“They are not delighted in baubles, but in usefull things”: Native American commercial...

Joshua Ivinson (Dec 2013)

“They are not delighted in baubles, but inusefull things”:

Reinterpreting Native American commercialmentalities and the gift/exchange dichotomy

in the early colonial South East

The historiography of the formation of the Southeast American ‘Indian

trade’ has long been written under the assumption that “in traditional

Indian cultures economic behavoir was so imbedded in social and political

activities that it precluded “economic rationality” after contact with

Europeans.”1 Despite the success of new Atlantic, ‘borderlands’, and

ethno-historical approaches over the past generation, which have

increased awareness of Indians’ role in the fur trade, the notion that

this participation was only possible after they were ‘transformed’ by

European capitalist and materialist culture still persists, denying early

Indian participants true agency in the transformation of the region’s

economy. Only recently are historians increasingly realising that

‘social’ forms of exchange – gift-giving and reciprocity – did “not

accurately capture the range of exchange modalities that were practices

1 Bruce G. Trigger, ‘Early Native American Responses to European Contact’ in Albert L. Hurtado and Peter Iverson (eds.), Major Problems in American Indian History, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001), p.66

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in early America”2 and that it is a myth that “Native Americans were

starkly different economic actors than European settlers.”3

Scholarship of the Southern deerskin trade has lagged behind that of

Canadian fur trade which, since the early twentieth century, has been

understood to be an “interplay of economic forces, technology, and

geography”4, rather than a straight forward imperial narrative. However,

as historians of the fur trade continue to shift their focus south

towards a region which had previously been “relegated to the margins of

early American historiography” 5 they are realising that, because of the

unique chronology of the contact era in the American Southeast, it is

arguable that the economic imperatives of Native groups “are perhaps

clearer in the Southeast than the Northeast.”6 Whereas in the rest of the

continent the transformative impact of trade with European was largely

overshadowed by the simultaneous trauma caused by new deadly pathogens,

in the Southeast “demographic collapse and the inauguration of English

trade did not 'overlap.”7 In the early sixteenth century, just as the

Mississippian chiefdoms of the late prehistoric began to wane, the

2 Jessica Stern, ‘Native American Taste; Re-evaluating the Gift-Commodity Debate in the British Colonial Southeast’, Native South, 5 (2012), p.23 Jessica Stern, Red Rat and the Maker: British American and Native American Exchange in the Colonial Southeast, PhD Thesis (Baltimore, MD, 2007), p.24 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, revised edition (Toronto, 1956), p.iv5 Daniel H. Usner, Jr., ‘The Frontier Exchange Economy of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the Eighteenth Century’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 44, No. 2 (1987), p.1656 Charles M. Hudson, ‘Why the Southeastern Indians slaughtered Deer’ in Shephard Krecht (ed.), Indians, Animals and the Fur Trade; A Critique of the Keepers of the Game (Athens, GA, 1981), p.1667 Joel W. Martin, ‘Southeastern Indians and the English Trade in Skins and Slaves’, in Charles M. Hudson, Carmen Chaves Tesser, (eds.), The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704 (Athens, GA, 1994), p.305

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Spanish expeditions of Juan Ponce de León and later Hernando de Soto

arrived in the region. Although the Spanish presence was temporary,

retaining only a tenuous presence in Florida, these new diseases

decimated the region’s population by half and brought an end to the

Mississippian chiefdoms before the colonies of English Carolina and

French Louisiana were founded in the late seventeenth century.8 These

colonial settlements quickly came to rely on trade with Indians for their

early survival: By the mid-seventeenth century, the British colonies were

exporting up to a million deerskins per year9 while an annual export of

50,000 deerskins formed French Louisiana’s “most consistent export

commodity.”10 Yet, by this time, the disintegration of stratified Native

societies into historical-era ‘tribal’ societies was forcing Native

people to similarly adapt to their new economic and political

environment: As many historians forget, “they, too, lived in a new

world.”11

Nowadays, historians have come to view the Southeast as zone of mutual,

cross-cultural economic interaction that suited all parties, albeit in

differing degrees in the long-term. But were the actions of Native

Americans in the early European-Indian trade due to their adoption of

imported European capitalist values, or are they coherent with existing 8 Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosnebloom , and Thomas Weiss, ‘Indians and the Economyof Eighteenth-Century Carolina’ in Peter A. Coclanis (ed.), The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, SC, 2005) p.2999 Dan Richter, Facing East form Indian Country (London, 2001), p.17810 Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy; The Lower Mississippivalley before 1783 (London, 1992), p.24611 James H. Merrell, ‘The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience’ in Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell, American Encounters; Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal 1500-1850 (London, 2000), p.43

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material and commercial cultures that were already held by Southeastern

Indians?

