Indian giver is an expression used mostly by European Americans to describe a person who gives a gift (literal or figurative) and later wants it back, or something equivalent in return. This expression misunderstands the concept of duality, reciprocity, balance that is part of the cosmovision of indigenous peoples all across the Americas.

The term "Indian gift" was first noted in 1765 by Thomas Hutchinson, and "Indian giver" was first cited in John Russell Bartlett

John Russell Bartlett

John Russell Bartlett was an American historian and linguist.-Biography:Bartlett was born in Providence, Rhode Island...

's Dictionary of Americanisms (1860) as "Indian giver. When an Indian gives any thing, he expects to receive an equivalent, or to have his gift returned." Thus it was really an exchange of gifts and not a matter of selflessness.

Nevertheless, the phrase can be considered offensive, particularly to American Indians

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

.

Etymology

It is unclear exactly how the expression came to be, but the consensus is that it is based on American Indians having a distinctly different sense of property ownership than that of European ancestry. One theory is that early European settlers in North America misinterpreted the aid and goods they received from local Indians as gifts, when in fact they were intended to be offered in trade. Many tribes operated economically by a form of barter

Barter

Barter is a method of exchange by which goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. It is usually bilateral, but may be multilateral, and usually exists parallel to monetary systems in most developed countries, though to a...

 system, or a gift economy

Gift economy

In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...

, where reciprocal giving was practiced.

Synonyms

Since the phrase was likely a cultural misunderstanding that unfortunately denigrates American Indians and no known English synonyms seem to exist, a group of freecyclers

Freecycling

Freecycling, also known as Free Recycling, is the act of giving away usable unwanted items to others instead of disposing of them in landfills. This term is most often associated with online groups who run mailing lists which offer items to members at no cost....

 invented the new word "ersatzgiver" to replace it (ersatz

Ersatz

Ersatz means 'substituting for, and typically inferior in quality to', e.g. 'chicory is ersatz coffee'. It is a German word literally meaning substitute or replacement...

 means "substitute" or "replacement" in German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

).