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By Root 708 0

in commodities. The North Pacific coast of America was first opened to white traders by Captain Cook around the time of the American Revolution. Trade in animal pelts increased steadily in the following century. The Hudson’s Bay Company established its first outposts in the area in the 183os. Unlike the later missionaries, the company wanted furs, not souls, and left the Indians alone. But their passive presence had its effect, nonetheless, for with them came firearms, sails, and alcohol. The Indians began to winter near the company stores, crowding the land and depending more and more upon a market they did not control. The Hudson’s Bay blanket, machine-made and selling for about a dollar, replaced the traditional nobility robe as an item of commerce. Where formerly a few carefully woven robes would grace a potlatch or feast, now literally thousands of trade blankets might be stacked along a beach to be given in return for a copper.

Toward the end of the century, whites began to commercialize the salmon fishing. No nation at that time recognized the Indians as full citizens and they were therefore unable to file land claims. But any white man could have 160 acres for the asking, and the entrepreneur who wanted a cannery would simply stake off 80 acres on either side of a river mouth, build his shop, and set to work. When he had more salmon than he needed, he might let the Indians come in and fish, or he might not. It’s an old story: purchased foodstuffs became necessary to supplement the Indian diet, and to buy food they needed cash, and to acquire cash they had to work for wages in the factory. Indians were paid by the day to fish, bought food on credit at the store, became civilized debtors, and returned to work another season.

As if these changes weren’t enough, during the nineteenth century the Indian population was thinned out by war and disease, the system of land tenure was widely altered, and large tribal federations emerged in response to European hegemony, all of which led to endless complications in sorting out the hierarchy of each tribe, one of the original functions of the potlatch. Two of the better-known characteristics of potlatch in the popular literature—the usurious nature of loans and the rivalry or “fighting with property”—while based on traceable aboriginal motifs, are actually post-European elaborations. It really wasn’t possible for Boas to see this when he did his early work; he had the misfortune, in a sense, to work in the area near Fort Rupert (one of the first Hudson’s Bay Company outposts) where the bitterness and antagonism of the “rivalry potlatch” had reached its peak. When Mauss read through Boas’s published field notes, he declared potlatch “the monster child of the gift system.” So it was. As first studied, the potlatch was the progeny of a European capitalism mated to an aboriginal gift economy, and with freakish results: sewing machines thrown into the sea, people embarrassed into sitting in houses set afire with fish oil, Indians dancing with pink silk parasols or stooped under layer after layer of cheap wool blankets, and as the sun set the Canadian Royal Mounted Police riding off with coppers and other ritual property to suppress the potlatch, which their government had declared illegally wasteful.

With these words of warning, let us turn to one of Franz Boas’s accounts of the ceremonial exchange of a copper, hoping to see in it the smudged image of earlier gift exchange. In Boas’s report, one tribe of the Kwakiutl has a copper whose name is Maxtsolem, “All Other Coppers Are Ashamed to Look at It.” The tribe invites a second tribe to a feast and offers them the gift. The second tribe accepts, putting themselves under the obligation to make a return gift. The exchange takes place the next day on a beach. The first tribe brings the copper, and the leader of the second tribe lays down a thousand trade blankets as a return gift.

This is only the beginning, however, and in a sense the true gift has not yet appeared. The chiefs who are giving the copper away seem to feel that the