Indian Giving 
Subtitle: Economies of Power in Early Indian-White Exchanges (Native Americans of the Northeast)
Edition: Library Cloth Ed edition
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: July 2000
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9781558492431
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; American studies; Cultural studies; Economic history; Indigenous peoples; c 1600 to c 1700; c 1700 to c 1800; History: American; Northeastern States; 18th Century World History; Native American Anthropology; Social Science; Ethnic Issues; Modern - 18th Century; North America; Indians of North America; Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies; Linguistics; Native American; Economic conditions; Modern - 17th Century; Commerce; First contact with Europeans
First sentence: ONE OF the claims I make in this book is that close attention to gifts and the rhetoric of giving in the representations of exchange works as a key to open up some of the complications in the struggle for political and cultural as well as economic power between Indians and Europeans.
Description: "In this book, David Murray explores a range of early exchanges between Europeans and Indians, showing how they operated within a set of interlocking economies - linguistic, religious, as well as material.".

"To illustrate the complexities of these cross-cultural transactions, the author looks closely at the work of linguist, trader, and missionary Roger Williams, whose A Key into the Language of America at once serves the purposes of translation, conversion, and trade.

Murray also examines the changing meaning and representation of wampum, the quintessential medium of exchange in the early colonial period, as well as the multiple processes of conversion taking place as Christian ideas were incorporated into Indian cultures."--BOOK JACKET.