Jack Weatherford

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

How Native Americans Transformed the World

Indian Givers

Che Guevara as "just one more white foreigner trying to tell them what to believe and what to do." 

Juan Agrón

The Indians ignored Che, in large part because they could not understand him. He spoke Spanish and they spoke Quechua. He came from a rich Spanish-Irish family and had been educated in the university. He came there from the big city of Havana to enlighten the Indians in their benighted peasant world, and to them he was just one more white foreigner trying to tell them what to believe and what to do. After two years he had not recruited a single peasant to his cause, and in 1967 the notoriously weak and ineffective Bolivian army tracked him down and killed him at Yuro Ravine, claiming he was a CIA agent.

Since 1848 in Europe one wave after another of workers’ movements had tried to overthrow governments through armed struggle or through ballots, but they all failed. Communists and socialists seemed to be the vanguard of the future, but they had great trouble enacting that future. Zapata knew, however, that the working classes of the cities had long since been absorbed by urban life; they offered little hope of a true revolution.

In his campaign, Zapata emphasized cultural and ethnic ties uniting his people in their struggle for a generalized justice rather than the specific agenda of one political ideology. The rest of the world did not know what to make of this revolution in Mexico. It was the first of the twentieth century’s great revolutions, but because the “civilized” world was busy fighting World War I, they had little attention to spare for this remote corner of the earth. The subsequent Russian Revolution, which was urban, Marxist, and working-class in orientation as well as much closer to the Europeans, seemed easier to understand, and many people then dismissed the Mexican Revolution as an eccentric anomaly in a barbaric land.

Karl Marx, in particular, developed a fascination with the political activities and economic lives of the Indians. From his reading of Lewis Henry Morgan, Marx sharpened his appreciation of the delicacy and sophistication of Indian political institutions, particularly as evidenced in the League of the Iroquois. At the time of his death in 1883, Karl Marx was in the midst of an extensive study of the American Indians; he had filled several notebooks with material on them in 1880 and 1881. Friedrich Engels, as the collaborator and literary executor of Marx’s estate, assembled and rewrote this material to form The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published in 1884 with the subtitle In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan.

...aside from the classical civilizations of Peru and Mexico, the “Iroquois confederacy represents the most advanced social organization achieved by any Indians,” and he reduces their organization to ten basic principles, which he discusses in detail. Engels calls this “a wonderful constitution” under which there are “no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, king, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits—and everything takes its orderly course” [Engels, pp. 84ff].

Marx and Engels translated the Iroquois image into a European one that fit their own materialist theories. Subsequent political theorists and activists cut from these ideas their own African and Asian ideologies, but the Indians were dropped from the theories and future generations pushed them once again into the nether regions of world consciousness.

Today these Indian revolts rarely receive attention as political movements. Instead they are dismissed under the general term of “uprisings,” as though the Indian were much too primitive to have a high degree of social consciousness or any notion of political ideology. Even partisans of the Indian movements tend to glorify these efforts as the last desperate acts of a people yearning to be free but lacking an understanding of the political realities around them. Often these Indians had well-developed ideologies, but they framed them in religious terms and in the imagery of nature rather than in the political vocabulary of Europeans.

Today we call this a “federal” system in which each state retains power over internal affairs and the national government regulates affairs common to all. Henry Steele Commager later wrote of this crucial time that even “if Americans did not actually invent federalism, they were able to take out an historical patent on it” [Commager, p. 207]. The Indians invented it even though the United States patented it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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].

J. McIver Weatherford

How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

Jimmy Cerone

"As entertaining as it is thoughtful....Few contemporary writers have Weatherford's talent for making the deep sweep of history seem vital and immediate." --Washington Post After 500 years, the world's huge debt to the wisdom of the Indians of the Americas has finally been explored in all its vivid drama by anthropologist Jack Weatherford. He traces the crucial contributions made by the Indians to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history.

Indian Givers How Native Americans Transformed the World

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