Pre contact economics

1. Pre contact economics

2. Prior to European invasion, the lands and bounty of mid-North America seemed endless. Tribal peoples balanced material needs, commercial relationships, and accumulation of material status objects within a worldview of respect for resources.2 • Tribal commerce throughout the centuries preceding active European commerce in the Western Hemisphere was extensive and based on a kinship model.

3. Rivers were replete with fish and aquatic species; lakes were recreational, seasonal, and life resource centers; and every kind of imaginable fruit, vegetable, herb, and plant medicine was tended, harvested, and nurtured.3

4. Greedy impulses among tribal citizens were checked by societal norms that required the redistribution of wealth to attain community status.4 • In various parts of mid-North America, these wealth redistribution community gatherings were given different names, but all had the same purpose.

5. Leadership was based on being able publicly to provide for the community. Holding a community “give-away,” “potlatch,”5 • Or “celebration feasts” were the means for the recognition of individuals. The individual gained status only after handing out the fruits of her labor and skill to those in need.6 • Thus, a self-contained circle of giving and receiving was maintained for community wealth balance. One could not rise up within the societal governance system without establishing that his or her heart was for the good of the people.

6. As youth gave way to the elder years, the oldest members of the community could happily expect to be provided for by the next generation.7 • It was as much an honor to receive as it was to give. • To receive meant that • a person was within the community’s cycle of life; • reinforced the circle of belonging; and • guaranteed that no abject poverty would arise for the less-skilled, the disabled, the elderly, the ill, or those otherwise unable to provide for themselves.

7. Trade festivals and summer seasonal gatherings drew thousands of different tribal citizens to prime-resource-abundant areas to stay for weeks, months, or the entire season. Kinship bonds were created, strengthened, and solidified during such gatherings.8 • Marriages took place creating intertribal liaisons. Adults were adopted into new families to be recognized as joining family lines across tribes.9

8. Oral histories were shared and new stories added. Leadership positions were announced. All manner of community activity took place during the market/ communal gatherings.10 • Old grudges could be dropped for the time being, and new alliances could shift historical confederacies.

9. This brief synopsis cannot fully encapsulate the thriving tribal economies and basic cultural norms for commercial conduct on the mid- North American Continent. • It does provide a window into the past and the sense of being in relation to others to conduct human interaction— such as adoption of new adult family members, providing for the less fortunate, and maintaining trade relations on a good-faith basis of kinship.11

10. Societal norms and specific tribal organizations (often designated as tribal societies) upheld the responsibility of keeping in check those who would take advantage of their relatives or disrupt the social structure of respect.12 • Law and order were taken seriously at tribal gatherings with individuals held responsible to the community for offenses.13 • To bring the disruption back to balance was the responsibility of the whole community through restorative actions.

11. Disputes did arise and community involvement occurred to provide resolution. In extreme circumstances, a disruptive citizen could receive the worst punishment known to a tribal citizen—expulsion from the tribal community. The loss of community belonging, status, and kinship were viewed as the greatest loss a human being could face.

12. In terms of hunting, the balance with the natural world was maintained in the same way with spiritual principles involved with the taking of animal life.14 • In the commerce realm, basic foodstuffs and material goods were never at issue. Rather, only the products developed by skilled workmanship or special harvest became objects of trade. Basic sustenance was a given in tribal existence.15

13. Through summer-food preservation, winter needs were anticipated and food storage practiced. Women played a substantial role in the seasonal management of food storage and preparation.16 • In many Tribes, women owned the home and could sever marital relations by removing her mate’s possessions from the home.17

14. The family unit was not viewed as the economic unit. Rather, the entire community was the economic unit ensuring a share of the material wealth for every member. • All of these trade practices and values are the foundation of Tribalist Economics.18

15. It was upon this extensive network of inter-tribal commercial relations, cultural norms over trade activities, and the trade routes spanning thousands of miles that interactions continued to be developed in mid-North America when foreigners entered the landscape.19

17. The incredibly diverse environments of the Americas have been homes to Indian and Inuit peoples for thousands of years. In that time, the different cultures have amassed a very detailed understanding of the unique characteristics and resources of each place in which they have lived. This knowledge, when acted upon for the satisfaction of human material needs, led the tribes to develop an equally diverse range of techniques for extracting and transforming resources into economic goods.

18. The result was a great profusion and variation among the goods. The cultures usually maintained a fairly high level of freedom to travel across tribal boundaries, so trade consequently developed in order to increase general access to goods available in one region but scarce in another.

19. One scholar who extensively studied the evidence of pre-Contact American Indian trade has asserted that trade goods from other tribes have turned up among all known North American native peoples except the extremely isolated Polar Inuit of northwestern Greenland.

20. The literature on pre-Contact American Indian economies and trade is extensive and rather technical. Most of the evidence available is in the form of analyses by archaeologists of trade good materials and production styles that allow reasonably good inferences to be drawn about the sources of the items found in excavations • An additional source is, of course, oral tradition accounts of travel and trade.

22. Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Inuit • In the Arctic, major trade items that can be identified in the archaeological record throughout the region are copper and soapstone goods produced by the Inuit of the Coppermine River in the central region of Canada’s northern coast.

23. Copper sheets and plates in the form of decorated, keystone-shaped ‘coppers’ were traded as far south as The Dalles, the great trade center on the Columbia River. • Wood was traded northward from the south, especially along river systems and the coasts.

24. The Inuit living on the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea traded with their Siberian relatives at annual trade fairs at least as long ago as 1000 B.C. • Major goods from North America included furs, ivory, copper and jadeite items, oil, ropes and nets.

25. The Siberian Inuit sent east their local products. Thus, the American Inuit acquired from Asia small numbers of iron knives and kettles, glass beads. • They traded food, oil, carvings of soapstone and walrus ivory, their specialized Arctic clothing, and guide services.

26. The short growing season in the sub-arctic region generally does not support agriculture; it also tends to limit the variety of gatherable plant foods. The traditional subsistence economy of the region rests on fishing, birding (including egg gathering on the extensive northern nesting grounds), and hunting.

27. The major tribal groups in the eastern and central parts of the Sub-Arctic are the Algonquin-speaking Montagnais, Naskapi, Cree, and Ojibwe, as well as the Athabascan-speaking Chipewyan. Further west, there are a greater variety of smaller bands mostly speaking Athabascan languages. • Obsidian and copper were the major trade goods.

28. In the Pacific Northwest, the very ancient culture and its offshoots specialized for thousands of years in the production of highly valued obsidian and agate knives, lance points and arrowheads based on the rich volcanic resources in the area. The production of these items reached a high degree of technical sophistication and amounted to a large volume of trade goods, which were dispersed far to the north, south and east.

29. Another major trade product of the Northwest came from Vancouver Island, where the western coastal waters provided long, thin, incisor-shaped white dentalium shells. These were highly prized from California to the Dakotas and north to the Yukon. They served as a form of money as well as a valued ornamental item. • The many varieties of preserved salmon from the Northwest’s rivers were appreciated with a connoisseur’s taste within the region and enjoyed by tribes eastward out to the buffalo country.

30. Trade routes in the coastal portion of the Northwest ran along the coast and inland on the rivers. Water transport in ocean-going cedar canoes and smaller, ‘shovel-nosed’ river craft predominated. A great trading center linking the coastal tribes to those inland on the Columbia Plateau was located at The Dalles on the Columbia River. • Routes crossed the lower mountain passes through both the Cascades and the Rockies to link the villages of the Northwest Coast to the tribes of the Plateau Great Basin, and western Plains.

31. The vast region of the Southwest, from eastern California to Texas, encompasses several major environmental regions whose resource diversity promoted a very extensive development of trade. These include Upper and Lower (Baja) California, the Great Basin, and the Desert region of Arizona, New Mexico, western and southern Texas and northern Mexico.

32. Shell products, including fishhooks and beads from the highly-prized abalone and olivella species, were made by the tribes around the Los Angeles area and the Gulf of California. The Central Valley of California produced acorn flour as a major staple and trade item.

33. Fine textiles, cast copper ornaments, brilliantly-colored macaw feathers and even live macaws came north from southern Mexico as major southern articles of trade; domesticated turkeys and corn had been traded north from Mexico earlier.

34. From the northern and eastern margins of the area, the Ute, Apache Navajo and Kiowa brought meat, hides, furs, and sinew and rawhide cordage into the Southwest trade system.

35. The Pueblo peoples and their ancestors the Mogollon, Hohokam and Anasazi put into the system highly valued turquoise from the local mines, pottery, corn and cotton textiles, and provided warehouses and other ‘middleman’ services in the trade system. • Similar contributions to the regional economy were also provided by the tribes of northern Mexico, reflecting local resources and their positions on the trade network

36. The major routes in the western part of this region included two west-east trails. • One ran from the northern end of the Gulf of California along the Gila River to the old Hohokam community near modern Phoenix, eastward along the Salt River, then northeastward to the northern Pueblos near Santa Fe. • The second ran from the Los Angeles area through the Mojave tribe’s territory in the desert that bears their name and then northeast along the Colorado River toward the Havasupai and the Hopi, then beyond to the southern tribes of the Great Basin.

37. The major north-south path through the region was a part of a very lengthy trade thoroughfare that is variously called the Old North Trail or the Turquoise Road. • One branch ran along the route presently used by Mexico’s federal Highway 15 from near modern Guadalajara northward along the western coast of the Mexican mainland. An extension crossed the mountains eastward from Guadalajara to the ancient capitols of Tula and Teotihuacan, then into the populous Valley of Mexico. • Another branch ran from these cities along the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre mountains, roughly taking the route presently used by Mexico’s Highway 45.

