| Summary: | This article presents a case study of middle ground between an indigenous community in southern Guyana and a group of itinerant miners from Brazil whose boss was perceived as a whiteman. Central to the emergence of this middle ground was each party's sense of creative agency in relation to the other, their mutual vulnerability in relation to larger circumstantial factors, and their mutual misunderstanding of each other's desires and motives for engagement. From this case study I argue that the conditions that provide for middle ground in resource extractive frontier spaces in Amazonia are often rare, short‐lived, and more likely to emerge in contexts where a decline in the market value of resources has reduced the scale and intensity of contact. Middle ground emerges in these conditions partly because certain indigenous alimentary techniques for negotiating power relations flourish when the contact is more interpersonal and more focused on embodied experience. [middle ground, whiteness, alimentary process, gold mining, indigenous Amazonia]
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