To understand the initiatives and reactions of Native Americans in the

Southeastern trading environment, it is necessary to put the colonial era

into the context of their existing history rather than adhering to

colonial periodisation; to “study the themes of culture change in the

lower valley as catalyzed through events brought about by European

invasions … bring[ing] the longue durée of Mississippian sociopolitical

complexity into focus.”12 By scrutinising economic activity in the pre-

historic Southeast – a distinct cultural region which encompassed the

Lower Mississippi Valley, the Southern Appalachian and further south – it

becomes clear that the actions of Native Americans in the post-contact

period display a greater continuity than has often been appreciated by

historians of early Euro-America. Rather than being seduced by superior

European manufactures, Southeast Indians continued to make rational

economic decisions, demanding and consuming goods that offered utility in

their existing culture and reappropriating goods to fit their own

traditional needs, while often taking the initiative to pursue new

commercial opportunities themselves and dictate the terms of trade.

Studying these developments as a whole suggests that the equal

participation of Indians in this trade economy was not necessarily the

result of a ‘transformation’ of Native economic culture, but due to the

responses that were completely compatible with rational economic 12 Jayur Madhusudan Mehta , ‘Spanish Conquistadores, French Explorers, and Natchez Great Suns in Southwestern Mississippi, 1542-1729’, Native South, Volume 6, 2013, p.34

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mentalities that had existed before the importation of European goods and

‘material culture’.

*

Until just over a generation ago, the economic involvement of Native

Americans scarcely figured in the colonial narrative of the early

Southeast. While Early American history was understood to be a multi-

national affair, Native Americans were still curiously absent in this

“history of those men and women – English, European, and African – who

transformed America from a geographical expression into a nation.”13 When

they were examined, Native Americans were artificially dealt with in

national terms as distinct political entities in a European sense. These

‘tribal studies’ “stifle[d] exploration of broader themes—environmental

changes, economic trends, cultural transformations” 14 and imbued

connotations of military defeat and “economic subservience”.15

However, from the 1980s onwards, new approaches emerged that re-examined

the role of Indians in the fur trades. Interdisciplinary and ethno-

historical scholarship aimed to revise old views through a better

understanding of Native culture and their environment. In a trend which

13 Benjamin W. Labaree, America’s Nation-Time: 1607-1789 (New York, 1976), cover, also p.xi14 Claudio Saunt, 'The Native South: An Account of Recent Historiography', Native South,Vol. 1, (2008), p.4715 E.E. Rich, ‘Trade Habits and Economic Motivation among the Indians of North America’, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 26, 1 (1960), p.35

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is now seen as excessive, these historians began to construct analysis

with the belief that Native Americans had economic mindsets “so

distinctive that comparison with western society is either impossible or

at least unproductive.”16 As Calvin Martin contended, “the majority of

society who scrutinize the past have very little idea of the Indian mind or

the Indian thought-world.”17 From this viewpoint, the transformation of Native

economic culture was almost a pre-requisite of trade with Europeans. In

his first of two seminal texts, Richard White first popularised the idea

that Southeastern Indians “saw commerce as an extension of reciprocity,

not as hard bargaining for personal advantage”18, a mentality which White

argues was disrupted by the lure of scarce European manufactures that

elevated Native leaders to hegemonic positions, and led to their

‘dependency’ on Europeans.

This understanding of gift-giving culture was applied again in White’s

later work on the ‘Middle Ground’, based on the northern region of the

pays d’en haut, which now proposed a more progressive argument that Native

Americans and Europeans were, in some areas, more accommodative and equal

“partners in exchange” through the need to adapt to each other’s

culture.19 Influenced by this ‘borderland’ theory, historians began to

apply similar concept to the Southeast: Daniel H. Usner ,Jr. defined the

16 Robert McGhee, ‘Demythologizing the Fur Trade’, Literary Review of Canada (Dec, 2010), p.817 Calvin Martin, The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford, 1987) p.718 Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees and Navajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), p.5719 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge , 1991), p.x

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region as a ‘frontier exchange economy’ which replaced “the notion of frontier

as an interracial boundary with that of a cross-cultural network.”20

Similarly, Piker has shown that Creeks and colonist created a world of

“pervasive and mutually beneficial economic interactions” and “mutually

beneficial cross-cultural relations”21, while Kathleen DuVal goes further,

showing that in certain areas of the interior such as the Arkansas

Valley, it was Indians whose mentalities were more able to define the

region’s transformations and “institute the new political economy.”22

Simultaneously, the growing popularity of Atlantic history helped provide

an alternative for the national, imperial histories that had “denied

Indian involvement in world histories”, while cis-Atlantic approaches

fostered appreciation for “the formation of a regional economy … with

greater attention to activities not totally dependent upon production for

the Atlantic market.”23 As a result of these combined stands of

historiography, it is now appreciated that “Native Americans such as the

Seminoles, Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws, powerfully shaped and took

