five-hundred year disclosure, I tried to think of a place where mining was done five-hundred years ago: the best I came up with was Cerro Rico in Potosi, Bolivia, where conquistadores set up silver-mining operations in the sixteenth-century. Potosi is now considered one of the most polluted places on earth. Of course, the Spanish crown did not set out the sorts of guarantees that Polymet is willing to set out; but apparently the mining company shares the crown’s illusion that its empire will last forever. Or at least they would like us to think so: they would like us to set aside our doubts and entertain the fantastic idea that they will provide water-treatment facilities for the maintenance of their copper mine for the next five-hundred years.

Mind you, the country’s only been in existence for 237 years, and Minnesota was only admitted to the union in 1858 — 155 years ago. The EPA only started operations in 1970; its workers only just got back on the job yesterday, after being furloughed during the shutdown. Why are we being asked to believe in the perpetuity or even the resilience of the EPA, the Minnesota DNR, or any government institution or form of government? Who can say what’s going to happen fifty years from now, let alone five hundred? Will there be a Minnesota DNR or an EPA in 2063? Will there be a Polymet? Minnesota? How about 2100? 2413? Insofar as history is about holding people to account, this is nothing more than historical fantasy: there’s no guarantee or even promise of accountability when you are talking about five centuries. As Steve Timmer would have it, nobody is going to be around to keep Polymet’s grave clean.

Time out of mind is the phrase this whole proposal conjures for me. The expression comes from English law. “Time out of mind” or “time immemorial” is a time before anyone can remember: a property or holding, a way of passage or a benefit has been enjoyed so long that those who claim it no longer have to prove ownership or their right to it; nobody can remember a time when it wasn’t so. In this case we are being asked to project that far into the future — way past the horizon of what we ordinarily consider the future, way beyond the time anyone can foresee.

Projecting that far into the future, time out of mind, is also a distorting lens. It’s easy when looking that far ahead to overlook what we know will really happen to the area in the near term, just in the course of constructing and operating an open-pit sulfide mine. Mine pollution that lasts for five-hundred years is a huge and terrifying prospect, no doubt, but that dread prospect might also have the weird effect of eclipsing (or normalizing) the more immediate environmental and social consequences of mining and the industrialization mining brings. Water Legacy estimates that the Polymet project will take 6,600 acres of forests out of public ownership, destroy or impair at least 1,500 acres of wetlands and result in 168,000,000 tons of permanent waste rock heaps and 228,000,000 tons of tailings waste. Add to this the haul roads, the mill operations, air and noise pollution, the effects of clear-cutting and deforestation, shifts in population, economic distortion, and so on.

It’s important to pull back, change the lens, and see clearly what’s going to happen, what’s already happening, to the waters and the wilderness areas, the Lake and all life around it, within our lifetime, and what effect our actions now will have for generations to come.

A Great Commons Narrative for the Great Lakes

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A few days ago, the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law released its report on the Human Right to Water Bill in California. Directed at State agencies, the report discusses the obligations these agencies have to consider the human right to water, as required by California Assembly Bill 685. Specifically it outlines what the duty “to consider” entails, discusses the human right to water, and offers some guidelines for implementation of AB 685.

Not every state has California’s water problems, but all states need to recognize the human right to water and put it on the public agenda. “The human right to water,” in the words of the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity” and (to continue with the language of General Comment No. 15) “a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.”

And yet even where water is abundant, we find this basic right threatened and compromised when it should be respected and protected. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the UN High Commission on Human Rights expressed concern on a recent visit that in some regions of the United States, mining and extractive industries are compromising the human right to water; that concern now must extend even to the Great Lakes area, where one of the biggest mining operations in the world is about to be staged around Lake Superior, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

A 2011 report issued by the Council of Canadians finds that “the human right to water is being violated in a number of communities around the Great Lakes,” especially but not exclusively in indigenous communities. The report, entitled Our Great Lakes Commons [pdf], lays out “a people’s plan” to remedy this situation and to save and protect Lake Superior and all the Great Lakes as our “common heritage.” I came to the report after reading an op-ed in the May 1 edition of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by its author, Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Chair of the organization Food and Water Watch. In her thought-provoking piece for the Journal-Sentinel and in this passage from her 2011 report, Barlow roots the human right to water in what she terms a broad “narrative” of the Commons:

