Trading Posts Research Articles

"Outcasts upon the World": The Louisiana Purchase and the Quapaws

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE SET IN MOTION one of the greatest demographic transitions in the history of Arkansas and the trans-Mississippi West. Within few short years of 1803, white American settlers vastly out-numbered Indians and colonists of French and Spanish descent in what would become Arkansas. Explosive population growth had propelled these settlers west. From 1700 to 1803, the population of the English-speaking settlements in the East had increased from 250,000 to 5.5 million. White Americans forcefully reworked the demography of the Mississippi Valley not only by their own migration but through the introduction of thousands of enslaved African Americans and the expulsion of Indians. Like so many places subject to America's westward expansion, Arkansas faced what Walter Nugent calls, a demographic inundation leading to complete political and cultural change.1 The Quapaws would feel the force of this flood as much as any Indian people. The wave of American immigration to Arkansas, while smaller than that hitting Missouri and Louisiana, overwhelmed them. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the Quapaw population stood at 555 in three villages located on the south bank of the Arkansas River. The first village (Kappa), under the tribe's principal chief Wah-pah-tee-see, had population of 160; the second (Tourima), under Etah-sah, had population of 166; the third (Osotouy), under Wah-to-nee-kah, was the largest with 229. By 1811, when the first census was taken, whites, 1062 of them, outnumbered the Quapaws two-to-one. During the next decade, the growth of the white population also outpaced that of other Indians immigrating into Arkansas from the East. Whites numbered 14,273 in 1820 and an estimated 30,000 by 1830.2 By the 1820s, enslaved African Americans-not counting those among the Cherokees-also outnumbered Indians. The shift in political and economic relationships wrought by these demographic changes would cast the Quapaws out of Arkansas entirely. Although white settlers began arriving on the west bank of the Mississippi well ahead of the Louisiana Purchase, the presence of the United States government would prove decisive for the Quapaws and other Arkansas Indians. Within two years after the purchase, the federal government established trading factory at Arkansas Post. Two more would be established within the boundaries of the territory before 1822. The mission of these factories was to establish fair trade with Indians in the region and impose new set of commercial regulations on that trade, including the prohibition of alcohol. The trading posts were followed by an increasing military presence on Arkansas's western frontier, intended to support the policy of Indian removal. This removal policy had two components that affected Arkansas: removal of Indians from the East into the less populated Arkansas River region; and land cessions demanded of Indians in Arkansas. The first component bred conflict as Indian immigrants like the Cherokees clashed with the Osages, one of the region's dominant tribes. More important and long-lasting for the Quapaws were the government's demands for land cessions, something they had not faced in their dealings with the French or Spanish. The American attitude toward land imposed boundaries and lines in areas of Arkansas that had only been recognized as hunting territory shared or fought over by Indians and small number of Frenchmen. The federal government began series of negotiations to acquire land from the Quapaws and the Osages. In 1816, the Osages agreed to quiet their claims to land in western Arkansas. Two years later, the federal government turned its diplomatic attention to the Quapaws in order to open lands south of the Arkansas. Before these negotiations began, United States officials had demonstrated little interest in the Quapaws, which was in itself an entirely new experience for these Indians when it came to dealing with white settlers and their governments. …

Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian (review)

In late spring 1837, the crew of a Missouri River steamboat carried smallpox to the Indian trading posts of the upper Missouri, and spread contagion to the Mandans, Arikaras, Hidatsas, Assiniboin, Blackfeet, and other Plains tribes. It was one of the worst Native American smallpox epidemics in history. It is also the most notorious, because of graphic descriptions from traders, because of popular attention given those tribes by early writers and artists such as George Catlin, and because of the work of latter-day historians like Bernard DeVoto. The epidemic took the lives of perhaps 23,000 Indians on the northern Plains, including a quarter or more of the Blackfeet, half the Arikaras, half the Assiniboin, and more than nine-tenths of the Mandans.