advantage of the Atlantic-borderlands conditions in the southeast.”24 As

Kathryn Braund argues, in a work that advanced the scholarship of the

Southeast Indian trade considerably, Southeast Indians “from the

beginning, were beneficiaries, not victims, of European trade”. In

‘Deerskins and Duffles’ (1993), Braund pioneered an appreciation for the 20 Usner, ‘The Frontier Exchange’ p.16721 Joshua Piker, Okfuskee, A Creek Town in Colonial America (London, 2004), p.503-54022 Kathleen DuVal, ‘A Good Relationship, & Commerce? The Native Political Economy of the Arkansas River Valley’, Early American Studies, 1, 1 (2003)p.6223 Usner, ‘The Frontier Exchange Economy’, p.16624 Nathaniel Millett, Borderlands in the Atlantic world, Atlantic Studies, 10, 2 (2013), p.281

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commercial impetuses of Indians who “embraced the opportunities afforded

them by geography and good fortune and became commercial hunters —

producers for the world market” for “purely economic motives”25

However, despite these historiographical advances, even current

scholarship offers the consensus that the ‘Mississippian world’ of the

seventeenth century saw “the inauguration of a nascent capitalist

economic system by Europeans.”26 Native Americans are now afforded a far

greater role in the process than before but only, it would seem, due to

their excited adoption of European material and capitalist culture; the

“destruction” of the existing Indian “precapitalist mode of production”

remains a central feature of much of today’s scholarship.27

The basis for this understanding is the assumption that Native Americans

were distinctly more primitive economic actors – or even ‘noneconomic’

altogether. Despite his innovative approach, Piker’s belief that the

Okfaskee’s economic mindset “centered on intellectual and social

constructs that did not mesh easily with market-oriented behaviors" does

not sit easily with his argument that “Euro-American and Native American

alike, are broadly comparable”. 28 Instead, this notion only serves to

reinforce the age-old narrative of the decay and dependency of Native 25 Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffles; The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo America, 1685-1815 (London, 1993), p.4, 61, 6326 Robbie Ethridge, 'Introduction', in Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall (eds.),Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln, NE, 2009), p.2 (my emphasis)27 Wilma A Dunaway, The First American Frontier: Transitions to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860(London, 1996), p.23, 3928 Joshua Piker, Okfuskee, A Creek Town in Colonial America (London, 2004), p.159, 4

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society during the colonial period, as it does in James H. Merrels recent

essay that describes how the Catawba were draw into “a web of commercial

relations few of them understood and none controlled" because they were

“unfamiliar with relationships based solely on the market.” Indeed,

Merrel went as far as to express his regret at referring to Native

Americans as business-minded in his earlier 1989 essay, such was the

consensus on social preconditions to trade in their gift-giving world.29

Even Braund was drawn into the belief that “Indians traded only with

friends and allies” and that the onset of European ‘capitalism’

“change[d] native society in a manner that the Creeks themselves … did

not fully understand.”30

While non-capitalist principles and redistribution did indeed governed

Indian societies at a local level, many historians have continued to base

their work on the assumption that “The principle of reciprocity … guided

Indian nations in their formal trade with the colonies.”31 Historians of

the Southeast commonly base their analysis of Native exchange mechanisms

on the ideas that these Indians “did not compartmentalize commercial,

personal, and political relationships”32 or that their trade “was more

akin to an exchange of gifts between allies.”33 According to Claudio 29 James H. Merrel, ''Our Bonds of Peace', Pattrns of Inercultural exchange in the Carolina Piedmont, 1650-1750', in Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, M. Thomas Hatley (eds.), Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, NE, 2006), p.279, 269-7030 Braund, Deerskins and Duffles, p.27, 8031 Daniel H. Usner, Jr., ‘Economic Relations in the Southeast Until 1783’, in WilcombeE. Washburn (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1988), p.39132 Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary Era (Oxford,1995), p.4433 Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2010), p.55

