European Dependence Upon American Natives: The Case of Russian America

Abstract

The Russians of Russian America, owing to their small number, sexual imbalance, and limited skills, became dependent upon the coastal natives for peltry, food, labor, and sex, just as they came to rely upon their American, English, and Hispanic rivals on the Northwest Coast for provisions and manufactures. The Aleut and Kodiak served as sea otter hunters and the Tlingit as providers of fish, game, and potatoes, while all three native groups supplied concubines and wives. In addition, the creole offspring of Russian fathers and native mothers acted as skilled workers. This dependency was essential to the maintenance of Russian occupancy. In the literature on the early relations between the native occupants and the European colonizers of North America the former have commonly been seen as rather helpless dupes who were manipulated almost at will by the latter, and it has often been contended outright or at least assumed that the natives soon became dependent upon European trade goods, particularly guns, liquor, tobacco, metalware, textiles, and even foodstuffs. Recently, however, this characterization of the contact period has been called increasingly into question. This paper carries the revisionism even further by trying to show that in the case of Russian America - or, more accurately, Russian America's insular and coastal margins, where the Russian presence was largely confined - the traditional characterization is not only oversimplified but downright erroneous, for in fact virtually the opposite