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Gift Giving in the Lake SuperiorFurTrade Bruce M. White The fur trade represented complex commercial activities involving Europeans and Indians coming from very diJerent societies and cultures ,as well as products and markets separated by thousands of miles. The Europeans were involved in commerce with“business partners” who were unable to read,unfamiliarwith contracts,and in a wilderness with neither laws nor courts.Trust was needed on both sides and the giving of gifts seemed to represent a solution.Bruce White focuses on the Indian side of gift giving,using the social and cultural meanings for the Ojibwe Indians.Gift giving was set in the context of family patterns like brother-brother or parent-child.Wampum,tobacco, and rum (“mother’s milk”) had special significance in these transactions . White studies gift patterns between the Ojibwe and Dakota and then between Ojibwe and Europeans in both diplomatic and trade contexts .The particular family relationship could become problematic as Europeans felt they were the“parents”and yet they might need“brothers ”more than“children”to secure the best furs.This ambiguity was sometimes resolved by the trader marrying a chief’s daughter and thus establishing a very visible familial tie. Gift giving was an essential custom followed by both Indians and Europeans to pursue trade and diplomatic relations in North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historical studies of this custom, however, have concentrated on European motives and machinations: historians have equated it with bribery and have suggested that it was introduced by Europeans . But why did fur traders give gifts at all? How did this expensive social act creep into what has usually been portrayed as merely an exercise in capitalism ? One plausible explanation for the widespread use of gift giving lies in its social and cultural meanings for American Indians. A promising area in which to seek answers is the Lake Superior region,where the Ojibwe Indians were the focus of important and long-lasting relations with the French,British, and Americans.1 29 What was it about the meanings of gifts in Ojibwe culture that made their use important in trade and diplomacy? First, a trader arriving in the Lake Superiorcountry to set himself up in business was one of only a few Europeans living far away from home in that foreign land.To his intended producers and customers, the Ojibwe, he was a stranger, potentially either an enemy or a friend. In order to do business, the trader had to prove to the Indians that he was trustworthy;he also had to make sure that he could trust these people with whom he wanted to trade.He needed to establish a reciprocal confidence that would minimize the risks on both sides. The tradercould not use European methods to do this.He could not,for example , take the Indians before a notary to sign legal contracts, for there were no written laws and no courts to enforce them.Rather,the trader had to make an agreement with the Ojibwe on their own terms,using Indian techniques to establish a binding relationship.The most common way was gift giving. On the simplest level the Ojibwe,like many othercultural groups,believed that tangible objects could be used to signify feelings. The traveler Johann Georg Kohl,who visited Lake Superior in the 1850s,recorded a fur trader’s belief that for the Ojibwe giving gifts was a necessary way of demonstrating one person’s esteem for another:“If you say to one of them ‘I love thee,’” wrote Kohl,“have a present ready to hand,to prove your love clearly.You will lose in their sight if a present,or some tangible politeness,does not follow on such an assurance.But it is often suIcient to hand them the plate from which you have been eating,and on which you have left a fragment for them.”2 Gifts also aided in establishing and aIrming more elaborate relationships. Depending on the situations in which they were given and on the words and ceremonies that accompanied them, gifts communicated something about what each partner to the relationship wanted. Among the Ojibwe the family or kin group served as the basic producer and distributor of goods and services.The parents did not exert the same kind of authoritarian power over theirchildren that European parents might have,and in a very real sense family members’ roles were defined less by authority than by the ways in which they cared for,or were...

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