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Saunt, Creeks “demanded allies exchange gifts rather than commodities”,

and only after “a generation of mestizo Indians [was] ready to apply the

commercial acumen learned from their British fathers” was Indian society

‘transformed’ to the level of European capitalism.34

It is true that the Creek “traditionally held notions of communal

property,”35 but, as this essay shows, there is little evidence that this

culture of redistribution and reciprocity ever had the same impact on the

inter-societal commerce as it did on the domestic, intra-tribal economy. Richard

White is correct that in very specific close relationships between

different communities the “object of trade was not profit; instead, two

peoples, like brothers, should meet each other's needs”36 – be it between

tribes or even individual Indian towns which were, in the words of one

colonist, “each… a sort of petty republick.”37 Indeed, social affirmations

of commercial relationships in the form of ceremonies and gift-giving

were a key way of building lasting, trusted commercial networks. However,

this more ‘personal’ social basis for trade was not unique to Native

American societies, nor did it exclude adherence to more economic

principals of trade. Current anthropological scholarship now shows that

gift-exchange can “coexist” with barter economies and “is not an archaic

prototype of capitalism,”38 just as Natalie Zemon Davis has demonstrated

34 Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things; Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge, 1999), p.42-4335 Steven C. Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (Lincoln, NE, 2004), p.7736 White, The Roots of Dependency, p.5937 Joshua Piker, Okfuskee, A Creek Town in Colonial America (London, 2004), p.938 Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-JonesBarter, 'Introduction', in Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.), Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach (Cambridge, 1992)p,6-7

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that, back in Europe, Frenchmen at the time were able to seamlessly move

“back and forth between gift mode and sale mode.”39

Therefore, as historians are only now coming to realise, “this view of

southeastern Native Americans as commodity- and market-shy is incomplete

and draws a false dichotomy between Native and European actors.”40

Continued generalisations that state that the “exchange of goods in Creek

country depended more on kinship, religion, and politics than on the

dictates of supply and demand” are not entirely accurate descriptions of

larger commercial trading relationships between disparate Indian groups.41

As Bruce Trigger notes, new approaches are gradually overturning decades

of ‘cultural relativism’ and realising that Native Americans made

“rational calculations [that] conform to a logic that is universal rather

than culturally specific.”42

*

In order to fully understand the Southeast Indians’ economic interactions

with Europeans, it is necessary to analyse their existing attitude

towards commerce during pre-contact times. By integrating the events of

post-contact material exchange into the greater narrative of Southeastern

economic and cultural history, a greater continuity becomes evident. As

Etheridge insightfully argues, “Mississippian chiefdoms, with their long

histories of rising and falling, fell spectacularly with European

39 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-century France (Oxford, 2000), p.4440 Stern, ‘Native American Taste’, p.241 Saunt, A New Order of Things, p4042 Trigger, ‘Early Native American Responses’, p.67

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contact, and they failed to rise again … [consequently, these] people

invented new ways of putting their social lives back together, ways that

sought to adapt to a field of play with nation states and a global

capitalist economy.”43

Contrary to common suppositions, in late pre-historic times the

inhabitants of the Southeast possessed a definite understanding of

material trade. While it has been suggested that the geography of North

America “left little scope for market exchange” and that the nomadic

lifestyle of many Indians “made significant capital accumulation

virtually impossible”, archaeologists are increasingly demonstrating that

trade held a vital function in the Southeastern ‘Mississippian Culture’.44

In the late prehistoric period the aboriginal inhabitants of the

Southeast were organised into chiefdoms with larger, more stratified

sedentary populations than the historic-era tribes and villages,

characterised by agriculturally-based settlements. Within these

societies goods were redistributed fairly, but between chiefdoms trade

occurred to maximise benefit for the chief and society as a whole.

Archaeological research shows that in this society resources such as

marine shells, obsidian and turquoise were traded thousands of miles from

their sources via elaborate networks of “trade nets”, leading towards

43 Robbie Ethridge, 'Introduction' in Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln, NE, 2009), p.4244 Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, ‘Exchange among Native Americans and Europeans before 1800Strategies and Interactions’, unpublished draft chapter to be included in The CambridgeHistory of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2014), p.2

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large “trade centres” with sedentary populations.45 Most notably, the

Mississippian town of Cahokia, populated by up to 30,000 people at its

1300AD peak, formed a “thriving urban market centre” for the Southeast,

attracting goods from the Rocky Mountains, Great Lakes and Atlantic

coast.46 Often, this trade was encouraged by the leaders of the chiefdoms

to involve “the exchange of rare goods to buttress their authority” as

status symbols,47 however trade also existed for more utilitarian reasons

including the widespread exchange of chert hoes and salt, as well as a

smaller trade in ceramics and perishables across the region.48

Excavations of Spiro in the Arkansas Valley show that, in the centuries

before contact, “Spiroans imported thousands of pounds of finished goods”

which they traded for their own manufactures, such as copper-covered

masks. Similar archaeological evidence shows that inter-regional trade

occurred between the Appalachians, Mississippi Valley and the Great

Plains, in which settlements exported their own particular manufactures

for a greater variety of exotic products.49 The specialised production of

trade goods was therefore taking place: Cahokia “may have been the main

copper-processing centre during the Mississippian period” despite having

to import raw copper, while different sites in Arkansas also display the

45 William R. Swagerty, ‘Indian Trade in the Trans-Mississippi West to 1870’, in Wilcombe E. Washburn (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 4 (Washington, 1988), p.35146 Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples; A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (New York, 1999), p.2247 Joseph Hall, ‘Anxious Alliances’, in Alan Gallay (ed.), Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln, NE, 2009), p.15548 Jay K. Johnson, ‘Prehistoric Exchange in the Southeast’, in Timothy G. Baugh and Jonathon E. Ericson, Prehistoric Exchange Systems in North America (London, 1994), p.115-649 Kathleen Du Val, The Native Ground, Indians and Colonist in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), p.23

