This thesis examines the impact of European trade goods on some aspects of North American Indian clothing. Sources include historical archives, artefacts, and artistic representations as well as the conclusions of archaeologists and anthropologists. Part One considers the beaver fur trading background. Geographically, the area extended from the northern Atlantic seaboard, through the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, the northern Plains and into the Canadian Subarctic. The native population included Northeast Woodland, Plains, and Athapaskan/Subarctic peoples. European goods entered at different periods and varying rates. French and British traders depended for success upon the established trade network and the extensive goodwill of the Native American population. They found it essential to determine by trial and error and "market research" the types of goods which the experienced Indian consumers would accept in exchange for their furs. The Indians were discerning in their selection of items and made critical choices which have been under-rated or over-looked in the literature of the fur trade. In the past they were often represented as simple, passive and willing to accept any trifles which came their way. In fact, European men often adopted Indian clothing appropriately suited to the environment. They also carried popular items of Indian manufacture to trade alongside imported wares. Additionally, Indian traders expected that Euro-Americans would participate in their pre-existing reciprocal ceremonial bartering practices. Since cultural values differed widely they needed to find mutually accommodating methods for dealing with each other. Part Two, based extensively on artefactual examples examines the impact and influence of introduced trade goods, and to some extent French and British "styles" on Native American clothing manufacture of hats, coats, and shoes. Decorative materials such as cloth, blankets, ribbons, silverwork, braids, laces, and beads were adopted and ingeniously used in often unique ways. Steel needles, scissors, awls and knives came to play an important part in skin preparation. The potential of new materials was skilfully realised but elements of existing technological practise continued. It is difficult to establish a case for Indian dependency when acceptance of introduced items, contrary to Eurocentric accounts, was by no means wholesale. There was instead, a mutual inter-twining of cultures. In fact, trade goods were often used in conjunction with native materials and sometimes rejected altogether. Careful creative choices were made regarding such factors as colour, lustre, and sound. Trading was seldom a simple procedure since there were sometimes hidden nuances. Goods could fulfil expressive symbolic, magic, prestige or status functions poorly recorded and comprehended by Europeans. Paradoxically, far from becoming dependent or Europeanised, in the days of the declining fur trade, it will be evident from this thesis that Native Americans produced clothing which became flamboyantly ever more distinctive and innovative as their three hundred year period of usefulness in their own right to Europeans as fur traders ended.

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Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, is an expression of a typically European fascination with Native American peoples which involves crafting "museum-quality replicas" of clothing and artifacts as well as reenactment of slices of Native American nineteenth-century life by non-Native practitioners in an effort to produce knowledge and meaningful experience through experimentation. Drawing on fieldwork data collected in 2003 and 2004 among play communities of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, I formulate an understanding of the social, performative, and mimetic dynamics of this phenomenon by conceiving of Indianist practices as forms of play that constantly shift between different play frames. In terms of knowledge production, I argue that the Indian hobby provides a space in which different (epistemological) traditions meet, as Indian hobbyists draw on, and enact, a hybrid reservoir of indigenous and European knowledge systems and art forms. Especially interesting is the relationship between Indianism and the dynamics of museal display in the West, both historically and contemporaneously. In general, I found that two different approaches to the right way of representing may be distinguished in Indianist methodological practice: a "Renaissance" and a "Translational" mode. / Because of its striking mimetic aspects, Indianism raises questions of identity play and cultural appropriation. An important element of the hobbyist quest for knowledge and experience consists in investing the self in an "other" in ways that elicit criticism from outsiders, including anthropologists. Indian hobbyism is a controversial example of "playing at" cultures that (by all conventional standards) belong elsewhere and to someone else, providing interesting insights for debates on identity politics and the construction of "race"---also among Indianists themselves. Rather than longing to embody someone else's identity, however, Indianists, almost in spite of themselves, enact a social world that is filled with action and life in their European present. Indianist practice and desire for authenticity revolve around craftsmanship and reenactment, resulting in skillful replicas, in the here and now.

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