'Her flesh must serve you': Gender, Commerce and the New World in Fletcher's and Massinger's The Sea Voyage and Massinger's The City Madam

'Her flesh must serve you': Gender, Commerce and the New World in Fletcher's and Massinger's The Sea Voyage and Massinger's The City Madam Claire Jowitt This essay examines the complex interaction between gender and the N e w World in two early-to-mid-seventeenth-century comedies, Fletcher's and Massinger's collaborative The Sea Voyage (1622) and Massinger's single-authored The City Madam (1632).1 Both texts engage with the Virginian enterprise and the troubled history of the Jamestown venture. Indeed, characters' attitudes towards, and behaviour in, colonial situations are used to measure their conformity to expected gender behaviour. Furthermore, I argue that characters' gender performance specifically their attitude to sexual commerce - figures as a metaphor for a larger set of commercial relations with the N e w World. The m e n and w o m e n in these 1 John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Sea Voyage, in Three Renaissance Trav ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 135-216; Philip Massinger, The City Madam, ed. Cyrus Hoy (London: EdwardArnold, 1964). All references are to these editions. For a detailed discussion ofthis text see Martin Butler, 'Massinger's The City Madam and the Caroline Audience', Renaissance Drama, 13 (1982), pp. 157187 ; Michael Neill, '"The Tongues ofAngels": Charity and the Social Order in 77ze City Madam', in Philip Massinger:A CriticalReassessment, ed. Douglas Howard (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 193-220; Ira Clark The Moral Art of Philip Massinger (London & Toronto: Associated Universities Press, 1993), pp. 41-49. 94 Claire Jowitt dramas are represented as conforming to, or deviating from, a male or female ideal in terms of sexual congress, which, in turn, acts as a yardstick for their moral, social and cultural worth. The correct management of appetite is crucial in determining commercial/sexual/social position and success. More particularly, as w e shall see, Fletcher and Massinger use their characters' attitudes to native inhabitants - particularly the prospect of miscegenation or the adoption of savage, native patterns of behaviour - as especially significant indices of their relationship with the dominant social order. Though the action of The City Madam takes place in Renaissance London, and that of The Sea Voyage is solely located on castaway islands, both plays engage with the Virginia project. Massinger's The City Madam draws explicitly on a Virginian context in the second half of the play, since the profligate and proud Lady Frugal and her two daughters, Mary and Ann, are threatened with a violent, sacrificial death in Virginia because they transgress accepted class and gender behaviour. Like The Tempest, the play with which The Sea Voyage is most frequently compared, Fletcher's and Massinger's text is less obvious in its engagement with Virginia.2 Nevertheless, The Sea Voyage is full of the most potent but unsettling images culled from recent English explorers' and settlers' accounts: Amazonian women, endemic starvation, fomenting rebellion, European rivalry, and, of course, easy riches represented by caskets of jewels strewn lavishly across the colonial landscape. Although the text's most recent editor, Anthony Parr, suggests that 'the very abundance of analogy . . . refutes any attempt to tie it exclusively to a particular place or venture', the presence of European w o m e n on board Portuguese and French ships is significant in locating this play within a Western rather than an Eastern context, since the former was concerned with permanent settlement and the latter with temporary trading posts.3 Women 2 The colonial context for The Tempest has been extensively explored in recent year for instance, Ronald Takaki, 'The "Tempest" in the Wilderness', in Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston: Bedford, 2000), pp. 141-172; and, most recently, see Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds.), The Tempest and Its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000). For an alternate - non-colonial - reading see Douglas L. Peterson, Time, Tide and Tempest: A Study ofShakespeare s Romances (San Marino, California: Huntington Library Publications, 1973), pp. 214-249. 3 Parr, 'Introduction', Three Renaissance Travel Plays, p. 22. On the differences between Eastern and Western European colonial ambitions see A. D. Innes, The Maritime and Colonial Expansion ofEngland under the Stuarts...

