Gifts as Treaties: The Political Use of Received Gifts in Anishinaabeg Communities, 1820-1832

Abstract

Gift giving has complex relationships to power in all cultures. The identities of giver and receiver denote power relations in specific cultural contexts. Therefore, the key to interpreting Indian-European gift exchanges lies not only in the differing sociopolitical structures that define the meaning of gift but also in the notions of power and responsibility held by both parties in the conveyance of gifts. For northeastern tribes immersed in relationships of obligation and mutual reliance among kin as well as with the manitous, or spiritual beings, that inhabit the natural world around them, a stance of neediness and even powerlessness had a very different significance than in societies like the United States that stressed social and economic independence. This means that gifts did more than allow chiefs to provide for a community or to confirm an alliance with another group. By accepting gifts, whether as a leader receiving gifts from another polity or as an individual getting gifts from the leaders they supported, a recipient acquiesced to the political messages and agreements that accompanied them. Similarly, rejection of gifts demonstrated rejection of the messages proposed at their distribution. Accepted gifts became physical reminders of the alliance itself, and recipients symbolically used them to show satisfaction or discontent with the results of current agreements and, on occasion, the need to renegotiate them. Examination of some of the early diplomatic encounters between the Anishinaabeg south and west of Lake Superior and the United States demonstrate this multivalent interpretation of diplomatic gifts among Anishinaabeg people. Before examining these historical encounters, it is important to firmly establish the meaning of gifts to Anishinaabeg people and the various levels upon which they were exchanged. Marcel Mauss was the first to recognize that gifts often have a social as well as an economic context—that such exchanges are used to create and perpetuate the social and/or political ties necessary to convert the outsider from potential enemy to friend and kin. He asserts that to fully understand all of the nuances of such exchanges, they must be examined [End Page 221] within their entire cultural context and not as solely economic, social, religious, or political goods. 1 David Murray, in his recent book Indian Givers,provides an excellent summary of the various ways that researchers since Mauss have explored the ramifications of his path-breaking work. To summarize this lengthy debate, Murray finds that opposing interpretations of Mauss's work that are either too structuralist in nature or too embedded in conventional ideas of market and commodity have been reconciled by Pierre Bourdieu's refusal to make the usual distinctions between economic and noneconomic practices. 2 Bourdieu suggests that in "pre-capitalist" societies, exchange always has a value to the communities involved. He expands the concept of economy to include symbolic as well as material value and asserts that these values can be interchangeable. Jonathan Parry then reconciled this concept to contemporary Western practice by suggesting that only with the creation of the market and the "idea of free individuals who aren't in a relation of reciprocal obligation" do economic relations become differentiated from other types of social relationship. 3 C. A. Gregory then clarifies the distinction between pre-market and market exchange. Market exchange is characterized by the exchange of commodities that establishes a relationship between the objects exchanged, whereas the gift exchange that characterizes pre-capitalist societies establishes a relationship between the partners engaged in the exchange. What this means is that in a commodity-oriented economy, the goal is to appropriate goods, while in a gift-oriented economy the goal is to expand social relations. 4 The implication is that social relationships were affirmed by the gifts rather than the gifts themselves representing the true value of the exchange. If the goal truly is to expand social relations, then those instances in which gifts and the social relationships attached to them were...