THE RECENT TWENTY-SEVEN-PAGE AHR ARTICLE by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron purports to shape a new paradigm for understanding Indian and EuroAmerican relationships in pre-twentieth-century North America.1 The borderlands in the work of the authors seem sanitized, morally neutral domains-eerie lethal places-where native populations "declined" by 50 percent, where the "relocation" of Indians is followed by intra-Indian "mayhem," and where imperial warfare is a "watershed" succeeded by European reinforcement and reform over a "dark and bloody ground."2 Indeed, there are so many issues raised in this essay that space does not allow a full explanation. A brief discussion of four elements will have to suffice. Adelman and Aron have devised what they claim to be a new way to understand the history of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century diplomacy and race relations in North America. This new concept revolves around time and several geopolitical words and their definitions: "empire," "frontier," "borderlands," and "bordered land." They evidently believe empires are European and lead to nation-states; empires are never indigenous, nor is there such an entity as an Indian nation. By definition, treaties are fictive or cynical tracts. Frontiers are ambiguous, borderless meeting places that involve cultural mixing. Borderlands are places of European imperial rivalry where Indians slyly seek micro-diplomatic openings. Once the rivalry is over, borderlands can become bordered land, where national borders are defined, and indigenous peoples are swallowed up by national cultures. To explicate the "new"l principles derived from these definitions, three North American theaters are explored: the Great Lakes as a "middle ground" where "the patina of Indian autonomy" existed, the lower Missouri Valley as a dissolved "borderland accommodation," and the Greater Rio Grande Valley (that is, the southern Great Plains) as a failure in "paternalistic pacification."3 This is process history. It is Turnerian, and that is all fine and dandy, yet the authors seem uncomfortable with the baggage that the Turner thesis brings with it.