The Loss of the Sharing Economy
When Native Americans were relocated to reservations, they also lost an important element of their social structure.
I took this photo when I was working on the Warm Springs Reservation on the eastern slope of the Oregon Cascades in January of this year during their COVID surge. A patient pulled up to our outdoor COVID tent and offered everyone some trout he caught in the Deschutes River nearby.
Prior to the arrival of the white man and the settlers, nearly all Native American tribes operated on what some call a "sharing economy". Sharing is an integral part of the culture and how tribal societies operated. Sharing and bartering built social connections in tribal societies- if a someone needed help, you helped them out and then the time would come you would need help and in turn, they would help you out. In the long run, it all worked out.
Sharing, giveaways, and bartering are still common practices in Reservation communities to this day. Last fall when I worked on the Colville Reservation in north central Washington, one of my patients was a very athletic high school student who during the winter months would go into the mountains and hunt elk to provide meat for several households. He had sustained a knee injury and was very concerned about his ability to trek 5-10 miles into the mountains to hunt so he could provide meat for several families.
For the patient on the Warm Springs Reservation, it was only natural for him to share his bounty with the staff of the clinic. Since we provide no-cost health care to the tribal community, many of them see giveaways and sharing as a form of thanks.
In the latter half of the 1800s as Native Americans were relocated (often forcibly) onto reservations, they were also forced to give up a sharing economy for a cash economy. To the tribes, a cash economy was an expression of an individualistic and materialistic society that clashed with their social mores.
As the reservations were run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, many BIA officials often complained about the sharing economy of the tribes and how it impeded their "assimilation". In Charles Wilkinson's excellent book Blood Struggle: The Rise of the Modern Indian Nations, he had an account of a BIA official on a Sioux reservation who disdainfully said "The Indian's hospitality, so far as means will permit, is boundless. He will divide his last morsel with his neighbor, however thriftless and improvident he may be."
The disruptions to tribal societies deepened as those who could get jobs now had cash. Those who had no jobs tended to gravitate to those with cash and it weakened the traditional structures that upheld the status of tribal elders. Even traditional gender roles in tribes were upended as it was the men who could get the jobs in the late 1800s and through most of Twentieth Century, giving them "cash clout" that clashed with what were often matrilineal family systems.
It's a struggle that permeates some of the political disputes that occur within tribes to this day- some say the closure of the Kah-Nee-Tah Resort on the Warm Springs Reservation was due in part to financial mismanagement and political patronage that is a modern day echo of the forced transition from a sharing economy to a cash economy.