Kendall,

If you were asking me to exlain, I actually thought I was amplifying on what you had said. I guess I wasn't very clear. Let me have another go at it.

If settlers traded gifts for land with an Indian tribe and the Indian tribe had no sense of what it means to buy and sell land there would certainly be conflict. The Eurpean society would consider that they had paid for the land and that the other party to the bargain, the Indians, by accepting the gifts, had sealed the bargain. The Europeans would feel as though they had clear title to the land.

Meanwhile, the Indians, having no concept of having sold something, would be glad to have the gifts but would not see why they would have to give up something that could not be sold anyway. They would continue to travel across it, hunt on it, build weirs in the streams, etc. From the whites' standpoint, the Indians were reneging on their bargain and taking back what they had just traded to the whites.

To me, that seems like a good hypothesis for the origin of "Indian Giver". Anyway, that's that I meant to say.

A slightly embarrassed Sourdough.