J. McIver Weatherford

Charts the wide-ranging and lasting impact of Native American culture on American and European society

How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

Indian Givers

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In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the year of American independence, Adam Smith wrote that the discovery of the New World and the ensuing opening of trade with Asia began “to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to” [Smith, p. 591]. For Smith these two events were the most important in all of human history, for it created a world economy. The discovery of America created what he called a “revolution in commerce” [Smith, p. 405].

The queen gave Drake ten thousand British pounds as his reward for his work, and she knighted him. In turn, Sir Francis gave her a crown and a cross made from the silver of Potosí and studded with the jewels he had looted from the Spanish churches [Morison, p. 720].

Today, the effects of that remain clearly visible in the English-speaking communities that dot the Caribbean islands and run the length of the coastal areas of Central America. Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, the Cayman Islands, Anguilla, Barbados, Grenada, Dominica, and dozens of smaller islands mostly owe their British character and English language to the early pirates who stalked their waters.

Incas. Unlike the superstitious Aztecs, the Incas did not build large pyramids to perform massive blood sacrifices or pursue long wars to please their gods. Unlike the mystical Mayas, they did not build observatories to watch the endless patterns of the stars or write long, philosophical poems on the creation of the world. They displayed an austere practicality in every aspect of their lives, and they show little hint of religious fervor, no penchant for meditation, no tendency toward either the sentimental or the superstitious.

This same practicality and passion for organization shows in their economic system, which lacked money, markets, or merchants and yet managed to avoid the famine that stalks so many great empires.

The ancient Peruvians had been among the world’s greatest experimenters with agriculture, and they built numerous experimental areas where crops could be grown in different ways. It would not be surprising if they devoted a place such as Machu Picchu to just such activity. Whether this site actually functioned as an ancient experimental agricultural station or not, the Indians of the Andes probably did more plant experiments than any other people anywhere in the world.

Apparently the potato descended from a tuberous Solanum that grew wild throughout the Americas and was used by Indian groups as far north as the southwestern United States, where the Navajos made it a major part of their diet. The Indians of the United States and of Mexico apparently were in the process of domesticating their own varieties of this potato when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century [Salaman, p. 1]. At the time of the Spanish conquest, Andean farmers already were producing about three thousand different types of potatoes in the Andes. This contrasts with the mere 250 varieties now grown in North America...

The Indians gave the world three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation.

Before the discovery of America, the Old World depended primarily on grain crops of domesticated grasses such as wheat, rye, barley, and oats in Europe and the Near East, rice in the Far East, and millet and sorghum in Africa. All of these plants, however, face numerous problems in their growing cycle. Because they grow on high stalks above the ground, they are easy prey to the destructive elements of wind, hail, heavy rain, and snow as well as to birds, insects, and animals. For centuries the northern countries such as Russia and Germany suffered periodic famines when the grain crop failed because of unsuitable weather. For as long as the Old World depended on grain crops, the great population and power centers remained in the warmer southern nations around the Mediterranean, where the grains flourished.

The monarchs and Adam Smith knew what the peasants would soon learn: a field of potatoes produces more food and more nutrition more reliably and with less labor than the same field planted in any grain. Even today, a hectare of land planted in potatoes produces 7.5 million calories. The same land planted in wheat produces only 4.2 million calories. The cultivation of potatoes also consumes far less calories or energy than does that of wheat.

In the northern climates, where long winters without fresh vegetables were the rule, the potato offered a new source of vitamin C that greatly improved the health of the population. For a reason still not adequately understood, potatoes do not produce tooth cavities nearly as much as grains. When eaten as processed flour, the finely ground starches from grains stick to the teeth and rot them. On the other hand, when eaten as tough grains, they are very abrasive and wear out the teeth. By eating more potatoes, the northern Europeans retained strong teeth until an older age, and this improved their general health. Nutritional diseases declined steadily, and by early in the eighteenth century, they virtually disappeared as causes of death in Europe except during war...

The Incas also used drying techniques on a variety of other vegetable crops and even on meat. The dried meat, or charqui as it was called in Quechua, also found favor among the Europeans as a convenient and light way to preserve and transport meat. The name charqui was taken over and corrupted into “jerky,” one of the few English words derived from Quechua.

Today the agricultural experimentation that began many centuries ago in the Andes continues at the International Potato Institute, located in the suburbs of Lima. The modern buildings of the institute spread out over the countryside like the new campus of a community college. Immaculate beds of potatoes in small, neat rows surround and run between the buildings. The site looks almost as though the beautiful mountain terraces of Machu Picchu had been flattened out and arranged in military formations across the plain.

On Thanksgiving Day North Americans sometimes remember the Indians who gave them their cuisine by dining upon turkey with cornbread stuffing, cranberry sauce, succotash, corn on the cob, sweet potato casserole, stewed squash and tomatoes, baked beans with maple syrup, and pecan pie. Few cooks or gourmets, however, recognize the much broader extent to which American Indian cuisine radically changed cooking and dining in every part of the globe from Timbuktu to Tibet. Sichuan beef with chilies, German chocolate cake, curried potatoes, vanilla ice cream, Hungarian goulash, peanut brittle, and pizza all owe their primary flavorings to the American Indians.

The discovery of new forms of political life in America freed the imaginations of Old World thinkers to envision Utopias, socialism, communism, anarchism, and dozens of other social forms. Scarcely any political theory or movement of the last three centuries has not shown the impact of this great political awakening that the Indians provoked among the Europeans.

Reportedly, the first person to propose a union of all the colonies and to propose a federal model for it was the Iroquois chief Canassatego, speaking at an Indian-British assembly in Pennsylvania in July 1744. He complained that the Indians found it difficult to deal with so many different colonial administrations, each with its own policy. It would make life easier for everyone involved if the colonists could have a union which allowed them, to speak with one voice. He not only proposed that the colonies unify themselves, but told them how they might do it. He suggested that they do as his people had done and form a union like the League of the Iroquois [Johansen, pp. 12, 61]. Hiawatha and Deganwidah founded the League of the Iroquois sometime between A.D. 1000 and 1450 under a constitution they called the Kaianerekowa or Great Law of Peace.

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