The notion of the Commons is a very old one. A Commons narrative asserts that no one owns water. Rather it is a common heritage that belongs to the Earth, other species and future generations as well as our own. Because it is a flow resource necessary for life and ecosystem health, and because there is no substitute for it, water must be regarded as a public Commons and a public good and preserved as such for all time in law and practice. Embracing the Commons helps us to restore to the centrestage a whole range of social and ecological phenomena that market economics regards as “externalities.” A language of the Commons would restore more democratic control over the Great Lakes and establish their care and stewardship the joint responsibility of citizens and their elected governments based on the notions of social equity, ecological survival and governance by the people most impacted.

The Commons approach is based on the belief that just by being members of the human family, we all have rights to certain common heritages, be they the atmosphere and oceans, freshwater and genetic diversity, or culture, language and wisdom. In most traditional societies, it was assumed that what belonged to one belonged to all. Many indigenous societies to this day cannot conceive of denying a person or a family basic access to food, air, land, water and livelihood. Many modern societies extended the same concept of universal access to the notion of a social Commons, creating education, health care and social security for all members of the community. There are many working examples of Commons in North America today that include systems of national, state and provincial parks, cooperative fishing compacts to protect local stocks from depletion, and public libraries.

A Great Lakes Basin Commons would reject the view that the primary function of the Great Lakes is to promote the interests of industry and the powerful and give them preferential access to the Lakes’ bounties. It would embrace the belief that the Great Lakes form an integrated ecosystem with resources that are to be equitably shared and carefully managed for the good of the whole community. In a Commons framework, water is a fundamental human right that must be accessible to all. Private control of water cannot address itself to the issues of conservation, justice or democracy, the underpinnings of a solution to the crisis of the Great Lakes. Only citizens and their governments acting on their behalf can operate on these principles. Under a Commons regime, all private sector activity would come under strict public oversight and government accountability, and all would have to operate within a mandate, whose goals are the restoration and preservation of the waters of the Basin and water justice for all those who live around it.

At the same time, it is not a return to the notion that the Great Lakes are indestructible due to their size, or what has come to be known as “the tragedy of the commons.” It is rooted rather in a sober and realistic assessment of the true damage that has already been unleashed on the Great Lakes as well as the knowledge that they must be managed and shared in a way that protects them now and for all time.

“The Lake Is Alive” – A Note on Maps and Language

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“…the most vital of all issues — the process of life itself.”
-Pierre Trudeau, on the signing of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, April 15, 1972.

When I posted the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission’s latest map of Lake Superior mining over the weekend, I didn’t expect it to generate nearly as much traffic as it already has. Save the Wild UP put the map and a link to my blog on its Facebook page; other organizations and individuals picked it up from there. So I’m looking at a little spike in traffic and trying to figure out what it tells me.

One thing it tells me is something every how-to on blogging will tell you: images work, and they work better than text. The conventional wisdom is that online readers aren’t necessarily interested in reading essays and disquisitions, or reflections on language. They want it very short, simple and preferably with funny pictures. I don’t know how much there is to that conventional wisdom (and it’s encouraging to see it challenged), but my writing tends to run against it, and so, this morning, did my thinking about that map of Lake Superior mining. You can run with me for the duration of this short note, or go search for gifs. It’s entirely up to you.

Three-quarters of the traffic spike on that mining map came from the United States, most of it from Michigan, where Save the Wild UP has a constituency and where people have a real stake in the new mining around the Lake. Almost all the rest of the traffic came from Canada, where most of the new mining, leasing and exploration are concentrated.

Of course, water knows no borders or boundaries. So when studying this map it’s important to see the Lake and its environs as a whole freshwater ecosystem, a biosphere, a living place, and understand the pressures that mining on both the Canadian and the U.S. sides will exert — or, to go back to what I said at the end of my last post, is already exerting on the Lake and the life it sustains.

