NORTH AMERICA: Native Americans

Native Americans fashioned hundreds of tribes and nations that operated on some form of collectivity, cooperation, or communalism. Native Americans shared among themselves basic cultural patterns in regards to religious beliefs and land usage, but they divided by languages, customs, cultural expressions, and politics. Their views and practices of work and economic production and consumption diametrically opposed those of the chief colonizers of North America: the Spaniards, French, Dutch, English, and, in Alaska the Russians. (The other major European colonizer, the Portuguese, limited their conquests and colonization in the Americas to what is now Brazil.) Native Americans stressed community over individualism and made economic cooperation a central feature of their cultures and societies. Native Americans made the extended family the major unit of collectivity to conduct social, cultural, and economic forms of cooperation or communalism. Members of the extended family, with a number of related adults in the same household, shared a common store of provisions and tools, worked for the common benefit, and organized into larger cooperative units: clans and bands. These larger units made up the tribe. From the extended family up to the tribe, these collective units of all Native American societies did not develop the concept of ownership of private property in land and natural resources. In addition, these units commonly shared property so that every family, clan, or band owned at least one of every essential tool. For example, every family must own a hoe, bow and arrows, or harpoon.

North American Native American societies had diverse economies that shared some form of cooperation or communalism, whether pastoral or sedentary. Native American societies pursued two major forms of economic production and subsistence: hunting and gathering or horticulture (or agriculture). Some societies mixed the two forms of production, but all societies stress mutual aid and cooperation. Obviously, various societies have distinctive patterns. For example, the Lakota Sioux hunted the American bison (buffalo), the Chinook fished (gathered fish), and the Cherokee tilled the soil. The hunting and gathering tribes followed their food sources according to the seasons. Depending on the season or the food source, scattered families and bands joined into larger groups for cooperative production, using methods not possible in smaller units. Hunting and gathering Native Americans conducted their economic cooperation on a large scale with the introduction of two new technologies: the horse and the gun. The horse enabled hunters to chase larger and faster animals, for instance, the buffalo. The gun allowed hunters to kill with greater accuracy, frequency, and effectiveness. With the exception of several societies, like the Cahokia in what is now western Illinois, Native American nations had rudimentary specialization of labor. All adults, and children above a certain age, worked. Native Americans worked to sustain themselves; they had a subsistence economy. Whether the tribe hunted, gathered, trapped, or tilled, the elders made sure that no one went without food, clothing, and other things basic for survival. Rarely did they produce the type of economic surplus to invest for greater production and to attain wealth.

Native American societies did not substantively change their social and economic patterns of cooperation or communalism when they incorporated the horse and/or the gun into their lives. For many Native Americans, the men generally saw their status increased over women's status because the horse and the gun enhanced traditional male roles in economic production. The men also enhanced their standing if their tribe engaged in extensive trade with Europeans and European Americans largely because in trade transactions European and European American men preferred to deal with Native American men who often had direct responsibility for hunting and trapping. For example, in some Native American tribes in northeastern North America, the men trapped beavers and turned beaver skins into pelts that Europeans highly prized in exchange for European manufactured goods like pots and metal axes. Native Americans, however, retained their basic patterns despite changes in status that came with economic interactions with Europeans and European Americans.