Coats in Unexpected Places: The Iroquois Consumer Revolution

By 1700, Iroquois people overwhelmingly chose to purchase imported fabric for clothing rather than create garments from leather and furs. Contemporary European observers believed Native people sought out the lighter, more colorful, more washable fabrics for their superiority to leather and hide, but the accounts of more than two hundred Iroquois consumers suggest that cloth became more attractive than hide garments for the labor it saved in its acquisition rather than its use.  The shift in garments of hide to garments of fabric coincided with an increase in the variety and quality of fabric and clothing available together with a precipitous drop in prices of fabric and clothing for Native customers at Albany.

Although Native consumers engaged the same Atlantic market for consumer goods as did contemporary Europeans and American settlers, the Iroquois case shows that Native people experienced a consumer revolution shaped by their own cultural paradigms.  Rather than Iroquois labor being reorganized by the Atlantic market, Iroquois people used manufactured goods to express traditional group identity through increasingly elaborate clothing and decorative work.  Iroquois consumption was not necessarily about consumption: it was about consuming goods which minimized the labor needed for basic clothing production, and allowed more time to be spent on traditional decorative work.  Engaging the Atlantic market for consumer goods allowed purchasers to solidify community identity while avoiding homogenization with the broader Atlantic world.