The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808-1826

A pivotal year for the United States and for the Native Americans who lived in the borderland regions of the early republic was 1803. The most significant and best-remembered event was Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. Historians often note that the purchase doubled the territory of the United States, but in 1803 Spain disputed the extent of Louisiana, arguing that the territory amounted to nothing more than narrow strip of land on the west bank of the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans.' Britain, for its part, had not recognized the Spanish retrocession of Louisiana to France in 1800, and thus questioned the legitimacy of the American purchase altogether. The purchase, in short, did not guarantee American control of the West. Rather, in 1803 the United States entered into complex competition for sovereignty in the trans-Mississippi West with Britain, Spain, and the Native Americans whose commercial and political allegiances were to these European powers. One of Jefferson's institutional efforts to extend American sovereignty into the Indian borderlands was the so-called system, network of federally owned trading posts, or factories. By subsidizing the operations of the factories, the federal government hoped to detach Native Americans from their commercial ties to foreign fur traders. Beyond this goal, Jefferson hoped that the factory system would means of shifting lands from Indian to American control. In February 1803, two months before finalizing the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson wrote an infamous letter to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, suggesting that the government factories would be glad to see the good and influential Indians among them run into debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individual can pay, they become willing to lop them off by cession of land.2 Suggestions such as this one prompted the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace to criticize a degree of ruthlessness in Jefferson's dealings with the Indians, the ruthlessness of benevolent zealot who would do virtually anything to insure that his new, free, American republic survived and grew.3 However ruthless Jefferson's designs may have been, in the multilateral borderlands of the Louisiana Territory where Native Americans could seek commercial and political alliances with Britain or Spain, Jefferson and his subordinates in the factory system could not enforce their will. Rather, in the borderlands, compromise and accommodation was the rule. Or, at least, compromise and accommodation ruled until the market revolution overswept the borderlands in the aftermath of the War of 1812. The changes that the market revolution wrought in the Louisiana Territory were best exemplified by George Champlin Sibley, Jefferson's chief factor in the region. Initially appointed to manage the factory at Fort Osage on the Lower Missouri River, Sibley embraced important aspects of Jefferson's political economy and Indian policy; he believed that commerce between natives and unscrupulous fur traders-especially noncitizens-corrupted the virtue of Indians and the national interests of the United States.4 In the early years of his career, Sibley enthusiastically pursued his mission to regulate trade in order to stabilize relations between Indians and Americans in the Lower Missouri borderlands. Notwithstanding Jefferson's musings about land cessions, Sibley and most of his superiors in the Indian service believed that American expansion would best accomplished by measured progression of American influence in the region that integrated Indians into pastoral economy, rather than headlong rush for the profits of the Indian trade in furs and pelts. By the mid-1810s, however, Sibley began speculating in lands and dabbling in trade. His personal transformation paralleled societal shift in the United States in the years immediately after the War of 1812, as piecemeal regional markets cohered into national economy based on commercial agriculture, exploitation of natural resources, and fledgling manufacturing. …

Market Formation in Bilateral Oligopolies

This paper investigates the structure of bilateral oligopolies - a simple version of Shapley Shubik games with two types of traders and two commodities. It shows that interior equilibria exist, studies the example of CES utility functions to uncover the relation between the complementarity of products in the utility functions and the shape of the reaction functions of the traders, and proves that the number of trading posts is irrelevant. Even if traders can split their offers on different markets, they never choose to specialize and all equilibria are equivalent to an equilibrium where all agents trade on a single market.

Market Games with Multiple Trading Posts

We study market games with multiple posts per commodity. We provide some facts that characterize prices of commodities across posts and show the following results: (i) As the number of agents increases, the price variability across posts for a commodity becomes smaller and it becomes zero when the number of agents becomes inffinite, irrespectively of the distribution of characteristics in the economy. (ii) The set of equilibrium prices and allocations of a market game is a subset of the set of equilibria of another game with more trading posts per commodity. (iii) We demonstrate via an example that the inclusion can be strict, as there are equilibria with price disparities across posts for a commodity which cannot be captured with less trading posts. (iv) One can pass from an equilibrium of a market game into an equilibrium of a game with less trading posts per commodity, by consolidating posts where the price of a commodity is uniform.

Geomorphology and the urban tropics: building an interface between research and usage

The developing countries, located almost entirely within the tropics, are currently undergoing urbanization at a rapid pace. Many of these cities are not more than a few centuries old, having been established to function as regional trading posts or administrative centers by either colonial or regional powers. It is doubtful that the site conditions were taken into consideration, and consequently, many of these cities were established in hazardous or environmentally sensitive areas. As these cities developed over time, they spread across a wide range of terrain conditions much of which are unsuitable, such as floodplains, coastal swamps, steep slopes, or sand dunes. For a number of these cities, which are located near active plate margins and tropical cyclone belts, such problems are magnified. Increased demand for water has required subsurface extraction, leading to problems of subsidence and quality. We examine the range of these cities with reference to (1) their site-related problems, (2) the nature of geomorphological information required for specific ameliorating actions, and (3) the level of management required for city maintenance. Management requires interfacing geomorphology with engineering practices and urban planning. We present case studies of cities ranging from those with limited problems and possible engineering and land-zoning solutions (Singapore) to cities where the hazards (either natural or anthropogenic) are so acute and widespread that a practical solution is difficult to achieve (Kingston, Bangkok). Precise geomorphological and geological information and long-term data sets are not available for most of the cities. Furthermore, it is necessary to present the information in formats appreciated by the engineering and planning communities. Often a set of specialized maps are extremely useful. We complete the discussion with several examples and suggestions for collection of geomorphological information and inventory preparation for communicating geomorphological data to city engineers and planners.

