When you wake up in the morning, take two aspirins then down them with a Coca-cola, you can thank the American Indian for your quick morning pick-me-up. At work when you eat a big hunk of someone's chocolate birthday cake or devour some Godiva chocolate, again you can thank the American Indian for the culinary delight. Later as you are stuck in traffic, listening to George W. Bush on the radio, you can thank, or despise as the case may be, the American Indian for the concept of the Electoral College. The introduction to some of the American Indians' contributions to agricultural technology, government, medicine, and some of the delectable cuisine we enjoy today, will both surprise and astound the reader of Jack Weatherford's delightful book The Indian Givers.
In this compelling book about the American Indians, Jack Weatherford takes us along on his qualitative research study of these amazing groups of people. He does not focus on any specific Indian group; instead he takes us on a trek of the Indian peoples in both North and South America. He shows how the American Indian takes nature and communes with it, lives with it, but never tries to tame or destroy it. The book is fascinating, to say the least, and could be used as a text or reference book. Weatherford holds his reader's attention by presenting many facets of American Indian history in his thorough, ironical and often paradoxical writing style. The book is divided into thirteen complex and compact chapters discussing everything from our Indian based form of government to capitalism, chilies to chocolate, agriculture to urban planning, and aspirin to Novocain. This book would probably be a difficult read for regular junior/senior English classes as a classroom text if read in its entirety, but it would be well suited to AP, IB or advanced classes. It could easily be adapted in a regular public classroom setting by assigning different groups different chapters. The writing is very methodical; in order for it to be ingested and digested, it might therefore be better to have a complete knowledge of a small part of the book, and then each group could share the different chapters orally.
There is hardly a person in this country, Europe, Asia, or Timbuktu (Weatherford relates a few interesting tales about this ancient city) who is not touched daily by something that was cultivated, invented, discovered or technically advanced by the American Indian. The Native Americans certainly did more than give us the buttered popcorn that my friends and I used to enjoy when we went to the Saturday matinees and watched movies about the cowboys and "savage" Indians.
It would be difficult to pick a favorite chapter, as all were equally compelling. There is great irony in the first two chapters, "Silver and Money Capitalism and Piracy," and "Slavery and the Birth of Corporation." Here the author describes the horrid conditions of the Indians mining gold and silver in Potosi, a city in South American that supplied the precious metals for most of the European coins, leading to the rise of capitalism in Europe. "Potosi made the money that irrevocably changed the economic complexion of the world" (20). The irony is that the silver and gold that was literally mined with slave labor of the Indians was also used to adorn the beautiful churches in Europe. The American Indians indirectly helped create these magnificent places of worship, places built with slave labor; eight million Indian lives were lost so that the churches of Europe could have their gilded altars and statues, and the rich could have coins jingling in their pockets.
Often when we think of the American Indian and food we think of corn. But the American Indian's discovery of the potato and Andean farmers discovery of how to "freeze dry" it hundreds of years ago, had a far greater impact on the world than all of the silver and gold combined. This crop could be planted in small areas, had a short growing season, and literally kept hundreds of people from starving. The potato, while getting off to a slow start in Europe, later became the main food staple in many countries throughout the world. "Today the agricultural experimentation that began many centuries ago in the Andes continues at the International Potato Institute, located in the suburbs of Lima"(77).
One of the most interesting chapters in the book is the "Indian Healer." This chapter illustrates the superior knowledge that the Indians had in the area of medicine and pharmacology. It was the American Indian who discovered the cure for scurvy, not the Scottish naval officer James Lind; he only took the Indian's lead for prevention of this disease. The Indians discovered laxatives, aspirin, and quinine, the cure for malaria. They also gave us curare, which relaxed a patient enough before surgery so that a tube could be inserted into the patient's windpipe to facilitate breathing during an operation; and a winter does not go by that I do not go through a jar of petroleum jelly for my dried lips-another American Indian discovery. Despite their knowledge of medicine, the American Indians could not fight many of the diseases brought to their lands from the Old World. "The Indians died by the millions. Probably 90 percent of the American Indian population died within the first century after the European arrival in America" (195).
The American Indian lived off the land, dressed peculiarly, talked in a "foreign language," ate bizarre foods; they even worshiped "gods" rather than God. Therefore the Europeans believed the American Indian to be a savage beast; pagans who certainly needed to be "tamed" and "saved." Naturally this gave way to Christian missionaries who would take it upon themselves to refine and tame this savage beast, and save his immortal soul in the process. When the Indian refused to conform to the white man's ways, violence resulted and many Indians were needlessly murdered and slaughtered. "The Indian civilizations crumbled in the face of the Old World not because of any intellectual or cultural inferiority. They simply succumbed in the face of disease and brute strength" (252).
In our nation's capitol rotunda, visitors can view pictures of a developing America; Indians are depicted as wild savages blocking the progress of the Europeans as they conquer new territories. "The most peaceful picture with an Indian theme in the rotunda shows the baptism of Pocahontas, daughter of the Indian leader Powhatan. Surrounded by Europeans and dressed in English clothing she symbolically renounces the savage life of the Indians for the civilization of the British" (134). Yes, the Europeans can definitely take credit for giving civilized ways to the American Indians!
Because of the land, the conflict between the Old and New World inhabitants was inevitable, but the outcome for the American Indian was devastating and disastrous. "Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, but America has yet to be discovered" (255); perhaps this single statement best sums up Indian Givers in its entirety.
review @2002 by Lynne Moyers and RSiSS
Jenks High School
Tulsa, Oklahoma