Rich Indians

Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History

Alexandra Harmon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781469606842, 9780807834237
• eBook ISBN: 9780807899571
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Social Sciences

Long before lucrative tribal casinos sparked controversy, Native Americans amassed other wealth that provoked intense debate about the desirability, morality, and compatibility of Indian and non-Indian economic practices. Alexandra Harmon examines seven such instances of Indian affluence and the dilemmas they presented both for Native Americans and for Euro-Americans — dilemmas rooted in the colonial origins of the modern American economy. Harmon's study not only compels us to look beyond stereotypes of greedy whites and poor Indians, but also convincingly demonstrates that Indians deserve a prominent place in American economic history and in the history of American ideas.

[1] “Savages,” Rich and Poor

As the colony of Virginia approached its hundredth anniversary, Robert Beverley took up pen and ink to write the story of that British outpost in North America, his birthplace and home. His account contrasted the colonists’ economic culture with that of the indigenous people. Before English settlers came, Beverley asserted, natives of Virginia had nothing they considered riches except “trifles” made of shell. “It was the English alone that taught them first to put a value on their Skins and Furs, and to make a Trade of them.” Although Beverley was unsure whether that lesson had corrupted the people he called Indians or perpetuated their primitive innocence, he knew they had not prospered along with the colony. As of 1705, the Indians— formerly happy “in their simple State of Nature, and in their enjoyment of Plenty, without the Curse of Labour”—were in a sorry state. The cause of the change was plain: “The English have taken away great part of their Country, and consequently made every thing less plenty amongst them. They have introduc’d Drunkenness and Luxury amongst them, which have multiply’d their Wants, and put them upon desiring a thousand things, they never dreamt of before.”¹

At least one of these assertions would surely have brought confirming nods from the Indians Berkeley wrote about: immigrants from England had “made every thing less plenty” for them. From the James River north to the Potomac River, a coastal plain that sustained thousands of their ancestors was now occupied largely by foreigners. Beyond the frontiers of immigrant occupation, large indigenous populations still controlled territory rich in the necessities of life and in commodities the English would buy.² But the wretched condition of Indians in the colony’s shadow suggested that natives of America were fated to lose economic ground as colonists gained it.

Another British writer explicitly posited this relationship between colonial prosperity and Indian poverty. During travels through North Carolina in 1701, John Lawson saw Europeans making “good Use of the Advantages . . . offer’d” there, thus “raising themselves to great Estates.” Many had “become rich, and . . . supply’d with all Things necessary for Trade, and genteel Living.” Most of the natives Lawson met seemed pitiably poor by comparison. “All other Nations of Indians,” he concluded, “are observ’d to partake of the same Fate, where the Europeans come.”³ Lawson not only echoed an observation that many of his contemporaries made; he also articulated a belief that would have a long life in the minds of non-Indians and Indians alike: if Indians were not poor when Europeans came, they became poor thereafter.

That belief developed as a consequence of events in times and places besides seventeenth-century Virginia, but some of its original and vital roots were there, in the native towns and early English settlements around Chesapeake Bay. Virginia Company adventurers set up residence on a tributary of the bay more than a decade before Britons planted lasting colonies anywhere else in North America, and the nearby Indians were the first to be stripped of their country— their principal wealth— by English intruders. That precedent is one reason to begin a study of bicultural perspectives on Indian wealth with the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia.

Did the Indians around Jamestown have substantial wealth in 1607, either by the colonists’ standard or by their own reckoning? The answer to that question was of considerable import for both groups, but it was not easy to come by. Cultural blinders and the circumstances of their interaction limited the two peoples’ ability to determine their relative affluence. Initially, however, everyone concerned had grounds to answer the question affirmatively, and that is an additional reason to examine the colonial encounter in Virginia.

Robert Beverley’s contradictory characterization of the aboriginal economy provides a foretaste of what we will see. Whether or not native people needed the English to teach them the commercial value of their natural resources, as Beverley alleged, they did enjoy a “plenty” of sorts in 1607, and a pressing issue for both groups was whether they would relate to each other in a way that undermined or bolstered that prosperity. In other words, significant Indian wealth was at stake in the intercultural negotiations that followed the English intrusion. An inseparable issue was whose economic culture would prevail in the region.

It would take years to decide those issues, partly because the Indians had a lengthy advantage over the colonists in food production, but also because the colonists first had to revise their conceptions of wealth and their strategy for obtaining it in the American setting. Indeed, native/newcomer relations prompted both peoples to adjust their notions of what constituted wealth and their sense of relative affluence. To study that adjustment process is to see a complex interplay of economic motivations, economic thought, moral choices, and ideas about Indians at a seminal moment in American history.