That big-picture perspective on the Lake is one I’ve been trying to develop and appreciate, but I feel I haven’t yet found the right language. Talking about whole freshwater ecosystems and biospheres and so forth doesn’t quite capture it, at least not for me; I find it boring and much too predictable, all very late-twentieth century, the vocabulary of a muted, quasi-scientific environmentalism that people have gotten used to ignoring.

Maybe it’s better simply to say, the Lake is alive. That is something a map like this can’t quite convey, as it tries to give the impression that the Lake’s geography is fixed in place. Instead of drawing or studying a map that describes the static geography (or geology) of the Lake, let’s try to appreciate the simple truth that the Lake that is a fluid place, and understand that what’s happening right now in Thunder Bay or on the Keweenaw Peninsula, or at the mouth of the Michipicoten or St. Mary’s rivers, isn’t just isolated or restricted to that place; it’s happening on Lake Superior and in the life of the Lake. The task, then, would be to map not a static geography or territory but an incessant, fluid deterritorialization.

Actions and events ripple and flow and move across the Lake; and at the same time the Lake is so much greater than the mere sum of all the actions and events that will diminish its life-force and force it, from all sides, to become something other than it was. Why? Because the Lake is alive, which means the Lake is already, incessantly, in millions of movements and in billions of ways, becoming something other than itself.

Those who live around the Lake are also alive in the Lake and the Lake is alive in them. Listen to Pierre Trudeau. The process of the Lake is the process of life itself; the story of the Lake is the story of life. In the most famous telling of that story, in the book of Genesis, the spirit of God moves across the waters — Gitchie Manitou, the Great Spirit, over Gichigami, the Great Water — to create life; but after that first movement, life is in the water and the water moves in everything that is alive and everything alive moves in it. It is life itself.

An Updated Map of Lake Superior Mining

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The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission has produced this updated map of Lake Superior mining. Since I’ve written about an earlier version of this map (here, but see also here and here and here) and I plan to write about Lake Superior mining moving forward, I thought it would be useful to share it.

This March 15, 2013 version of the map [pdf] includes more detail and definition as we see new projects come online and exploration and leasing continue apace.

Notice how much more detail we have in this version around Duluth and Hibbing, in the southwestern corner of Superior. Taconite and iron yield to copper and nickel as the trail of exploration moves north. On the south shore of Superior, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Kennecott Eagle Copper Mine on the Yellow Dog Plains, along with White Pine and Orvana Copperwood, are now properly identified.

Claims and leases have turned much of this area, from L’Anse Bay to Marquette and over to Deer Lake, pink. The new mining runs right up to the edge of the watershed area that stretches from the Carp River to St. Mary’s River.

The densest concentration of leasing and mining claims remains on the Canadian side, on the northwestern shore of Superior, from Thunder Bay toward Lake Nipigon. Gold and rare mineral exploration predominate.

“Areas of Concern” singled out by the Lake Superior Mining Committee in 2010 are unchanged, on both the Canadian and the U.S. sides of the lake; and yet we see mineral exploration and new mining claims right around these areas.

It’s tempting to look at what’s happening around Lake Superior right now and make alarming conjectures about what might happen, three or five or ten years down the road. Nobody knows how many full-blown big mining operations will develop from all this exploration and activity. But it’s clear from this map that new mining is already putting significant pressure on Lake Superior.

Note: For a newer (2020) version of this map, see this post.

Race You To The Water

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The other day I expressed some misgivings over the word that Earthworks chose to apply to water in the first sentence of its report, Polluting the Future: their characterization of water as an “asset,” I said, made me uneasy. The water flowing from springs and brooks, the water of rivers, lakes and streams, the raindrops that fall from the sky and the dew on the morning grass, the water in our bodies, in plants and trees, the water in dogs, flowers, bugs, fish, elephants, walruses and caterpillars, the water in everything that is alive on earth — water is and will always be something greater, more wondrous and something other than a mere entry in the accounting ledgers of some grand business enterprise, which is all that the word “asset” conjures for me.

greatlakesoilI came across the word again today as I was reading an editorial in The Detroit Free Press. I am in complete sympathy with the position it takes against plans to build a huge network of oil pipelines carrying diluted bitumen (or dilbit) across the Great Lakes region, and to transport crude oil by barge across Lake Superior. These are reckless, irresponsible ideas. The threat they pose to the integrity of the Lakes and the life the Lakes sustain is only made worse when you consider a couple of salient facts. First (and it is curious that the editorial does not mention this), the new mining around Lake Superior — as I’ve noted repeatedly — is already going to put pressure on Lake Superior and the Lake Superior watershed; the shipping of oil by barge would bring even more industrialization and greatly heighten the risk of environmental catastrophe. Second, the company building and running the pipeline (the Canadian company Enbridge) has already been responsible for an environmental disaster in Kalamazoo, Michigan — the worst inland oil spill in US history, in fact.

