The Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast by Jessica Yirush Stern (review)

Scholars of Native American history often assert, with good reason, that encounters between Indians and Europeans in early America involved a collision of worldviews that included differing understandings of land, ownership, and material objects. Indians inhabited land communally and they did not own it; if anything, it owned them. Europeans viewed land as a commodity to be bought and sold as property. Indians exchanged items by giving and receiving gifts, without concern for profit or loss. Europeans traded for profit and drove hard bargains with their eyes always on the bottom line. Then, pulled into the Atlantic economy by the need for European goods and guns, Indians succumbed to market forces and were caught in a lethal web of dependency. But historians also know that binaries rarely reflect human complexities. Colonists from Britain, where wrenching changes in the organization of land and labor were eroding communal lands and values, did not always arrive in America as fully functioning commercial capitalists; and Indian people were not immune to a good deal.

In the last generation, ethnohistorians have added multiple layers of nuance and complexity to our understanding of the worlds that southeastern Indian people built both before and after contact with Europeans. Jessica Yirush Stern adds to the nuance and complexity by examining the meanings that Indians and British attached to goods and to the ways those goods changed hands in the deerskin trade. Analyzing numerous exchanges and considering British and indigenous cultures of production, distribution, and consumption, she demonstrates that Indians and Europeans exchanged goods in multiple ways, for multiple purposes, and with multiple results, and that "gifting hands were not always Indian hands, and trading hands were not always European hands" (p. 154). Distinctions between gift exchange and commodity exchange frequently blurred. Like extending credit, giving a gift established an obligation, and the British understood that the power of an item to shape relationships when it was given as a gift often outweighed any financial profit it might generate in a commercial exchange.

The meaning of an object often depended on whether it was a gift or a commodity, but the meaning could change as the object traveled across the Atlantic and deep into the interior, or vice versa. Goods assumed new lives as they changed hands and circulated in a different culture. Deerskins harvested by Indian hunters and dressed by Indian women were processed and fashioned by British craftsmen into European commodities; textiles and clothing manufactured in British mills were refashioned by Indians into Indian garments. Meanings were also contested. British officers and officials recognized that gifting guns, and thereby establishing obligations of friendship and reciprocity among the recipients, was a more effective way to secure Indian allies than selling them guns. Indians accepted the guns but refused to accept that the obligations placed them under the command and control of their British allies.

As in other areas of encounter, Indians and Europeans found areas of common as well as contested ground in the southeastern deerskin trade. Questioning old assumptions about dependency, Stern suggests that shifts in power rather than shifts in culture explain mounting tensions between Indians and colonists. Attitudes and behaviors changed as people reconfigured their economic and social relationships to accommodate new people and new things, but cultures are expansive and resilient and changing tastes did not mean changing identities: Indians wearing linen shirts did not become British any more than Londoners wearing deerskin gloves became Indian. Tracing the lives of objects as well as Stern has done reveals much about the lives of the people who made, exchanged, and consumed the objects, about the limits of consumer revolution, and about the intricacies of human encounters.