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characteristics of specialisation in the production of basalt axes or

processed hides.50 The remarkably universal characteristics of goods such

as the calumet pipe across the entire continent are also suggestive of

this type of inter-regional economic interaction and specialisation, as

substantiated by a report of from Govenor Kerlerec of Louisiana in the

1750s which suggested that the Kansa lands contained “quarries of red

stone from which are made the calumets for all the nations.”51 Meanwhile,

the distribution of these goods in particular burial mounds is indicative

that in the pre-contact Mississippi culture universal laws of economics

still held and “scarcity and distant [i.e. transport costs] increased the

goods’ value”52

While this society was already in decline by the early sixteenth century,

for reasons yet fully understood, the influences of “Mississippian

culture were still very visible when the Spanish invaded the southeast”

after 1539.53 However, while this evidence shows that Southeastern Indians

had a predisposition to trade shortly before contact, it is clear that

the political and social structure of their society changed greatly in

the period between the introduction of Spanish epidemics in the 1540s and

the English colonisation of the 1670s. Crucially though, the economic

50 Robert H. Lafferty III, Prehistoric Exchange in the Lower Mississippi Valley, in Timothy G. Baugh and Jonathon E. Ericson, Prehistoric Exchange Systems in North America (London, 1994), p.197, 20151 Kerlerec’s Report, 1758, in A.P. Nasatir (ed.), Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785-1804 (St. Louis, MO, 1952), p.5252 Kathleen Du Val, The Native Ground, Indians and Colonist in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), p.1953 Calloway, First Peoples, p,24

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transformations that affected Southeastern society during these little

understood “protohistoric Dark Ages”54 occurred before the arrival of

formalised European commerce and therefore owed almost entirely to the

agency and responses of native people. By the time the first English

colonies were founded in the region, “The southeastern Indians were

[already] in a period of transition away from old traditional patterns of

toward a new, more abstract and structured culture.”55 Although Native

trade in the southeast was in decline after 1500, and was governed by

social laws of reciprocity and redistribution on an intra-community

level, it is clear that “southeastern Native American individuals were

fluent in the practice of commodity exchange” before the arrival of

Europeans and were in the process of adapting to a new world, of which

new European trade was only a one element.56

*

As Jon Gibson convincingly argues, while Mississippian political

structure altered significantly between 1540 and 1670, patterns of trade

displayed a greater continuity so that, by the time Europeans became a

dominant commercial force, “Lower Mississippi trade was still

predominantly a reflection of older aboriginal established interaction

spheres and exchange partnerships.”57 In the ‘proto-historic’ period and

afterwards, the Indian controlled trade networks of the South-west 54 Mehta , ‘Spanish Conquistadores…’ p.3455 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Roanoke, The Abandoned Colony (Savage, MD, 1984), p.4556 Stern, ‘Native American Taste’, p.457 Jon L. Gibson, ‘Empirical Characterization of Exchange Systems in Lower MississippiValley Prehistory’, in Timothy G. Baugh and Jonathon E. Ericson, Prehistoric Exchange Systems in North America (London, 1994), p.168

