The Meaning of Trade Goods

Native Americans profoundly altered their societies in order to acquire European trade goods. They did this in ways that suggest to me that these goods held meanings that transcended functional value. I contend that the symbolic significance of trade material is overlooked in most scholarly and popular works that deal with trade. The value of goods traded is regarded, usually, as "self-evident": self-evidently functional, prized as a status item, or useful to further trade. Examples abound and include competent and even notable works of scholarship.^[5]

I suggest that the meaning and value (even from a modem functional or "capitalistic" perspective of value) of trade material is not at all self-evident, but is entirely dependent upon the context of exchange. Exchange everywhere in North America established the first relationships between Euro-Americans and Native Americans and thereby laid the basis for all future relationships between them. To Native Americans, trade established certain obligations and rules of conduct. Often such obligations were ignored and the rules violated by the Euro-Americans. Successful Euro-American

traders were quick to grasp and manipulate the symbolic importance of trade items, but as the resources—fur-bearing animals—exploited by Native Americans for their part of the trade diminished, these traders were unwilling or in some cases unable to fulfill their obligations.

Participation in this trading relationship cost Native Americans dearly. The firearms introduced by Euro-Americans contributed to the overexploitation of resources and heightened intertribal conflict. Contact with Euro-Americans introduced, time and again, diseases for which Native Americans had no immunity and that killed large percentages of Native American populations. The combination of drastic population reduction and the reorientation of Native American economies toward the production of furs for trade produced massive social dislocations and migrations of population, which further exacerbated intergroup conflict.

The process just described occurred repeatedly over 400 years. The Native American survivors of the nineteenth century, a small group compared to the population at the time of initial European contact, were now operating within a system of beliefs and values that was still traditional in nature, but it was a system that had been much modified by the experiences of the intervening centuries. In the case of the Plains Indians, the system of beliefs and values was now oriented toward a nomadic existence of hunting and warfare. The complete disappearance of even this modified traditional way of life—brought about by the end of the trading relationship, dense Euro-American settlement of the continent, and the relegation of Native Americans to reservations—produced an anomie which has been manifested in numerous ways. These manifestations of despair range from the Ghost Dance mania of the 1890s to the widespread and chronic health problems brought about by alcoholism and violence in Native American populations today. Such despair is inexplicable without reference to the social relationships and the betrayal of those relationships (which were at best unequal in terms of power) that brought it about. It is the despair of the "disembedded," as Anthony Giddens might put it.^[6]

The original Native American-Euro-American trading relationship is important for a related reason. It is no coincidence that the trade goods that provided the focal point of Euro-American-Native American relationships in historic times—alcohol, tobacco, firearms, furs and hides, beads, shells, and various sorts of bodily adornments—are still employed, tragically or creatively, as current touchstones of "Indian-ness" which work to re -embed Native American culture within a "cosmic" order. To understand how these items realized their significance, how this was

exploited, and why this symbolic power remains, one must look to the original, historic context of their use.

Finally, it is important to understand how traditional values and beliefs attached to trade were altered by exposure to capitalism. The history of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, for example, indicates that while a continuum exists from "gift" exchange on the one side to "market" exchange on the other, these types of exchange are not mutually exclusive. Aspects of market exchange are present in "gift" societies, but, perhaps even more important, aspects of gift exchange are present in "market" societies. In fact, the ritual aspect of any sort of exchange acts to shape social relationships. In the modem world, this is usually overlooked. Paradoxically, as virtually all enduring social relationships have withered away, this has become the preeminent mechanism by which social identities are formed. Ritually assigned meaning, based upon fugitive myth, forms the basis for the much decried "materialism" of the modern world. Material objects still represent social relationships, and most of these relationships are imaginary. A good example of such an imaginary relationship is that which the Native Americans believed to be symbolized by the peace medals, beads, firearms, and other trade objects presented to them by the whites. The Native Americans assumed that such items established a relationship of long-term reciprocal commitments, one essentially alien in the modem world.