BARTERING FOR BASICS

• Early Native American Indian groups lived in different cultural regions. Their environments had different resources that allowed each group to specialize in making certain products or developing certain skills. As they perfected their techniques, something exciting began to happen. For the first time in their tribes’ history, they had a surplus of materials. They had enough to meet their own needs, with extra left over. The conditions were ripe for a multiple-tribe economy to develop. In an economy, goods and services (and often money) are organized into a system for using them.

• Native American Indian groups began to work with each other to simplify their work and meet their needs. A system of bartering emerged as they learned to interact with one another. Bartering is trading goods or services directly for other goods or services rather than using any form of money. Having the ability to barter with other tribes meant that no one group needed to work as hard to create or find all the things that they needed in order to survive. Native  American Indian tribes would often travel long distances for the opportunity to trade with each other. In between trading times, they would gather or create surplus products especially for the purpose of bartering with other tribes at their trade meetings. Another benefit of trading between cultural regions was the ability to enjoy products that were impossible to make with the resources in one’s own area. For example, tribal members of the Desert Southwest region enjoyed the use of tools fashioned from whalebone because of the participation of the tribes from the Pacific Northwest region, who had access to resources found on the beach or in the sea.

• Some people still use bartering today to get the things that they need, like  trading your services babysitting the teacher’s children in exchange for theteacher tutoring your own children. Especially in tough economic times, people  return to this age-old way of getting things that they need. We will probably always have some form of money, but we don’t always have to use it.

Name:__________________________________

Answer the following questions based on the reading passage. Don’t forget to go back to the passage whenever necessary to find or confirm your answers.

1)   What is the purpose of this passage? 

2)   What were several benefits that encouraged the Native American Indians groups to barter with each other?

3)   What does it mean to specialize?

  4)   What conditions were necessary before bartering between tribes could take place?

  5)   Do you think that you would like to try bartering with someone in the future? Why, or why not?