Similar economic motivations focused the two peoples’ initial interest in each other. For colonists, appraising the Indians’ resources and economic competence was a top-priority task; it was vital to carrying out the colonial mission of generating wealth.⁴ The Virginia Company men said they would be pleased to find inhabitants who were rich in commodities prized by Europeans and eager to exchange some of that wealth for English goods. The inhabitants they found, contrary to Beverley’s claim, did have and care about riches of several kinds. Native people of the Chesapeake region not only prized some substances that qualified as wealth in England, but, like the English, they sustained a political and social hierarchy with the acquisition, accumulation, and exchange of valuables. Furthermore, they considered the English a probable source of additional wealth. Thus, while the colonists were assessing the Indians’ economic status, Indians were measuring their prosperity against that of the intruders, and both groups hoped to improve their fortunes by drawing their new neighbors’ resources and desirable possessions into their own exchange networks. At first, both groups also had realistic hopes of gaining materially from relations with each other, and each had cause to feel richer than the other in important respects.

Nevertheless, the English deemed the Indians’ economic culture inferior to their own in essential ways, and such disdain was apparently reciprocated. Any possibility of reversing those negative judgments vanished when the colonists finally learned that land was the local resource whose acquisition could enrich them. Thereafter, relations between natives and newcomers worked increasingly to the natives’ disadvantage, and a common British preconception of indigenous Americans as people without property became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before the colonial venture was a century old, Virginians had considerable basis in local experience for thinking that Indians were, and inevitably would be, poor. Disparaging Indians’ morals, including their supposedly irrational desire for “Luxury,” served to excuse the colony’s ruinous effect on the indigenous economy. Indians’ dismal destiny was attributed largely to a defective culture, conceived as sinful savagery.

It was May 1607 when three ships belonging to the Virginia Company of London dropped anchor in a wide river winding through the country that natives called Tsenacomoco.⁵ From the writings of men who stepped of those vessels and from the works of subsequent historians, we know the indigenous people of Tsenacomoco as Powhatan Indians.⁶ But there are many things we cannot know about seventeenth-century Powhatans. Because they left no written accounts of themselves, because the century’s events drove them and their descendants to the margins of a colonial society that ignored their view of history, and because their language fell out of use before linguists could record it, we have scant evidence from which to infer how Powhatans thought about most aspects of life, including economic affairs.⁷ We are dependent to a discomfiting degree on tall tales and amateur ethnography penned by chauvinistic and self-serving Englishmen, including reports that historian Joyce Chaplin ridicules as “absurd transcriptions” of purported speeches by “ventriloquized” Indians.⁸

The scarcity of evidence has not kept some hardy modern scholars from venturing to describe the economic culture of Tsenacomoco’s aboriginal communities. The most prolific and experienced re-creator of Powhatan life and history is Helen Rountree, an anthropologist. By reading the early English accounts in light of limited archaeological evidence, environmental data, anthropological theory, and information on Indians of the larger region, especially Algonquian language speakers, Rountree has formulated a characterization of Powhatan economic life in the early 1600s that other ethnohistorians find plausible in most respects.⁹

In fat, wooded terrain laced by rivers that flowed to Chesapeake Bay, Powhatans usually fed themselves well by hunting, fishing, collecting wild plants, and cultivating a variety of edible crops. At numerous cleared townsites, amid bountiful cornfields and smaller gardens, they erected bark-or mat-covered houses for extended families. Beyond their towns stretched mature forests of hardwood trees. Because stone was scarce and iron unknown, the people had to craft tools, buildings, canoes, and clothing using less durable materials. What they made with implements such as sharpened reeds, turkey spurs, bird bills, beaver teeth, and shells seemed ingenious but primitive to Europeans, who had worked with iron and steel for countless generations.

According to Rountree, “‘wealth’ among the Powhatans consisted of food-stuffs and hides. It was not easily inheritable, and it was accessible to all, since the land was owned in common” and all able persons had procurement skills appropriate to their gender. In a country “so rich” and a society with “little or no economic specialization,” Rountree suggests, “everyone had a chance to prosper.” Even so, some people prospered considerably more than others. A few “ruling families” enjoyed “a truly noble lifestyle,” with privileges that included an abundance of high-status food and possessions.

Echoing the terminology of the English colonists, Rountree explains that a noble lifestyle was possible because the rulers or chiefs— called weroances if male— received tribute from their subjects. Some tribute took the form of labor in weroances’ fields and a portion of the crops from commoners’ fields. A ruling family would therefore control a supply of corn—“the most prestigious food”—even “in late winter and early spring, when most people’s stores were gone.” Tribute also included items prized for qualities other than mundane utility— beauty, permanence, scarcity, and presumed spiritual power. Most such “nonperishable luxury goods”—copper, pearls, antimony ore, shell beads, and a root that supplied pigment and medicine— originated in lands beyond Tsenacomoco. Because weroances managed their communities’ relations with outsiders, the exotic riches generally came into Powhatan hands via those men.¹⁰

