Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Although it is usually assumed that Native Americans have lost their cultural identity through modernization, some peoples have proved otherwise. Brian Hosmer explores what happened when cultural identity and economic opportunity converged among two Native American communities that used community-based industries to both generate income and sustain their cultures. Comparing a lumber business run by the Menominees of Wisconsin and a salmon cannery established by British Columbian and Alaskan Tsimshian communities known as Metlakatla, Hosmer reveals how each tribe responded to market and political forces over fifty years.
Hosmer's innovative ethnohistory recounts how these Indians used the marketplace to maintain their distinctiveness to a far greater extent than those who became wage earners in the white man's world. Hosmer shows that, by selectively incorporating elements of American capitalism into their cultural lives, the Menominees and Metlakatlans came to view modernization less as a threat to their tribal life than as a means for maintaining their independence. These tribes embraced the same market accused of hastening the demise of native societies and became comparatively successful in American terms even as they both honored fundamental values and forged new cultural identities.
Over time, these peoples came to understand how the market worked, recognized that the broader economy operated according to market principles, and learned how to adjust to it. Hosmer reveals how their strategies of "purposeful modernization" brought relative economic independence and sometimes the respect and cooperation of local and federal governments, how it helped chart a middle course between unchecked individuality and a communal ethos that might stifle economic development, and how economic development and cultural values ultimately affected one another.
American Indians in the Marketplace is a story of adaptation that acknowledges the hardship and suffering common to most Indian-white contact while emphasizing the benefits of selective modernization accompanied by a constant re-invention of tradition. It questions the victim thesis of Native American history and shows that native peoples can meet the challenges of surviving in the larger world.
This book is part of the Development of Western Resources series.
From the Back Cover
"The ability of Native Americans to participate in the mainstream economy and then to use the proceeds from such participation to protect, defend, and/or develop their native culture is not a new concept, but Hosmer's perceptive analysis provides valuable new insights for historians and anthropologists."--R. David Edmunds, editor of American Indian Leaders and coauthor of The Fox Wars
"This book should find a prominent place in the growing literature emphasizing the successes of Indians in adapting to and creating viable economies within American market capitalism. More generally, it contributes to the larger literature emphasizing the positive, even proactive, agency of Indians in responding to culture contacts and change rather than viewing them as simply passive 'victims' without choices."--David Rich Lewis, author of Neither Wolf Nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change
American Indians in the Marketplace: Persistence and Innovation Among the Menominees and Metlakatlans, 1870-1920
American Indians in the Marketplace: Persistence and Innovation Among the Menominees and Metlakatlans, 1870-1920,Brian C. Hosmer,University Press of Kansas,0700609830,Cultural assimilation,Economic Anthropology,Economic History,Economic conditions,Ethnic Issues,Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies,History,History: World,Menominee Indians,Metlakatla (Alaska),Native American,Native Americans - Southwest,Reference,Tsimshian Indians
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