Category: Biology

Rowlandson acknowledges her commodity status as a captive, her simultaneous use value and exchange value for her captors, when she observes that her mistress, Weetamoo, a Pocasset Indian married to the Narragansett sachem Quinn pin, refused to lend her to another Indian for fear of losing “not only my service, but the redemption-pay also” (1). The practice of captive-taking predates European contact, when, as Colin Calloway notes, captives were usually either adopted or tortured to death as a way of replacing or avenging the death of a family member lost in war. That practice persisted but was also revised within the new colonial economy that emerged between natives and settlers, when a developing market value for European captives prompted Indians to begin selling them for ransom . Although hardly a commodity in the sense that a gun or a piece of gold is, in this hybrid colonial economy the captive nevertheless circulated as an object of trade subject to some of the same cross-cultural translations and investments that inscribed other commodities. In periods of warfare, captives became one of many common objects of exchange between Europeans and Indians, who, despite the lack of a shared language or culture, had always participated extensively in trade with each other. Specific accounts of exchanges between them illustrate, however, that certain values could not and need not be so easily agreed upon. When they were acquired by the Indians, for example, items such as gold pieces were perforated and strung onto wampum necklaces, and gun barrels were sawn off so that they could be played as flutes or whistles. Copper kettles were sometimes cut up into arrowheads or game pieces (2), and sometimes placed on the heads of the dead, while stockings were used as tobacco pouches . When Henry Hudson gave the Delaware...