Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

In Weatherford’s telling, the European colonial process was defined by the drive to take. The exchange of ideas between the Old and New Worlds, he argues, was fundamentally one-sided. Weatherford is primarily concerned with the innovations of the Indians, but he also makes more subtle implications about the receivers of their knowledge, the European colonizers of the Americas.

Weatherford paints Europeans as largely unable or unwilling to work in harmony with other peoples or with nature. Unpleasant labor was immediately allocated to African slaves or the Indians. The Spanish, for example, seemed content “to reap the profits and allow the Indians to use whatever technology and organization worked best” (50). One of the Europeans’ most meaningful natural advantages, their wide variety of domesticated animals, is framed in terms of the European “exploitation.” They “easily learned to harness animal energy in place of human energy […] the Old World had thoroughly exploited animal energy sources” by using horses in war, cattle for plowing, and many other animals for food (251). Europeans even harnessed the power of inanimate aspects of nature, like wind (mills, sails) and water (waterwheels). All of these factors gave them a decisive advantage over the Indians, who in Weatherford’s telling built their civilizations in more harmonious balance with the wilderness, and on human energy alone.

Europeans were also fundamentally unwilling to simply accept the passive benefit of new technologies. They also needed to assimilate and replace. A prime example of this model can be found in the highway system. Rather than striking out their own paths, the Europeans simply destroyed what was there and built on top of it: “The present road and highway system, railroad network, and even the canals of the United States and other American nations largely follow Indian trails and roads” (247).

European colonizers are portrayed as exploitative not only in their constant appropriation of Indian innovations and labor, but also in their unwillingness to give anything in return. The arrival of the Europeans brought little to no benefits to the Indians. Instead, their interactions were marked not by positive or even neutral effect but by active harm. As the Europeans enjoyed Indian remedies, the Old World diseases they brought with them ravaged the Indian population, which lacked any natural immunity. Weatherford explains, “Probably 90 percent of the American Indian population died within the first century after the European arrival in America” (195). It was not enough to appropriate Indian land. Destructive wars, like those waged by Andrew Jackson, cost the natives their territories and drove them into the dangerous frontier, where they served as a buffer between the Americans and their enemies. Using New World crops domesticated by the Indians, Europeans distilled stronger alcohols and offered them as trade goods, sometimes with the explicit intent of subjugating Indians. As one Mexican viceroy observed, alcohol represented “a new need which forces [the Indians] to recognize very clearly their obligatory dependence with regard to ourselves” (214). Weatherford argues that at every turn, Europeans took from the Indians then bit the hand that fed them.