Working the Waters

The first interactions of commerce between the Europeans and the Indians, from the anecdotes of the King George’s men and the Hudson’s Bay men, are painted in a very indistinguishable color. From the snapshots of history learned in high school I have produced the assumption that the natives of America were one of the many colonies exploited by Europeans in search of a greater empire. I had already placed a distinct blame upon the W.A.S.P, which blanketed every white establishment, for maliciously manipulating the peaceful tribes of the Americas. Through the portal of these English and Indian accounts during the juvenile stages of commerce things became a bit more ambiguous. The boundaries of the cultures that were so apprehensive of each other began to slowly dissolve. There is no doubt that our actions further down the road were easily contemptible but in these early interactions a more symbiotic relationship was clearly possible. Possibly these foreigners were responsible for corrupting the natives with a drastic accumulation of wealth but not without being ushered in. Economic hierarchy was apparent in the tribes; families that had many slaves and goods could create loyalties through trade and marriage. I found that there were many parallels between the Indians’ social structure and the fur traders. The cultures became ingrained in one another for better or worse and because of their trade ties these divergent cultures were forced to tolerate and act accordingly towards one another.

My greatest interest lied within the universality of the systems of social construct.  The systems of loyalty, wealth, power, and trade, the elite of aboriginal societies forged social bonds that transcended local loyalties. A system of worth was not absent in the native tribes. Slaves were a large part of culture and played a poignant stake in marriage creating ties between tribes. The same shrewd sense of business was apparent in the Indians. Two months after natives began bringing beaver to Nisqually, many decided to withhold their skins because the company had hiked its prices (Harmon 28).

Trade ties bred a type of camaraderie between the natives and the foreigners. In many cases King George men consorted with indigenous women and used marriage as a way of gaining business and capital. As Hudson’s Bay men and local people cohabited, traded, and tried to indulge each other’s desires without forfeiting their own, they cleared and gradually expanded a figurative arena for their joint activities—a cultural space where people from dissimilar societies could serve their separate interests by observing common, specialized rules. Richard White has coined the term “middle ground” to describe a comparable culture of relations that developed in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth century (Harmon 31).

Not only would they fail in business if they alienated the people around them; they would also go hungry (Harmon 28)

Hudson’s Bay traders adapted their inventories to better suit the desires of their Indian clientele and produced other good relations by paying the natives for fish and game, and accepted trade items valued solely of primarily by other natives, such as baskets, rush mats, and strings of shells. Both consciously and unwittingly, company traders also enabled their establishments to serve the social ends that prompted Indians to trades. For example, they tolerated people who came empty-handed merely to pay social calls. (Harmon 28)

This is an extremely rough draft and a lot of the quotes are going to be elaborated.