What to the seventeenth-century French was little more than a mundane article of commerce became, to the Acadian Micmac, an institution with noteworthy economic, ceremonial, spiritual, and demographic connotations. Utilizing portable kettles, Micrmac households became less inclined to camp near their immobile wooden cauldrons which now served a diminishing function as the symbolic locus of settlement. The copper kettle thus afforded these people the opportunity to move about at random as they hunted game for the fur trade. Two years after his return home to France, in 1614, the French Jesuit Pierre Biard set down his memoirs of three stormy years spent in Acadia. A bitter man who had been ill-used by the commandant at Port-Royal, Charles de Biencourt, Biard's relation is clearly self-serving. Nonetheless, despite this blemish, it remains an extremely valuable commentary on early Indian and white relations. Contained within its sparse prose, for instance, we find a list of goods which were customarily exchanged in the early seventeenth-century trade between the two ethnic groups. "All this new France is divided into different tribes," he intoned, "each one having its own separate language and country. They assemble in the Summer to trade with us, principally at the great river [St. Lawrence]. To this place come also several other tribes from afar off. They barter their skins of beaver, otter, deer, marten, seal, etc., for bread, peas, beans, prunes, tobacco, etc.; kettles, hatchets, iron arrow-points, awls, puncheons, cloaks, blankets, and all other such commodities as the French bring them" (Thwaites 1896-1901:3:69). Beguiling in its dryness, this abbreviated catalog was in reality the living anatomy of one of the most revolutionary institutions in North American contact history. What in pre-Columbian times had been a non-profit, balanced, reciprocal exchange of necessities and luxuries between Northeastern and Eastern Subarctic tribes and bands was completely overhauled in