Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives presents historical evidence that wage labor was prevalent among Native Americans.In this timely collection of essays, leading ethnographers and ethnohistorians, as well as innovative younger scholars, present field and primary historical evidence that wage labor was a significant American Indian economic adaptation as early as the seventeenth century in some areas and was common in many U.S. indigenous communities by the late nineteenth century.

These well-written, well-documented case studies form a concrete picture of Indian dependence on wage labor from Maine to California and of Native Americans' place in the capitalist system.