The editorial takes the position that these plans betray a “deep misunderstanding of the true value of the lakes,” but when the editors try to say what that value is, they run into trouble:

It’s easy to wax poetic about the value of the Great Lakes to Michigan and the other states they border. The beauty of the lakes, the wildlife and fish that dwell in and around the lakes, the environmental benefits the lakes present — they’re incalculable.

But let’s get practical: Clean freshwater is one of the scarcest commodities there is. And it’s only going to get worse. Clean water will be an asset that’s worth far more than oil. Jeopardizing the Great Lakes isn’t just morally and ethically wrong. It’s financially foolish, as well.

It’s interesting how the argument here moves, in just a couple of short paragraphs, from the “incalculable” to the crudest of calculations — the “worth” of clean water. This is tantamount to arguing that what is “morally and ethically” right should take second place to what is financially sound — as if finance should have more claim on the imagination and intellect (and the heart) than morality, and monetary value should be privileged over moral and ethical considerations.

I suppose that’s the way it goes nowadays, and I just need to get real. Still, there’s a great swirl of confusion in these two paragraphs, and I have a number of questions about the concept of morality being invoked here, how we’re to distinguish it from ethics, and why those things don’t seem to figure into what are called “practical” considerations. Practice and finance here are unmoored from and unrestricted by moral and ethical concerns; it’s precisely that kind of thinking that got us into the precarious situation we’re now in.

One remedy for all this confusion may lie in the perspective that holds water to be a basic human right — a perspective I also found missing from the Earthworks report. But even then we need to go beyond talking about assets and recognize the limitations of the argument that “clean freshwater is one of the scarcest commodities.” Why? Follow the link from The Detroit Free Press editorial to the National Geographic site on the “Freshwater Crisis.” There you enter a Malthusian world:

While the amount of freshwater on the planet has remained fairly constant over time—continually recycled through the atmosphere and back into our cups—the population has exploded. This means that every year competition for a clean, copious supply of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and sustaining life intensifies.

bilquaszwaterchildHere, all of humanity is engaged in a contest or race. More and more people enter every year to compete for the same, limited resources. This is one reason why it’s imperative to recognize freshwater as a human right. Otherwise, history becomes a death match, or a big, global reality TV show: intensifying “competition” over this scarce “commodity” means that there will be winners and losers in the water game. The winners are fully vested with their rights; the losers struggle to survive in arid, toxic regions, or simply die of thirst.

On the Reference I Made the Other Day to ‘The Middle Ground’

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In a previous post, I said that asking creates a kind of “middle ground” where power – and everything else – is up for grabs. The concept of the middle ground is one I borrowed from a wonderful book, Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. It was a passing reference, and it may have been a little careless, I now concede. Here I want to talk a little about the concept as White develops it, and try to connect it with what I had to say about the power of asking in my earlier post.

In White’s book, the middle ground is both a real place – the pays d’en haut or “Upper Country” of the Great Lakes Region – and a complex human terrain where the French and the Indians created “an elaborate network of economic, political, cultural and social ties to meet the demands of a particular historical situation.” For Europeans and Indians in the pays d’en haut, the middle ground described a place of mutual agreement, exchange and concession, to conduct everything from judicial proceedings to the regulation of sexual mores to the fur trade. White calls the middle ground “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.”

In this place, Indians and Europeans staged a creative, cross-cultural, ad hoc exchange of words, forms, rituals and practices. This conversation accomplished what force or violence could not. Or, to put it more precisely, the middle ground emerged at the limits of coercive power and violence. The Europeans in the Upper Country “could neither dictate to the Indians nor ignore them,” White writes; and where they could not conquer, command or go it alone they had to yield, concede and share. That went both ways.

