![]() Traders advanced guns and traps on credit in the fall, and families settled up at the end of the season. The European fur trade of the eighteenth century built on, and over time altered, Indigenous economies. Both Dakota and Ojibwe communities also supplied fur traders with wild rice, their main foodstuff, in exchange for trade goods. By the mid-1700s, the Dakota had established direct trading relationships with the French in the southern reaches of the Dakota homeland. But when Ojibwe traders also traded weapons to the Cree, who were traditional enemies of the Dakota, the arrangement fell apart. The Ojibwe bands became middlemen, supplying the Dakota with desirable trade goods: blankets, metal pots and knives, guns and ammunition, and traps. The French first began trading with Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes in the 1600s. One scholar of Ojibwe life goes further, stating that due to the importance of food production the women in these communities were the primary managers of these economies. As in most societies, men’s and women’s work was complementary. Men’s duties involved land clearing hunting, fishing, and trapping and defending the group from attack. In both Dakota and Ojibwe bands, women’s responsibilities included gathering and preparing food, tanning hides, making clothing, constructing tipis (Dakota) and wigwams (Ojibwe), and caring for children. Perhaps because both peoples had access to plant and animal resources, there is no tradition of exchange of food items between them.Ī gendered division of labor played important roles in these economies. Bands split up in winter to live in small family groups in sheltered woods. Hunting and fishing was carried out in all seasons, but especially fall. ![]() They traveled to customary locations through the spring, summer, and fall to make maple sugar, gather nuts, berries, and other plants, and harvest wild rice. In both groups, families cultivated maize, squash, and beans in small plots near their summer villages. The economies of both the Dakota and Ojibwe people were based on seasonal cycles of hunting, fishing, planting, gathering, and harvesting. Pipestone from a quarry in southwestern Minnesota was traded across the continent. Cowrie shells from the Gulf of Mexico, dentalium shells from the West Coast, copper from the Great Lakes, and obsidian were all used. The peoples living in what is now Minnesota, an area well connected by extensive waterways, participated in this system. Trading systems connected Indigenous nations across North America long before European settlement. ![]() Indigenous Economies of Subsistence and Exchange The omission of particular industries or businesses is not a judgement about their importance for Minnesota’s economic development but a choice made to keep the length of the article manageable. It links to other MNopedia entries that allow readers to explore specific topics in greater depth. The story of Minnesota’s economy is vast, so this essay focuses on trends and key developments. ![]() In that time, it has shifted away from natural resource development and the production of agricultural products and evolved into a broad-based system built on a foundation of natural resources, physical capital, and human ingenuity. The economy of Minnesota has changed dramatically over hundreds of years.
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