15


largely remained intact, providing a commercial link to the interior via

societies on the Mississippi, such as the Pawnee, Osage, and Wichita – a

fact recognised by French traders who sought to spread their meagre

influence westward using a strategy of favoured nation diplomacy with

these groups.58 Even before Europeans truly arrived in these regions,

Indians there continued to trade and respond to increases incentives to

trade: By the 1670s the Chickasaws along the Mississippi already had

access to “guns, axes, hoes, knives, beads, and double glass bottles” via

native trade link with Mesoamerica or Florida.59 Archaeological evidence

shows that Caddoan Indians deep in the Southeast interior responded to

the possibility to profit from trade around 1700 “at a time when access

to European goods (particularly guns) was variable and unreliable” by

investing in lithic hunting and processing tools, indicating that these

Indians were responding to commercial opportunities before being ‘won

over’ by European culture.60 Meanwhile, to support the trade in bison

products, the neighbouring Natchez reportedly obtained salt through

direct trade with the Caddoans.61

Although the well-known accounts of Europeans venturing into Indian

country to trade indicates that the initiatives of these traders drove

the expansion of commerce, it is often overlooked that entire Indian

58 Swagerty, ‘Indian Trade in the Trans-Mississippi’, p.355-759 John Shea (ed. and trans.) Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley: with Original Narrative of Father Marquet,(Clinton Hall, NY, 1852), p.4460 Timothy K. Perttula,, ‘French and Spanish Colonial Trade Policies and the Fur Tradeamong Caddoan Indians of the Trans-Mississippi South’, in The Fur Trade Revisitted; Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference (East Lansing, MI, 1994), p.8261 Ian W. Brown, ‘Certain Aspects of French-Indian Interaction in Lower Louisiane’, inCalumet & Fleur-de-Lys; Archaeology of Indian and French Contact in the Midcontinent (London, 1992), p.20

16


communities gradually relocated to better engage in this trade. For

example, the Indian town of Chatahuches in the early seventeenth century

were most probably Okfushkees who had moved eastwards “for convenience of

Carrying on the [slave] Trade”, as noted by Carolina’s governor in 1708.62

In a land previously populated by inland chiefdoms, the new commercial

potential of coastal European colonies prompted southeast Indians,

notably the Creeks, Cherokees and ‘Westoes’, to gradually perform “an

about-face towards the new oceanic powers” during this period of internal

restructuring.63 In many other ways, these responses to commercial

potential required far less restructuring and were compatible with Native

cultural life; the initiation of commerce was facilitated by the fact

that the “emerging slave trade with Carolina fit in neatly with Creek

practices”64 while the up-scaled commercial deer hunt that soon replaced

this trade “retained much of its tradition … ancient rituals, solemn

ceremonies, and elaborate hunting dances.”65

This evidence from the prehistoric and proto-historic periods suggests

that the native people of the Southeast possessed an understanding of

trade, a history of producing goods specifically for trade, and an

imperative to seek commercial opportunities. Moreover, historians of the

early colonial-era fur trades are reaching an understanding that in the

62 Joshua Piker, Okfuskee, A Creek Town in Colonial America (London, 2004), p.19-2063 Lynda Norene Shaffer, Native Americans before 1492: The Moundbuilding Centres of the Eastern Woodlands (Armonk, NY, 1992), p.9564 Claudio Saunt, ''The English Has Now a Mind to Make Slaves of Them All': Creeks, Seminoles, and the Problem of Slavery', American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (1998), p.15965 Braund, Deerskins and Duffles, p.62-3

17


past “we have failed to appreciate the agency of the indigenous

consumer.”66

The notion of Native Americans only being accustomed to gift-exchange had

cast Indians as passive receivers of whichever, often superfluous, goods

were prescribed by European traders. However, even contemporaries had

doubts over terming their some of their exchanges as ‘gift-giving’ when

they necessarily involved equal and reciprocal material exchange. Just as

colonial authorities in Canada understood that these ceremonies had “a

strange feature; for an equivalent in return at a future gathering is

expected to be presented”67, missionaries in the Arkansas Valley came to

realise that the Quapaw’s insistence on regularly receiving gifts was not

a genuine desire to affirm friendship but instead “seemed a lot like

trading”.68 Similarly, British traders came to understand that the Creeks

routinely demanded gifts “as a way to offset high prices.” In return,

British traders also manipulated the semantics of these cultural

engagements, often referring to simple wages as “presents” to emphasise

their own generosity.69

Therefore, many Indian-European exchanges that took the form of ceremony

and gift-giving were still essentially commercial. Indeed, as the French

often realised, gifting did little to guarantee them a lasting

relationship with Indian groups. Unable to coax Indian consumers away

66 Susan Sleeper-Smith, ‘Cultures of Exchange in the North Atlantic World’ in Susan Sleeper-Smith (ed.), Rethinking the Fur Trade (Nebraska, 2009), p.xviii67 Christopher Bracken, The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (London, 1997), p.3668 DuVal, ‘A Good Relationship, & Commerce’, p.7769 Braund, Deerskins and Duffles, p.16

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from the English trade due to their competitive disadvantage, the French

Louisianans attempted to “juggl[e] gifts to control the Indians” on a far

greater scale and even conducted ceremonies purely in Native languages.