Portuguese in Sri Lanka: influence of substratum languages

Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole is considered to fall within the group of Indo-Portuguese Creoles, which were Portuguese-based Creoles that once flourished around coastal India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole arose when the Portuguese established trading posts and fortresses in Sri Lanka from 1517 onwards. The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the influence of substratum (indigenous) languages on Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole.

Property Rights, Competition, and Depletion in the Eighteenth-Century Canadian Fur Trade: The Role of the European Market

Pricing behavior at three Hudson's Bay Company trading posts is examined in terms of a model of long-run profit maximization of a depletable resource. At Fort Churchill, where the company acted as a monopsonist purchaser of furs from the Indians, rising European fur prices had little impact on prices paid to Indians and beaver stocks in the hinterland were maintained. At Fort Albany and York Factory, where the company faced competition from French traders, prices at the posts were raised and the beaver was depleted. These outcomes are consistent with optimal pricing behavior by the company. The lack of well-defined Native property rights to the beaver was a crucial element.

Monetizing Trade: A Tatonnement Example

This paper presents a class of examples where a barter economy develops through agents' optimizing decisions into a monetary economy. A barter economy with m commodities is characterized by m(m-1)/2 commodity pair trading posts for active trade of each good for every other. Monetary equilibrium is characterized by active trade concentrated on m-1 posts, those trading in money versus the m-1 other non-monetary commodities. Specialization, the concentration of the trading function in a few trading posts in the monetary trade arrangement, reflects the workings of scale economies in transaction costs. As households discover that some pairwise markets (those with high trading volumes) have lower transaction costs, they restructure their trades to take advantage of the low cost. When a trading post's transaction cost is sufficiently low, households find it advantageous to use the low transaction cost goods as intermediary goods in their transactions, rather than trade directly (at high transaction cost trading posts) for the goods they want. The process converges to an equilibrium where only the high volume trade through a single intermediary good (money) takes place. Monetization of trade results from dynamic adjustment to scale economies in the transaction technology.

The NYSE's 3D Trading Floor

The 3D Trading Floor lets people use one of their strongest innate skills-spotting exceptions. A good visualization system leverages this ability by bringing exceptions to the fore. The model shows data on many different levels. Because it's designed for the floor operations staff, as opposed to individual traders, it focuses on operational issues. So it depicts the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in an abstracted style that corresponds to the physical layout. It shows each of the 17 trading posts and each stock traded. In addition to this micro level of detail, an external, macro level provides live TV feeds, such as Bloomberg, CNN, or CNBC, overlaid on the walls of the stadium-like world. At an intermediate level, it shows the NYSE's two data centers, local servers, and links between mainframes, servers, and trading posts. When something breaks, changes in colors, shapes, and motion pinpoint the problem area, as well as the probable causes and any downstream functions that are or may be lost.

Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves

Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves Gert Oostindie (bio) and Bert Paasman (bio) I. Introduction 1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The scope of the Dutch Maritime Empire. (Map by G-O graphics, Wijk bij Duurstede). From its very beginnings, Dutch colonial ventures gravitated towards Asia. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was established in 1602, nineteen years before its West Indian counterpart, the WIC. In addition to various trading posts along the Indian subcontinent and along the Asian coast, Dutch expansion under the aegis of the VOC resulted in the colonization of the Cape Colony and, most importantly, the vast and populous Dutch East Indies. The importance of the Dutch West Indies pales in comparison. The New Netherlands’ colony was ceded to the British in 1664; the Dutch intermezzo in Brazil was short-lived. By the late seventeenth century, the Dutch empire in the West consisted of six tiny Antillean islands and three as yet barely exploited and inhabited colonies on the “Wild Coast” of the Guyanas (fig. 1). Apart from this, the WIC only supported a few trading posts on the West African coast. Dutch colonialism had started in the geopolitical context of the struggle against Spain. Initially therefore, there had been an obvious ideological rationale behind the overseas expansion. Once independence was attained, however, pragmatism ruled. In contrast to the Catholic nations, there was no serious attempt to convert the subjected peoples to Christianity, much less to socialize them into Dutch culture. Apart from the numerically insignificant colonial expatriates, metropolis and colonial world remained separate entities for all but economic purposes. Moreover as the physical presence of colonial subjects in the Netherlands was negligible, for ordinary Dutch people the colonial empire must have been an extremely distant reality at best. Accordingly, the rare debates about themes such as colonialism, slavery, or Christianization had a very limited participation and impact. At the same time, within the colonial empire, the divide between the VOC’s and the WIC’s respective territories was hardly ever bridged. This short paper therefore discusses these two parts of empire in separate sections. II. The Dutch East Indies 2 When the Portuguese arrived in Southeast Asia in the early sixteenth century, they found people with highly developed cultures, including their own languages and religions. European supremacy existed only in technology, especially in maritime and military fields. When the Dutch arrived about one century later, Portuguese had already become the lingua franca in most of Southeast Asia, certainly on the coasts. This was also true of the western part of the Indonesian archipelago; in the eastern part Malay served that purpose. In and around the Portuguese trading posts there were already large numbers of Eurasians (offspring of a European father and an Asian mother, or of mixed parents), the so-called mestizos, with their own culture. The Portuguese had already begun missionary work; the Jesuits in particular were active. The VOC, clad with sovereign rights by the States General, tried to push back the Portuguese influence by taking over trade contracts, conquering trading posts, and by replacing the Roman Catholic mission with a Calvinist one. Portuguese remained the major language in the “central rendezvous” of the Company, Batavia, as well as in other settlements far into the eighteenth century. Dutch was only spoken in the offices of the VOC by the governor general, the Councillors of the Dutch East Indies and other officials, and in some churches and schools. In the eighteenth century Malay gradually replaced Portuguese, while Dutch still played a minor role. Because of the influence of Asian and Eurasian women and their slaves, who raised the children, Portuguese or Malay was often spoken in the family circle. The so-called mestizo culture became more and more important during the eighteenth century. Every European staying in the East Indies for a period of time began to live like a mestizo to a greater or lesser extent. Marrying into mestizo families was even a means to make a career for oneself in the Company. Having obtained a monopoly for the whole [End Page 349] territory between South Africa and the Strait of Magellan, the VOC did not...