The middle ground depended on the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force. The middle ground grew according to the need of people to find a means, other than force, to gain the cooperation and consent of foreigners. To succeed, those who operated on the middle ground had, of necessity, to attempt to understand the world and the reasoning of others and to assimilate enough of that reasoning to put it to their own purposes.

Understanding and assimilating the world and the reasoning of others: another word for that is translation. And that’s how White sometimes describes it: the middle ground was a place made up of “creative, but often expedient misunderstandings” – fictions – that allowed the Indians and the Europeans first to see each other as human beings, then to construct “a common, mutually comprehensible world.” They forged a new language, new meaning and a new world together: “the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and exchange.” Gift-giving, calumets, the covering of the dead – all these Algonquian rituals were brought into play, but it wasn’t simply a matter of carrying old forms across languages or cultures; in the middle ground, they were transformed into something new.

It would be a mistake to think that the French and the Indians somehow deliberately set out to create this middle ground after first encountering one another. The middle ground did not emerge because both sides had dedicated themselves to a spirit of cooperation – hardly! — or because some “magical affinity” (as White puts it) or mist of peace, love and understanding hung over the pays d’en haut in the 18th century. Short-lived, fragile, often unique and irreproducible adaptations and improvisations made up the middle ground; in White’s account, it emerges and disappears then re-emerges while the French are the primary European presence in the pays d’en haut. They abandon it from time to time, resorting to force and violence (as do the Algonquians). After the defeats of the Iroquois and the French in the Seven Years war, and the ascendency of the English as a power in the Upper Country, the middle ground is all but lost.

While some readers of The Middle Ground talk about the way White’s work unravels and disassembles the concept of the frontier, I find myself moving in an entirely different direction. I tend to think of pays d’en haut as White describes it in his book almost as an Atlantis, a world residing somewhere between myth and history; or, better, as a historical world created by mythmaking. It exercises a hold over my imagination as few places have — except, maybe, the city of Naples, which is, for me, also a place both real and imagined and to which I return in my mind over and over again.

1755_Bellin_Map_of_the_Great_Lakes_-_Geographicus_-_GreatLakes-bellin-1755

On the one hand, it’s easy to see why the French Upper Country has a hold on me: here the history of the Great Lakes region (which I discovered in the course of my work on 1913 Massacre) comes together with my interest in non-coercive forms of power. So it’s not surprising that I should have made a passing reference to White in my previous post about the power of asking; in fact, it’s much more surprising to me that I didn’t go on more about it, as I have here.

On the other hand, I recognize that this is all very problematic. White is a historian, describing as meticulously and carefully as he can the cultural politics of the Great Lakes region in the 18th century; I’m reader of history, and I tend to take what I read and start imagining things. I’m familiar with Philip J. DeLoria’s warnings against “oversimplification” of White’s work, and his worry about misreadings that make White’s middle ground “analytically portable” to the point where it becomes “simply a trope for human give and take.” But there is, there has to be, something portable in everything that one reads; the act of reading is itself a carrying back and forth, an exchange, an importing and exporting. It’s an act of give and take, as DeLoria himself wryly admits.

This is not just to say that White’s study of the middle ground echoes themes found in, say, James C. Scott’s work on the Upland peoples of Southeast Asia, or Pierre Clastres’ work on the Indians of South America, and that there’s some common trope that all these books describe. It might be to say that reading itself is an exercise of non-coercive power, an act that involves transference, translation, transmutation and creation of new meaning, a kind of dialogue between author and reader, the practicing historian and the images we make of history.

Not much new in that thought: for the moment, I simply want to offer that I seem to have carried my interests, imagination, intellectual habits and stories into White’s work, assimilated it, and now I seem to be putting it to my own purposes, as an illustration of what can be accomplished through the exercise of non-coercive power. It remains to be seen how that illustration will help advance or complicate my thinking on this point. But I guess it’s pretty clear that all this situates the act of reading in the territory of cultural production White describes in The Middle Ground.  I say that knowing full well that I am probably going to be accused of misreading.