"The creation of the middle ground involved a process of mutual invention by both the French and the Algonquians. This process passed through various stages, of which the earliest is at once the most noticed
and the least interesting. It was in this initial stage that the French, for example, simply assimilated Indians
into their own conceptual order. Indians became sauvages, and the French reduced Indian religion to devil
worship and witchcraft. Algonquians, for their part, thought of the first Europeans as manitous (spirits). On
both sides, new people were crammed into existing categories in a mechanical way."
-Source: Richard White, historian, The Middle Ground, 1991
Which of the following best supports the general argument in the excerpt about how Native Americans
and Europeans related to each other in the early colonial period?
Khan academy