Housing Conditions and Spatial Organization in Accra, 1950s–1990s

GHANA STUDIES / Volume 1 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 1998 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 63 HOUSING CONDITIONS AND SPATIAL ORGANIZATION IN ACCRA, 1950s–1990s1 KWADWO KONADU-AGYEMANG Introduction Cities in sub-Saharan Africa have been growing rapidly since the 1950s. The growth is evident in terms of both population and spatial expansion. Indeed, cities in this region have in recent years experienced higher growth rates than their counterparts in other Third World regions. Annual average growth rates of 5–12 percent have been recorded for cities like Lagos, Abidjan and Kinshasa overthepasttwodecades(WorldBank,1980–1996).Theimpactoftheircolonial past, coupled with post-independence socioeconomic development, have led to the concentration of infrastructure and job opportunities in these cities, which have in turn made them the destination of rural-urban migrants (Caldwell, 1967; 1969; Harvey and Riddell, 1972; Mehretu, 1993). Despite their tremendous growth, and the associated problems such as housing and infrastructural deficiencies,nodetailedstudiesonthehousingandspatialorganizationinthese cities have been undertaken in recent years. For instance, the city of Accra, the capital of Ghana, stands out as one of the prominent and fastest growing cities in the region, yet it was last studied in detail 40 years ago by Acquah (1958), who examined various aspects of the city including demography, housing and administration. Although there have been several other studies on the city since the1960s,theyhavebeenlimitedtoonlyselectedaspectssuchasenvironmental issues (Amuzu and Leitmann, 1994), land values and economic growth (Bobo, 1974; 1977), history (Amoah, 1964), and demography (Benneh et al., 1990). The purpose of this study, therefore, is to investigate the spatial organization and housing conditions in Accra in the 1980s and 1990s, comparing and contrasting them with Acquah’s findings in the 1950s. It will seek to elucidate and understand the impact of the Accra’s colonial past and contemporary influences on its present internal dynamics and spatial organization from a political-economyperspective .Byfocusingontheroleofhistoricalprocessesandglobalforces, 1. I am grateful to Drs. Allen Noble and Baffour Takyi of the University of Akron for their comments and suggestion, and to Ms. Irvia Toledo for reproducing the maps used in the text. I am alsothankfultotheanonymousrefereesfortheircommentsandsuggestionsforimprovements. 64 Ghana Studies • volume 1 • 1998 as well as the contribution of the state and the comprador elite in the creation and shaping of Accra, the political economy approach transcends all the other approachesthathavethetendencytoeitherfocusoninternalorexternalfactors alone (see Safa, 1982; Timberlake, 1985 for the advantages of this approach). The major emphasis of this study, however, is on housing conditions in the city, and draws extensively on a survey conducted by the author in 1989. The survey involved524householdheadsrandomlyselectedfromthirteenresidentialareas, offices and workplaces in Accra. The survey data has been supplemented with data from the Ghana Standard of Living Surveys published by the Ghana Statistical Service and the World Bank. The paper also draws on archival and other unpublished and inaccessible materials, as well as the Ghana Demographic and Health Survey of 1993 (Ghana Statistical Service and DHS, 1994). The study’s key finding is that the housing conditions in Accra of the 1980s and 1990s seem tobeworsethantheywereinthe1950s,andthatineffectiveurbanplanningpolicies are responsible for this state of affairs. This paper is divided into 7 sections. Following the introduction, section 2 discusses the early history of Accra and its incorporation into the world capitalist system, as well as the impact of European colonialism to set the background for understanding the city’s late twentieth -centurysituation.Section3dealswiththegrowthanddevelopmentofAccra from1948tothe1990s.Sections4and5discussthedemographicissues,spatial structure,andhousingconditionsinthecity.Section6isanoverviewofhousing and planning policies, while the conclusions are found in Section 7. Accra: Early Times to Incorporation into Colonial Network Accra, the capital of Ghana, lies on the Gulf of Guinea coast of West Africa, and is located at 0° 5’ West of the Greenwich Meridian and 5° 30’ North of the Equator. Whilst historical and archeological evidence suggest that Accra was founded by a group of Ga fishermen in the sixteenth century (Ozanne, 1962; Amoah, 1964), the city’s growth and development can be linked to European mercantile activity in West Africa which began in 1471 (Sanjek, 1972, 1982; Dickson, 1969; Amoah, 1964). Between 1560 and 1671, European traders built numerous castles, forts and lodges to serve as trading posts. These forts became the nuclei around which modern Accra developed (Ozanne, 1962; Sanjek...

NAVAJO EL DOKUMACILIĞI

Navajo Rugs” which are special kind of rings were woven by Navajo people in Southıvest part of N. America. The first samples of Navajo rugs are blankents which are dated quite earlier 1800’s. But first Navajo rug appeared after 1932 through different approaches by local Trading Posts. As a result of being this rug type very popular, they spread all over U.S. and Europe. Today, they continue their traditional weaving techniques, dying process, as well as traditional patterns.

Warriors, Tributaries, Blood Money and Political Transformation in Nineteenth-Century Mauritania

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the demise of a System of political power that had existed in the southern Mauritanian region of Brakna since the eighteenth century. Until the 1840s, tolls levied on the Senegal River gum trade had sustained the hegemony in southern Brakna of the Awlad al-Siyyid, an Arabic-speaking warrior group. Unlike more mobile warriors of the Saharan interior who depended for their livelihood on tribute extracted from nomadic pastoralists, the Awlad al-Siyyid had specialized in the control over a small area near the Senegal River, and over seasonal trading posts, known as escales, through which gum arabic was exported to the Atlantic economy. However, their increasing dependence on this trade allowed French administrators to manipulate relations among Awlad al-Siyyid chiefs by recognizing the taxing privileges of some while withholding recognition from others in a way that led, from the early 1840s on, to a bitter factional struggle within the group. The resulting conflict weakened the control of warriors over tributaries, harratin (freed slaves) and others, and caused a crisis within the political and social hierarchy of Brakna. An increasingly desperate struggle developed among Brakna warriors over a diminishing number of tributaries. This paper examines that struggle through the lens of an affair of diyya, or blood money, that emerged during the late 1840s and came to preoccupy all of the warrior groups and factions in the Brakna conflict. By competing for portions of the diyya owed to a small pastoral group as compensation for homicides, Brakna warriors, chiefs from neighboring regions and powerful tributaries in the process of repudiating their tributary status engaged in a symbolic duel that revolved around the increasingly unstable role of the warrior as a consumer of tribute and dispenser of ‘protection’.