38. In the north of Mexico, the Trail curved slightly northeast following the local river courses; it passed through what are now the towns of Nogales and Tucson before heading northeast toward the Zuni territory in western New Mexico, near the hub of the region. It passed through the Four Corners area northward past present-day Rock Springs, Colorado, and thus along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountain range.

39. From Colorado, the Old North Trail ran north along the eastern edge of the Rockies through Wyoming, Montana and western Alberta. It terminated in branches that connected to the Liard River, a tributary of the northward-flowing McKenzie River, and to the Peace River, which leads to Lake Athabaska in the northern parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

40. The Turquoise Road was the major north-south overland trade route of North America for many centuries. The Siksika (‘Blackfeet’) of southern Alberta and northern Montana tell stories of their trader-merchants traveling south to Mexico on this path, being gone on the journey for as much as two or three years.

41. To the east of the Turquoise Road, overland routes connected the Santa Fe-area trading pueblos on the Pecos River with the Canadian River and Red River basins, and thence out onto the southern Plains. • Another, the famed Santa Fe Trail, ran northeast to the Missouri River. • Goods from the western trade connections of the Pueblos were added to regional products (obsidian, piñon nuts, salt). All these were traded east to the Kiowa and Apache, who moved the goods into Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. • From these latter tribes, Choctaw and Chickasaw traders subsequently moved western and Mexican goods as far east as Florida, and also northward into Kansas where the Pawnee were trading partners.

42. The Great Plains extended from the mid-latitudes of the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba southward between the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and near to the Great Lakes-Mississippi axis to the northeastern third of Texas. Within this vast region, tribal cultures ranged on an economic continuum between those groups which were more-or-less nomadic hunters and those which mainly lived as farmers along the river margins.

43. Many tribes produced both kinds of products, but the specialization of others led to exchanges of dried meats, fats, prairie turnips and other dry-land produce, hides and finished hide products like clothing and lodge coverings for many varieties of corn, beans, squashes and tobacco.

44. The Southeastern (‘Mississippian Culture’) region had an active trade network and great transport advantages in the form of many rivers and a large coastal margin. These waterways made canoe-borne trade easy in much of the region. Trade links in this region included the tribes of the Caribbean islands. • Overland trails were also well developed in the uplands, the best-known being the Natchez Trace between modern-day Nashville, Tennessee and Natchez, Mississippi. Regional diversity between the coastal lowlands and the interior highlands differentiated local products and so stimulated trade. Seafood, shell products and raw stone seem to have been major components of the river-borne trade in this region.

45. The Mississippi River and its tributaries also enabled a regional trade in copper from the southern Great Lakes and Appalachian regions. Salt from the West was another significant trade item. • Villages in the Southeast traded pottery and the seeds and techniques of agriculture to the Northeastern tribes beginning around 1000 B.C. • One major southeastern trading community located in Louisiana has revealed archaeological evidence of the manufacture and trade in fine quality stone tools, carvings and pottery as long ago as 1500 B.C. Its characteristic goods have been found in sites in Florida, Tennessee and Missouri.

46. The Northeast, like the Pacific Northwest and Southeast, has an abundance of water routes on which American Indians carried canoe-borne trade for many thousands of years. • The villages in the northeastern woodlands exchanged considerable volumes of products over a vast area. Their traders used the river and lake routes connected by overland connections the French later called portages, along with a few longer trails such as the ‘Iroquois Trail’ between present-day Albany, New York and the Falls of the Niagara River.

47. Our modern designation of the region as the ‘Northeastern woodlands’ obscures the diversity of environments within and adjacent to the region. Marine and freshwater resources of the eastern rivers were highly utilized by the villages on the coast. • Salt and fresh-water fish formed a major portion of the diet of these tribes and also were valued as fertilizer to boost agricultural productivity, especially in the poorer soils on the northern coasts.

48. Highly prized white and purple shell wampum beads, valued in trade and used to record the histories of some tribes in the form of pictographic belts, were likewise an important product of the coast. The northern center of production was among the tribes on Long Island and the Connecticut-Rhode Island coasts. Further south, the Delaware of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey coasts were prolific producers.

49. Inland, the presence of the Great Lakes, the Ohio and upper Mississippi drainages, and the headwaters of the northward-tending rivers of the Canadian Shield that lead to Hudson’s Bay gave most tribes access to fish, waterfowl and aquatic plants. One notable example of the latter is the grain of Zizania aquatica, an aquatic grass known commonly as ‘wild rice’. It is harvested even today using canoes, and it has long constituted an important dietary and trade staple for the Ojibwe of Minnesota as well as other tribes once resident in the region immediately west and southwest of Lake Superior.

50. The economy that developed out of the varied resources of this region was always mixed and diversified, with fishing, hunting and gathering predominant in the centuries before the introduction of agriculture some thousands of years ago. Since that time, the rich agricultural potential of much of the region enabled many of its peoples to adopt a balance between agriculture, gathering, hunting, fishing and trade. This balance promoted the economic well-being of the villages and also supported a remarkable level of social equality between the sexes. It also tended to minimize class distinctions.