Dear Sticky Wicket,
I remember when I was little and someone gave a gift and then took it back we called them and “Indian Giver,” but I never understood where the term came from. From what I know about Native Americans, they were the ones duped by European settlers who took their land and traded them small pox infested blanks. So why is it that they got the bad rap as being the ones who give gifts and take them back?
~Giving in Galventon
Dear GIG,
In the 18th century, white settlers in North America were accustomed to buying things with money, but when they tried to do business with the Native Americans, things became confusing.
Having no system of monetary currency, Native Americans traded by bartering. When they gave gifts, they expected gifts of equal value in return. Europeans did not understand this practice; in their system, gifts were always freely given, with nothing expected in return.
The Native ways of giving eventually garnered a bad reputation among the white colonists, and "Indian giver" became a derogatory slur.
The term "Indian gift" first appeared, however, as a neutral description of the Native American ways of trading, in Thomas Hutchinson’s The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (1765):
"An Indian gift is a proverbial expression, signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected."
Evidence of white settlers twisting the term's meaning, making it derogatory to the Indian race, appears in the work of Maximilian Schele de Vere. He was the first professor of modern languages in the mid-1800s at Thomas Jefferson's fledgling University in Charlottesville, Virginia. Schele de Vere's written works documented the regional nature of American speech.
Addressing the term "Indian giver" in Americanisms: the English of the New World (1873), Schele de Vere wrote: "As the Indians have been led by their white friends to consider a present in the light of an exchange only, being always expected to give much land for little value, this has given rise to the term Indian Giver, meaning a child or a man, who desires the return of his gift.”
"It is a sad index to the nature of the vast majority of such transactions between white and red men,” he says. “That the term Indian liquor is universally known to mean adulterated whiskey."
Today, the terms "Indian summer" and "Indian corn" also conjure a feeling of "falseness" in the prefix "Indian."
The evolution of a negative connotation for "Indian" may have been to "denigrate the Native race," writes Gary Martin, in Meanings and Origins. "Historians would now agree that, where deceit was concerned, it was the settlers who were the front runners. It isn't uncommon, and it could be argued that it is customary, for the conquering race to attempt to justify their invasion by dismissing the conquered as dishonest and stupid."
In 2008, as the American dollar shrinks in value, perhaps "Indian giver" will begin returning to its original meaning: one who trades value for value, honestly and equitably.
Sources:
Americanisms: the English of the New World (1873), Schele de Vere
Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (1765)
"Meanings and Origins", by Gary Martin on Phrasefinder" www.phrases.org.uk, 2007