American Indians, the fur trade, and Cuba

Pen-l'er Tim Stoshane wrote: There was a book in the late 70s or early 80s called KEEPERS OF THE GAME by an anthropologist (Calvin ???) whose last name I cannot remember. He makes a very interesting and HIGHLY controversial argument about how the tribes in the northeast and northwest (that is, what we now refer to as the Midwest) had no "scientific" way to explain the diseases brought by the Europeans (Dutch, French, English, others) were striking down their populations. They reasoned that their gods were angry at them and they sought revenge against animals whom they thought were the channels for disease. This confluence of interpretations coincided with the extinction and near extinction of many species (e.g., beaver, mink) through their increased hunting for the fur trade. We're probably talking mid- to late-18th century in North America.

This book was really controversial. It is well-argued and documented, but there are some leaps that the author had to explain and document. I don't remember what consensus emerged from the brouhaha. One major objection was that it really takes the gloss off of the image of Native Americans as somehow more spiritual and loving stewards of the natural world. It was, after all, as the book shows, Indian warriors and hunters who showed the European fur traders where the habitats of these animals were and helped kill them.

Louis Proyect replies: Indian complicity in the whites' fur trade is the subject of Calvin Martin's 1978 work, Keepers of the Game. Martin asks how Indians could have broken their covenant with game animals, particularly beaver, in overhunting them to near extinction. He rejects the idea that Western marketplace systems caught up Indians in their web, so that Indians could not resist because they wanted white goods. Instead, he proposes that diseases, in conjunction with missionary teachings and social disequilibrium, corrupted Indian animal responsibilities. Indeed, Indians came to blame beaver and other animals for the new diseases that so demolished Indian populations for centuries, and the fur trade was in part a revenge against the disease- bearing animals.

There is no doubt that diseases, along with dislocation, loss of tribal autonomy, and environmental disruption, undermined traditional Indian religions, social systems, and ecological practices through spiritual crises and loss of confidence. Did Indian religious beliefs not have an effect on Indian actions in historical events?

It is unfortunate that Indian ideals regarding environment were often vitiated by white economic and religious thrusts, but weakening does not mean that ideals were nonexistent or aboriginally ineffective. They simply were not strong enough always to withstand white pressure, and it should be noted that Indians often did try to withstand the white seduction to kill animals rapaciously. The Indian complicity must be seen in the context of the colonial trade in which Indians OFTEN HAD TO SACRIFICE THEIR IDEALS IN ORDER TO SURVIVE.

Some American Indians took part in a white colonial fur trade through which enormous numbers of animals, especially beaver, were killed. But if white Christians kill inordinate numbers of human beings, do we conclude that Christians have no ethical relations with other humans? No, it is clear that Christianity and even Christians themselves hold that other humans are worthy of ethical consideration. Unfortunately, there are circumstances in which these ethical relations do not apply, or they become cancelled by events. The same can be said for the Indians in the fur trade. Events dislocated their ethical relations with the environment.

What were those events? Certain tribes had to acquire white trade items, most specifically guns, in order to maintain the precontact equilibrium among Indian nations that whites disrupted. If they did not kill beaver, other Indians would and thereby inherit the trade and gain advantage.

Through dependence on fur trade items, Indians saw their very survival at stake, and the successful hunting of beaver and other animals was their only way of staying above water. Also, white goods often preceded the trade itself and whetted Indian appetites for trade, this explains Indian eagerness to trade on first contact.

Furthermore, we must deal with the condition of identifying with the oppressor. Indians, an oppressed and exploited people, wore white clothing in order partially to share in white power that had given whites guns and other items of status. It is possible that in participating in the white fur trade Indians wanted to act like whites in order to become more like them. When seen in the context of cultural invasion in which white missionaries insisted that Indian values were evil or infantile, it is no wonder that Indians buckled under the ideological pressure.

Furthermore, if we see Indians as part of a nascent capitalist system, we understand how they came to see animals as property, as commodities in trade, rather than as persons of nature capable of equivalence with humans. In the fur trade beaver became devalued in Indian eyes.

(From Christopher Vecsey's "American Indian Environmental Religions" in "American Indian Environments: Ecological Issues in Native American History", edited by Vecsey and Robert W. Venables, Syracuse University, 1980. Vecsey is Assistant Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.)

I am struck by the analogies between American Indian survival strategies and what is happening in Cuba today. Communalist societies based on hunting and gathering, and modern socialist societies, both have to function in an ocean of capitalist property relations. Relations with the hostile, cash- based outside societies involve compromise, if not betrayal of one's deepest beliefs. Does this mean that the belief itself is somehow flawed? No, rather it means that the power of capital to corrupt and to undermine egalitarianism and democracy are almost irresistible.

The continuing efforts of American Indians to preserve their values against rapacious American corporations and the effort of socialist Cuba to provide health-care, education, and other social services to working people under attack from the same quarters should inspire us. Gambling casinos on Indian reservations or glitzy tourist flesh-traps in Havana represent concessions made to a more powerful adversary.

Our goal as progressives and socialists is to fight for and solidarize with the best aspects of these societies and not condemn them. As the class struggle of the next century unfolds, it will become clearer and clearer that the ecological insights of land-based peoples like the North American Indian, Australian aborigines, Nigerian Ogonis who fight Shell Oil, the Indian villagers who resist World Bank dams are not only just on their own terms, but utterly necessary to universalize for the survival of all humanity. American Indians and ecology will in fact be the topic of my next article, which should appear sometime this weekend.

Thorstein Veblen on the fur trade and American Indians

In analyzing America's nineteenth century dilemma, Veblen concluded that vested interests did not bear their share of environmental costs because the "doing business" rationale of wealthy Americans caused rapid social losses for the nation at large. As an eyewitness to wasteful farming practices and to business domination of government, a situation which permitted the slaughter of buffalo and exploitation of the Indian in his time, Veblen provided a unique and penetrating assessment of what was going on in the United States. The various forms of "progress"-- the fur trading, mining, ranching, farming and oil drilling frontiers--Veblen understood as having produced huge social losses, almost impossible to calculate on a monetary basis. As Veblen wrote: "this American plan or policy is very simply a settled practice of converting all public wealth to private gain on a plan of legalized seizure." The scheme of converting public wealth to private gain gave impetus, Veblen argued, to the growth of slavery because of the development of one-crop agriculture on a large scale fueled by forced labor. Both agricultural and real estate speculation were aspects of this progressive confiscation of natural resources. The history of frontier expansion, Veblen maintained, was marked by the seizure of specific natural resources for privileged interests. There was a kind of order for the taking: what was most easily available for quick riches went first. After the despoliation of wildlife for fur trade wealth came the taking of gold and other precious minerals followed by the confiscation of timber, iron, other metals, oil, natural gas, water power, irrigation rights, and transportation right-of-ways. What was the result of such a shortsighted policy? The inevitable consequence, Veblen maintained, was the looting of the nation's nonrenewable resources to enrich the privileged few. The fur trade, Veblen said, represented this kind of exploitation and was "an unwritten chapter on the debauchery and manslaughter entailed upon the Indian population of the country." The sheer nastiness of this rotten business was such that it produced, according to Veblen, "the sclerosis of the American soul."

(From Wilbur R. Jacobs "Indians as Ecologists and Other Environmental Themes in American Frontier History". This is in "American Indian Environments", edited by Christopher Vecsey and Robert W. Venables, Syracuse University, 1980. Highly recommended.)