Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges (Native Americans of the Northeast)

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Description

Whether they involved goods, words, or ideas, acts of giving and trading were fundamental in early Indian-white contacts. But how did these transactions function across the two cultures, and what did they mean to each and every? In this book, David Murray explores a range of early exchanges between Europeans and Indians, showing how they operated within a set of interlocking economies―linguistic, religious, in addition to material. Murray begins by examining the the most important role of gift-giving. Like the double function of the key, which both locks and unlocks, the gift―with its simultaneous action of offering something and demanding a return―expressed the paradoxical nature of early Indian-white encounters. Because the power to give used to be associated with ideas of sovereignty, both sides ceaselessly preferred to represent exchanges as gift-giving relatively than trading or selling. To illustrate the complexities of these cross-cultural transactions, the writer looks closely at the work of linguist, trader, and missionary Roger Williams, whose A Key into the Language of America at once serves the purposes of translation, conversion, and trade. Murray also examines the changing meaning and representation of wampum, the quintessential medium of exchange in the early colonial period, in addition to the a couple of processes of conversion taking place as Christian ideas were incorporated into Indian cultures. According to the writer, only by recognizing the ways in which objects and ideas circulated and took on value in interrelated economies are we able to consider the contested “middle ground” between Europeans and Indians of the colonial Northeast.

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