Indian Trade

The Indian Trade refers to trade between Europeans and their North American descendants with the Indigenous people of North America (today known as Native Americans in the United States, and First Nations in Canada, but formerly as "Indians").

The term Indian Trade describes the people involved in the trade. The products involved varied by region and era. In most of Canada the term is synonymous with the fur trade, since fur for making beaver hats was by far the most valuable product of the trade, from the European point of view. Other products desired by the Europeans produced other components of the Indian Trade, including the deerskin trade in the what is now the east coast of the United States, and the Pemmican and buffalo skin and meat trade on the Great Plains.

For the indigenous people the most desirable European goods were those things that aided their survival in the landscape, but which they did not have the technology to manufacture themselves. This especially included goods made of metal such as traps and snare wire, pots and pans, knives, sewing needles, muskets and later rifles, arrowheads and spear points, axes and ploughs, and so on. As well they could obtain glass beads for decoration, wheat flour and baking soda for making bannock/fry bread, molasses as a sweet treat, machine-woven cloth for making clothing, gunpowder for their guns, horses for transportation, woollen point blankets for warmth and protection, and tobacco for smoking and chewing. Of course a trade in alcohol was also a notable part of the trade in certain eras. The French traded brandy, the British rum, and the Americans whiskey or "firewater".

The diversity of the products traded was made possible because of a global trade network controlled by European trading companies backed by the military power of imperial states. Beads could come from China or Italy, tobacco from the American South, molasses and rum from the Caribbean, with the metal goods and wool originating in England.

Trade between European nations and the natives began from the earliest the very beginning of European colonization of the Americas. Trading was a major focus of activity especially in the case of the French, the British, the Hudson's Bay Company and the Dutch West India Company.

It was often hard for Europeans to understand the Native American customs of trading. On encountering a native tribe, the Europeans would often be offered fur, food or other items as gifts. The Europeans would then feel no obligation to assist the natives against their enemies, which was the purpose of the gift-giving, from the native perspective. The Europeans never did catch on and were frequently viewed by the natives as welchers on the implied pledge of alliance they'd entered into by accepting the gifts.

After observing that Europeans were just as eager to trade with their enemies as themselves, the natives did eventually get the picture; but especially in New France, in Carolina, Virginia, and New England and in New Netherlands the Europeans became drawn into the endemic warfare of their trading partners.

After the United States became independent, trading with the Indians/Native Americans was nominally regulated by the Trade and Intercourse Act, first passed on July 22, 1790. The Bureau of Indian Affairs issued licenses to trade in the Indian Territory, which in 1834 consisted of most of the United States west of the Mississippi River, where mountain men and traders from Mexico freely operated.

Rarely the term Indian trade can also refer to the cession of lands in exchange for promises of European goods. This is usually instead referred to as treatymaking. See also aboriginal title.