Indian Givers: How the Indians

¶ … Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World by Jack Weatherford. Specifically it will contain a book report on the book. Weatherford's thesis for writing this book is clear. He wants people to know that Native Americans, in both North and South America, and been forgotten and misrepresented with it comes to history. This book proves this point in many areas, from food to our basic democracy, and it is an engrossing book that acknowledges the importance of Native Americans in so many ways.

This book includes dozens of instances where the Native Americans influenced culture, society, and even capitalism in the world. The author begins with a discussion of South American gold and silver, mined by Natives, which led to the beginning of capitalism and the industrial revolution in Europe. The silver and gold helped fund countries and fuel competition, both necessary for the industrial revolution and capitalistic tendencies. The book is absolutely full of examples like this, that seem perfectly logical when reading about them, but would not necessarily be the first thing people would think of when thinking about Native Americans.

Another example is the many different foods they have contributed to world cuisine. For example, the Incas grew potatoes, something Europeans had never seen before, and they grew corn, like the Natives in North America. These foods, and many others, like tomatoes, peppers, and others found their way to Europe and were introduced to European tables. Weatherford writes, "The monarchs and Adam Smith knew what the peasants would soon learn: a field of potatoes produces more food and more nutrition more readily and with less labor than the same field planted in grain" (Weatherford 67). Today, we take the potato for granted, rarely think about its' origins, and cannot quite imagine life without it, but the author makes it quite clear, it is just another of the many ways Native Americans continue to influence our culture and society in unimaginable ways.

Natives developed many ways of farming that are still used today, and they taught Europeans many agricultural ideas, including tapping trees for their syrup, making essences out of herbs and plants, and drying peppers and other foods. The author writes, "The spread of American foods around the Old World began in 1492, when Columbus gathered the first plants to take with him back to Spain, and the process has not yet stopped (Weatherford 94-95). With these new foods, came new ways of growing them, directly as a result of Native American agriculture.

In one of the most interesting chapters of the book, the author talks about the advanced government of the Iroquois Nation, and how our country's government is based on it, whether intentionally or not. Many aspects of the protocol in Congress, and how Congresspeople are elected come directly from the Iroquois system. The author writes, "Another imitation of the Iroquois came in the simple practice of allowing only one person to speak at a time in political meetings" (Weatherford 140). Repeatedly, the author shows the reader items that we take for granted today that were influenced by the Natives, in everything from politics to how to make rubber.