Although ethnohistorian Frederic Gleach questions whether tribute is the appropriate term, he agrees with Rountree and other analysts that Powhatans channeled wealth of several types to their chiefs. The resulting accumulations had many possible functions. Besides satisfying the personal needs or vanity of noble families and their close associates, weroances’ treasuries provided the means to recruit or reward followers and allies, entertain visiting dignitaries, and relieve food scarcity by trading luxuries for corn from communities with staples to spare.¹¹

Based partly on a few English observations, especially an account that a weroance deposited precious items in a “gods house,” anthropologists hypothesize that Powhatan religious ideas determined the meanings and distribution of exotic valuables, if not all wealth. Gleach, for one, flatly asserts that Powhatans regarded copper, shell beads, and other “luxury goods” as “objects of sacred power.” They directed such objects to the weroance, who had power to “socialize” them for ceremonial use or redistribution. Stephen Potter similarly surmises that Powhatans conceived of weroances as intermediaries between their society and other realms, including the sacred. By entrusting chiefs with riches and surplus food for use in rituals and diplomacy, they ensured the well-being of their community.¹²

If the anthropologists are correct, Powhatan ideology did not construe the chiefs’ control of wealth as self-interested acquisitiveness or greed. David Murray imagines an alternative explanation for the weroances’ appropriation of corn that commoners grew— an explanation stressing “the redistributive aspects and the relations of kinship and reciprocity that bind ruler and ruled.” Murray cites Henry Spelman, who lived in Powhatan towns as a youth and saw the paramount weroance fling beads to people as they planted corn for him. The weroance “is therefore a figure of bounty,” Murray proposes, “even at the very moment the people are working to produce what will later be his bounty to distribute to them at harvest time.” Gleach favors a similar interpretation of the evidence. Powhatans gave their allegiance to a person who could dispense food and wealth, he argues. The weroance’s generosity and the tribute that enabled him to be generous attested to his “high moral position.”¹³

This conception of leaders is typical of societies where households carry out all productive functions, as they did in Tsenacomoco. Kin relations are the model for other economic relations. Although their kinship and economic systems differ, such “tribal” societies invariably idealize mutual caretaking and generosity, and they structure relations to enforce those ideals. That ethos does not preclude hierarchy. Even communities with modest material resources may acquire and stockpile things in excess of subsistence needs, and if the surplus funnels to a production leader, the conditions for a self-perpetuating unequal distribution of wealth arise. The leader has the wherewithal to be generous, but his beneficiaries reciprocate or induce his benevolence with offerings of their own, and he thus receives a disproportionate share of circulating wealth. The people conceive of their ruler’s treasury as family wealth that he can use to meet their needs. He may claim that the common welfare depends on his putting some of the wealth to such seemingly personal uses as display, but he does so by appealing to the ideals of mutual support and generosity among kin. “Everywhere in the world,” anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observes tartly, “the indigenous category for exploitation is ‘reciprocity.’”¹⁴

We cannot trust seventeenth-century Englishmen to tell us whether the allocation of wealth in Tsenacomoco was exploitation, let alone whether Powhatan commoners viewed it as such. Colonists saw indigenous societies through a distorting lens of English ideas and aims. The lack of a common language further limited what they could learn. Additionally, and perhaps most important, the colonists’ mission in America influenced how they depicted Powhatan society in correspondence and publications. Nonetheless, their writings do supply convincing evidence that they had entered the domain of a formidable weroance who presided over an extensive “family” of communities and had a claim on much of the region’s wealth.

Colonists knew the man’s “proper” name was Wahunsonacock, but they more often called him Powhatan— a name they heard he had taken from the town that was his “principall place of dwelling.” Before the English arrived, Wahunsonacock had reportedly increased, from six to thirty or more, the number of local weroances who paid him homage, in some instances by conquest or coercion.¹⁵ During a two-year stay at Jamestown, William Strachey came to share other colonists’ perception that Wahunsonacock was a powerful and wealthy overlord. “Every Weroance knowes his owne Meetes and lymitts to fish fowle or hunt in,” Strachey wrote in 1612, “but they hold all of the great Weroance Powhatan, vnto whome they paie 8. parts of 10. tribute of all the Commodities which their Country yeildeth . . . ; for what he Comaundeth they dare not disobey in the least thing.” English correspondents rendered the great weroance’s native title— mamanitowock— variously as “Prince,” “King,” and even “Emperour.”¹⁶ We may question whether colonists accurately gauged the nature of the mamanitowock’s power or understood how the Indians conceived of the treasure he amassed, but we can trust that they saw a man who occupied an exalted rank in his society, and they correctly deduced that his status was inseparable from his control of significant wealth. Among Powhatans, a command of exceptional wealth apparently indicated and sustained the power that entitled some men to rule.

Colonists equated Wahunsonacock with a king or prince because the same was true in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Rich Indians
• Rich Indians Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “Savages,” Rich and Poor
• 2 Indian Gentry
• 3 Civilized Indian Nations
• 4 Gilded Age Indians
• 5 Osage Oil Owners
• 6 Riches Reclaimed
• 7 Gambling Money
• Notes
• Selected Sources
• Index