Tayo, The Strange Bird from New Caledonia

According to the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, the core grammars of all "real" creoles should be alike to a significant degree. Real creoles are then defined as those creoles that were born on plantations, as opposed to those that appeared in so-called fort situations, that is, around trading posts and the like. The validity of the hypothesis depends on the precise characterization of what counts as a plantation situation, which is by no means an obvious task, contrary to what seems to have been assumed. An attempt toward such a characterization is made here. Tayo, a French-based creole spoken in the south of New Caledonia, can be considered a plantation creole and should therefore appear similar to, for example, Haitian and Isle-de-France Creole. That it differs radically from these languages in such basic domains as the determiner and the TMA systems, however, is easily demonstrated. Factors that might explain the difference are then examined, with the conclusion that only relexification from a substrate New Caledonian language can be retained as the primary reason for this difference. Although arguably a plantation creole, Tayo falls thus clearly outside the scope of the LBH, appearing rather as strong supportive evidence for the Relexification Hypothesis. Given the importance of the case for deciding between competing theories, further detailed investigation is urgently needed in order to ascertain whether Tayo is indeed a plantation creole, as it is seems to be, in view of the available historical and ecological evidence.

Saskatchewan River Rendezvous Centers and Trading Posts: Continuity in a Cree Social Geography

Lors de la periode historique et pendant la periode precedant les contacts, les populations aborigenes de la vallee du fleuve Saskatchewan ont forme plusieurs bandes regionales. Les membres de chaque bande se rassemblaient une fois par an au printemps et parfois en automne. Connus par les Europeens sous le nom de « rendez-vous », ces assemblees etaient des jours et des semaines d'interaction sociale, autour d'une serie de ceremonies religieuses. A partir de preuves archeologiques et historiques six centres de rassemblement ont ete identifies. Les commercants de fourrure ont reconnu l'importance de ces centres. La majorite des postes de commerce des 18 eme et 19 eme siecles fut construite dans ces centres ou entre eux, aux frontieres des bandes regionales. A la fin du 19 eme siecle des reserves furent etablies dans plusieurs de ces centres qui continuent d'etre d'importants sites d'habitation aujourd'hui

Archaeology, the Caddo Indian Tribe, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act

Caddo leadership has a long history of working cooperatively with foreign governments. In the seventeenth century, they cooperated with Spanish officials and missionaries who wanted to establish themselves among the southern branch of Caddo tribes--the Hasinai in Northeast Texas. In the eighteenth century, they cooperated with the French who wanted to establish trading posts on the Red River among the Natchitoches and Kadohadacho. In the nineteenth century they cooperated with Americans to establish peaceful relationships with unfriendly tribe. For Caddos, the result of these cooperative efforts was disillusion, decimation, displacement, and finally dispossession. Now, with new hope in the twentieth century, Caddo leaders have again pledged cooperation. This time with agencies, institutions, and individuals affected by an act of the United States Congress: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). They do so with a desire to reach mutually satisfactory agreements for the return of some part of what was lost in previous time: respect for their dead and recognition that only living descendants have the right to possess cultural items that belonged to Caddo ancestors.

Culture and Tourism in the Navajo Country

The Navajo Country of the American Southwest has long attracted tourists, not only for its spectacular landscapes but also because of its cultural attractions. These include prehistoric Anasazi ruins, historic trading posts, and other buildings, as well as visible manifestations of Navajo culture, including traditional dwellings and costumes. In addition, Navajo handicrafts are a long-standing attraction. Tourism to the Navajo Country has been encouraged over the years by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, the National Park Service, the states, certain Indian traders, and the Navajo Tribe. The latter has established a Recreational Resources Department, nine Tribal Parks and Recreation areas, a Tribal Museum, and an Arts if Crafts Guild. This study gives historical background on the creation of the Southwest-Indian image and on Navajo Country tourism, discusses the role of cultural attractions and their “packaging” in drawing tourists, and briefly assesses the physical, economic, and cultural effec...

Cradled in Furs Winter Fashions in Montreal in the 1860s

(1990). Cradled in Furs Winter Fashions in Montreal in the 1860s. Dress: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 39-47.