Ideas that come with the trade

 Trade dependency between native and colonial peoples is a controversial topic. I wonder if it might be a metaphor for thinking about some features of contemporary American culture.

The historian Alan Taylor gave an account of the concept that emphasized the mutuality of dependency among the French and the Native peoples in Canada in colonial times. Here are the highlights:

• Native people believed that the life of each animal had a spiritual value that must be considered with the overall health of the land. Waste was abhorred. Human beings took no more than was needed.

• The French brought luxuries that quickly became necessities. Native peoples who shunned the French traders could continue to skin carcasses with stone tools instead of metal knives. They could continue to use stone hoes to cultivate fields. But stone tools virtually disappeared from some Native populations during the 17^th century. What once were luxuries were soon necessities.

• To pay for them, Native peoples traded furs. The animals that produced good furs had been largely exterminated in Europe. To the French, the pelts were valuable, but they were commodities. To the Native people, that idea was initially abhorrent. But by the 1620s, the Huron people, who were middlemen trading with other Native peoples on the Great Lakes, were supplying the French with 10,000 to 12,000 pelts a year. It was business. People who once killed animals to feed and clothe themselves were killing animals to supply a market. The view of how the world works had changed.

It seems to me that you could make an argument that the current population of the United States has been influenced, not by invading hordes, but by an invasive collection of ideas. This snarl of ideas is based on a kind of capitalism that endows corporations with human rights and that increasingly makes commodities of things, such as public trusts, that traditionally were not. What ordinary people are willing to trade in return for wages and for necessities has changed.

In 17^th-century Canada, the revolution in the way humans lived together and how they lived on the land occurred without anything that looked like an invasion. In 1627, after almost 20 years of efforts to grow the colony, the French population in Quebec reached 85. The changes that occurred in Canada were not brought about by invading hordes, but by the influence of new ideas, new technologies, new ways of looking at things.

Not all the changes were healthy. I’d say the same about the changes that occurring in the United States today.

• Source and note: Alan Taylor, American Colonies; London: Penguin Books, 2002, pp. 94-102. Taylor is one of the historians who speaks on camera in The American Revolution, a film series directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. It premiered on PBS.