Yet the observance of these gift-giving rituals was evidently “not of

greater significance than the quantity of quality of transmitted

materials” since the trade remained largely in English hands.70

Eventually, the French authorities realised that economics, not politics,

dictated the direction of the Creek Indian trade and ordered their

traders to raise their exchange prices in the 1730s to attract

consumers.71 Likewise, the Quapaw of the Arkansas Valley did not see

themselves as being tied to French trade despite decades of ceremony, and

were quick to threaten a cessation of commerce when they were not

receiving their “needs.” Through this wily commercially exploitation of

Europeans Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Native Arkansans who

“instituted the new political economy” of the region under their own

enterprise.72

When Indian’s did rely on reciprocal exchange systems, it has been

demonstrated that they did so in ways that adhered to principals of

economic rationality. Just like all forms of exchange, “to be sustained

as a societal norm, gift-giving had to be in the interest of individuals”

and offer a clear and expected economic return.73 Usually, the promises of

reciprocation and of guaranteeing a beneficial trade relationship were 70 Brown, ‘French-Indian Interaction’, p.2871 Usner, Indians, Settlers and Slaves p.25272 DuVal, ‘A Good Relationship, & Commerce’, p.78-9, 6273Carlos and Lewis, ‘Exchange among Native Americans’, .16

19


worth the cost of these gifts. Within societies, the redistribution of

most necessities constituted a “minimization of subsistence risk” for

individuals while still “generating a situation of producer priority”

that incentivised production.74 This is evident in Creek culture, where

meat from the hunt– which was vital for the subsistence of the community

– was redistributed between amongst the clan, whereas furs – more of an

economic luxury – became the property of the hunter who first spotted the

animal.75 Between communities, similar reciprocity could constitute “a

form of saving for the giver and borrowing for the receiver” which

allowed different Indian groups to cover shortfalls in food and other

goods, “perhaps allowing for their survival.”76 Under scrutiny, this form

of social commercial relationships does not appear so different to how

credit in early modern Europe was “extended between individual emotional

agents … that were willing to trust.”77

Yet in enacting these material exchanges, Indians are still frequently

described by historians as being irrationally overawed by European

material culture, a perception based on primary sources that suggest

Indians were “cosoned by a desire of new-fangled novelties.”78 Kathryn

Braund, for example, states that “Creeks ogled and eagerly fondled”

exotic English goods.79 However, in reality traders generally realised

74 Bruce Winterhalder, 'Gifts Given, Gifts Taken: The Behavioral Ecology of Nonmarket,Intragroup Exchange' Journal of Archaeological Research, 5, 2 (1997), p.16275 Braund, Deerskins and Duffles, p.6776 Carlos and Lewis, ‘Exchange among Native Americans’, p.2, 3277 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London, 1998), p.378 John Florio (trans.), The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, vol.1 (London, 1910), p.17079 Braund, Deerskins and Duffles, p.28

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that Native Americans were “not delighted in baubles but in useful

things”80; guns, metal products and fabrics which they had no other access

to and from which they could derive utility. Although traders attempted

to market certain heavier fabrics to the Cherokees, the Indians

continually rebuffed these offers by demanding cheaper products that

offered a lightness that their deerskin clothing lacked.81 In rejecting

these goods, which the colonies’ promoters had hoped could become a

staple export, and by instead demanding high-quality fabrics which were

reserved for the upper-classes in Britain, it appears that “Native

Americans, and not colonists, controlled the goods that entered their

communities.”82 Similarly, over 21,000 yards of English woollen strouds

were imported to New France for the Indian trade in the early eighteenth

century, because Indian consumers regarded it as superior to the French

product.83

Meanwhile, when less utilitarian goods such as beads and tin were

purchased, it should be noted that they still often had definite economic

value in Southeastern culture as traditional status markers, if not a

material usefulness. Just as Europeans believed Indians were being

irrational for purchasing goods which they saw as having little use in

their own culture, so did Indians struggle to understand the rational of

80 Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (London, 1632), [ebook, 1999, ed. Jack Dempsey], p.5081 Stern, ‘Native American Taste’, p.1282 ibid, p.883 Arthur J. Ray, ‘Indians as Consumers in the Eighteenth Century’, in Carol M. Judd and Arthur J. Ray (eds.), Old Traits and New Directions, Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference (London, 1980), p.267

21


their trade partners: As one Northern Indian was claimed to have stated,

"The English have no sense: they give us twenty knives like these for one

Beaver skins"84

Instead, Indians across the continent purchased European goods, but often

used them in distinctly Native American ways, “integrat[ing] foreign

goods into all aspects of their cultural life” such as the use of rum in

religious rites, strouds in burials, and European objects as currency.85

Archaeologists have shown that many items imported by Southeast Indians

showed “signs of the retention of traditional [Indians] material culture

in the way they were used”; discarded gun barrels were reused as hide

scrapers, stakes and flutes; lead was melted into calumet pipe inlays;

