Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford: Book Review

Overview of Indian Givers

Jack Weatherford's 1988 book Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World describes the many contributions that the Native peoples of the Americas have made to world civilization from the 16th century to the present — contributions that have generally been ignored by mainstream academics and the general public.

About the Author

Weatherford received his B.A. in political science (1967) and M.S. in sociology (1972) from two American universities, and his Ph.D. in anthropology from a third. He has taught cultural anthropology at a university in Saint Paul, Minnesota since 1983, specializing in tribal cultures and the influence of Native Americans on world history. His other publications include Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004), Savages and Civilization: Who Will Survive? (1994), and Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America (1991).

Weatherford's Thesis and Major Arguments

The main point of Indian Givers was to integrate "the Native peoples of North and South America into the mainstream of world history" (Weatherford, 1988/2010, p. vii). At the time it was first published, there seemed to be a renaissance in American Indian history and culture, with books like Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and films like The Mission and Dances with Wolves. In 1992, Rigoberta Menchú was the first Native American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, while 1993 was designated the United Nations' Year of Indigenous People. This brief period of attention did not continue, however, and American Indian history, literature, and culture have remained segregated in academic ghettos.

Native Americans influenced the rest of the world in a wide variety of ways — through food, medicine, money, government, and politics — yet have received little notice or credit for their accomplishments. Gold and silver from Latin America, mined by Indian slaves, made Spain the wealthiest empire in the world during the 16th and 17th centuries and financed the Catholic Church and the religious wars against the Protestant Reformation, but the indigenous peoples of the Americas never benefited from this wealth at any point in the past 500 years. Spanish conquerors and colonizers from Christopher Columbus onward extracted this wealth for their own benefit and that of ruling elites, nearly exterminating the Natives in the process. This is well known, at least to historians and academics, as is the fact that Europeans also obtained food and medicinal products from the Americas, including squash, potatoes, tomatoes, quinine, and digitalis. Indigenous peoples also have a long tradition of resistance and wars of liberation that has continued to the present, from North America to Mexico and Central America to Peru. What emerges from accounts like these is how little appreciated these people were, how their treatment amounted to a crime against humanity, and how remarkable it is that they survived at all.

Columbus and the Distortion of History

One of the most persistent problems raised by Weatherford's book is that negative or inaccurate portrayals of Native Americans have continued in mass media and popular culture up to the present, even in an era supposedly more sensitive and aware of these issues. This was especially evident in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of America by Christopher Columbus. In reality, that moment marked the beginning of invasion and conquest for the Native peoples of the Americas — an invasion that often ended in enslavement and genocide, or confinement to the instant ghettos of the reservation system. Famous historians like Samuel Eliot Morison lionized Columbus and cast him as a great hero, while minimizing or glossing over his crimes. Within fifty years of his arrival on Hispaniola, the island's indigenous population had been effectively reduced to zero.

Columbus: The Discovery (1992) was a box office failure, mocked and lampooned by critics as an unintended comedy. Producer Alexander Salkind was sued for fraud, racketeering, and breach of contract. Marlon Brando, the film's only real star, also threatened to sue and remove his name from the project because of the way the Carib and Arawak Indians were portrayed. Few people saw the film at the time, and it is deservedly forgotten today. Almost nothing in the movie is historically accurate, except perhaps the appearance of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María. The film depicts Columbus as a typical romantic hero and swashbuckler of the Hollywood type, romantically involved with Queen Isabella, while the real Columbus was manipulative, deceptive, extremely greedy and ambitious, and a harsh colonial ruler guilty of slave labor, genocide, and other atrocities. His main concern in later years was collecting the full 10% of profits he had been promised; although he repeatedly claimed poverty, he died a wealthy man.

Even in small details, the historical Columbus demonstrated a character quite different from his popular portrayal. In the movie, Columbus offers a bounty to the first sailor to sight land, but in reality, when he returned to Spain, he claimed the reward for himself. He even wrote an entire book asserting that he had not been adequately rewarded for his conquests and had never received his full 10% of the profits as originally promised (Morison, 1974). As the historical record shows, the real Columbus was very much a modern man in the sense that he was eager to advance himself and extremely egotistical and ruthless in the pursuit of wealth. His own logbook and diary reveal a man obsessed with finding gold, using the raw materials of the New World for plunder and profit, and exploiting native peoples as slaves (Columbus et al., 1992, p. 37).