and files were appropriated as knives, scrapers, chisels or for striking

fires.86 In this way, southeast Indians ‘Indianized’ European goods by

“adapting these objects to uses that were defined by their own culture.” 87

Contemporary European traders were well aware that the Creek “will not

accept European dress.” 88 Instead, they imported blankets and strouds to

be worn as clothes because they derived more utility from the extra

agility they allowed. Evidently, Creeks were “very specific about what

they needed and wanted in exchange for their deerskins”89, acting 84 Ruben Gold Thwaites (ed.), The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol.6 <http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/relations_06.html>[11 December 2013], p.297 85 Gail D. MacLeish, ‘Red Labour: Iroquois participation in the Atlantic Economy’, Labour: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas, 4 (2004), p.7686 E.S. Lohse, ‘Trade Goods’ in Wilcombe E. Washburn (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1988), p.400-187 Stern, Red Rat, p.ii88 Samuel Urlsperger, Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants who Settled in America. Vol 1: 1733-1734, George Fenwick Jones (ed.), (Athens, GA, 1968), p.20889 Braund, Deerskins and Duffles, p.121

22


economically to obtain certain goods, even though ethnocentric Europeans

often could not understand their reasons for doing so.

To argue that the early inflow of European goods inevitably imbued

Indians with European capitalist culture would therefore be inattentive

to how these people acted and reacted to these new material and

commercial possibilities. While it has previously been argued that “to

the Indians, material goods … actually transmitted some of the

extraordinary power and brilliance behind their creation”90, Jessica Stern

appears to be more accurate in arguing that Creeks “accept[ed] European

products without accepting the rhetoric of Native American creative

deficiencies.”91 If Native Americans did indeed undergo a ‘consumer

revolution’ after contact with Europeans (which they almost certainly

did)92, it should be understood that this transformation was due more to

Indians’ own reactions to the introduction of new goods - in ways

consistent with their existing culture and basic universal economic

rationales - than it was due to a total absorption of Europeans’ material

culture.

*

90 Neal Salisbury, 'Religious Encounters in a Colonial Context: New England and New France in the Seventeenth Century', American Indian Quarterly, 16, 4, (1992), p.50291 Jessica Stern, 'Southeastern Indian Cultures of Labor in the Eighteenth Century', Draft Article, <globalencounters.ubc.ca/images/uploads/STERN_Creek_Production.pdf>[28November 2013], p.2792 James Axtell, 'The First Consumer Revolution', in Lawrence B. Glickman (ed.), Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (London, 1999), p.86, et passim

23


Overall, while historians have a come a long way in realising that

Indians were “important actors … rather than bit players, props, or

spectators”93 in the creation of new ‘borderlands’ exchange economies in

the Southeast, the extent to which these transformations were due to the

commercial impetuses that already existed in Indian culture is still not

fully appreciated. In these Indians’ world, domestic gift-giving played a

vital economic role, helping to “equalize consumption, preserve game and

other food resources, and avoid conflict.”94 But this does not imply, as

many historians have understood it to, that these people failed to

understand and be motivated by utility-maximisation principles in their

external trade.

Evidence from prehistory shows that southeastern Indians possessed a

significant propensity to trade before contact with Europeans, who they

often commercially exploited in familiar ways. However, they also drove

their own organic re-adaptations of their economic culture in the

traumatic protohistoric and early contact eras, realising that “exchange

enabled refugees to find shelter and new power … [by] blending gifts and

trade to profit”,95 rather than simply having this materialistic mindset

imposed on them by Europeans. In analysing this trade, historians should

be attentive to current archaeological and anthropological research,

93 Merrell, ‘The Indians’ New World’ ,p.4394 Carlos and Lewis, ‘Exchange among Native Americans, p.3395 Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo's Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philidephia, PA, 2009), p.168

24


which shows that “acceptance of articles of White manufacture did not

indicate a complete scrapping of the native lifeway and material culture”

nor did it imply the Indian consumer was “constrained by the limited

choices of objects and designs presented to him by the trader.”96 Native

Americans were able to integrate new goods into their own culture by

‘misusing’ them in a variety of ways, and therefore had completely

rational reasons to demand goods which Europeans would not have seen as

useful. Native ceremonies and social confirmations of trade agreements

did regularly take place, but primary sources indicates that the aims of

these exchanges were far more commercial than social, despite the

semantics used. Meanwhile it should not forgotten that Europeans were

perhaps “even more disposed to equate trade with social relationships

than southeastern Native Americans”97, and were similarly eager to

guarantee agreements and regulate prices during these meetings. On this

basis, it should be realised that Southeast Indians’ commercial culture

was not nearly as primitive as they have previously been seen. Instead,

these people possessed definite a commercial imperative that was not

purely an absorption of European ‘capitalist’ material culture, and which

continued to have a vital role in the transformation of the Southeastern

borderlands economy.

96 Lohse, ‘Trade Goods,, p.40197 Stern, ‘Red Rat’, p.158

25


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