Jack Weatherford - Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

Jack Mclver Weatherford

First published in 1988

For Walker Pearce Maybank

Acknowledgments

1. Silver and Money Capitalism

2. Piracy, Slavery, and the Birth of Corporations

3. The American Indian Path to Industrialization

4. The Food Revolution

5. Indian Agricultural Technology

6. The Culinary Revolution

7. Liberty, Anarchism, and the Noble Savage

8. The Founding Indian Fathers

9. Red Sticks and Revolution

10. The Indian Healer

11. The Drug Connection

12. Architecture and Urban Planning 13. The Pathfinders

14. When Will America Be Discovered?

References

Index

The writing of this book involved the assistance of manY colleagues and friends to whom I am grateful. My family contributed to my work on this project by helping me in the field when possible and by covering for me while I was gone. I thank my wife, Walker Pearce, for her help in Asia and Europe, and I must credit her as being the person who insisted steadily for twelve years that I should write this book. I thank Roy Pearce Maybank for his work with me in South America and Minnesota, and I appreciate the help of Walker Pearce Maybank in central America.

Much of the travel and many of the contacts for this project came through the assistance of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, where I particularly thank Larraine Matusak, Patrick McDonough, Anna Sheppard, and the members of class V of the Kellogg National Fellowship Program.

I thank the administration of Macalester College for giving me the opportunity to work on this book, and funding from the Bush FoundatiQn and the Joyce Foundation. I particularly appreciate suggestions and help in the research by Anne Sutherland, David McCurdy, Anna Meigs, Kay Crawford, Chris Cavender, and James Stewart. Many students also helped me in this work, but I particularly appreciate the help of David Warland's computer skills and the field assistance of Douglas Kleemeier in Africa and South America.

My Spanish teachers through the years have worked patiently to open up to me the Indian world of Latin America. I thank Antonio Lasaga, Maria Doleman, Fabiola Franco, and Jorge Vega for their efforts to educate me. In Bolivia I am particularly thankful to Luis Morato-Pena and his family, with whom I lived and worked so often, and I appreciate the assistance of the families of Johnny Villazon in Cochabamba and Federico Kaune in La Paz.

Others who have read and assisted with comments on the manuscript include Twila Kekahaba-Martin, Gotz Freiherr von Houwald, Marc Swartz, Zaida Giraldo, Lee Owens, Rochelle Jones, Hans Christoph Buch, Lavon Lee, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Joyce King, and Ali Salim. I owe a great debt to my agent, Lois Wallace, and my editor, James Wade.

I appreciate the help of the Newberry Library of Chicago, the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., and the Macalester College library in St. Paul, Minnesota.

No government money was used for any part of this work.

*Bracketed notes specify page numbers of books listed in References section.

Each morning at five-thirty, Rodrigo Cespedes eats two rolls and drinks a cup of tea heavily laced with sugar before he slings his ratty Adidas gym bag over his shoulder and leaves for work Rodrigo lives in Potosi, the world's highest city, perched in the Bolivian Andes at an elevation of 13,680 feet above sea level. At this altitude Rodrigo stays warm only when he holds himself directly in the sunlight, but this early in the morning, the streets are still dark. He walks with other men going in the same direction, but like most Quechua and Aymara Indians they walk along silently. The loudest sounds come from the scraping noise of the old women who laboriously sweep the streets each morning. Bent over their short straw brooms, these women look like medieval witches dressed in the traditional black garments woven in Potosi and the tall black hats native to the area.

Rodrigo reaches the main road and joins a line behind forty to fifty men waiting to board one of the dilapidated but once brightly painted buses that leave the Plaza 10 de Noviembre at a quarter before the hour. In the dawning light, he stands across the street from a small dump in which a handful of old women, two dozen snarling dogs, and a few children fight over unrecognizable chunks of food in their daily battle for garbage. When he finally boards the bus, Rodrigo squeezes agilely into the dense pack of silent and stooped men. Very slowly the old bus begins its labored climb up Cerro Rico, the mountain towering over the city. After ascending the mountain for only a few minutes, the bus passes the entrance to the original colonial mine founded on Cerro Rico in 1545. Workers long ago boarded it shut after exhausting that vein, and then they moved to higher veins more difficult and less profitable to mine. After another twenty minutes and a hundred meters' rise in elevation, he passes the dilapidated entrance to the massive government-operated tin mine and the scene of many bloody confrontations between miners and management. Once owned by the "Tin King" Simon Patino, these mines were nationalized by the revolutionary regime of Victor Paz Estensoro after the revolution in 1952, and now COMIBOL (Corporacion Minera de Bolivia), a government-owned and highly unprofitable company, operates them as a way to keep the miners' leftist union tranquil. The bus chokes to its first stop at the mine opening, and most of the men leave the bus.

Even though the bus has less than half a load now, the old engine wheezes and belches up thick black diesel fumes as it struggles on to an altitude of fourteen thousand feet. Few vehicles anywhere operate at a higher altitude, and this bus probably plies the highest daily bus route in the world. Barely able to climb any higher, the bus coasts to a stop near the Heart of Jesus, a large abandoned church covered with graffiti and filled with the strong smell of stale urine, all topped by a giant concrete Jesus.

The edifice and its large statue jut out on a cliff a little over halfway up the mountain. Here Rodrigo and the remaining men leave the bus, which then descends for another load.

Without a glance at the Heart of Jesus and without raising his eyes toward the immense mountain above him, Rodrigo begins to climb the long familiar path. For the next two hours he looks only at his feet and he keeps his chin tucked into his jacket and out of the mountain winds that whip around him in freezing but bone-dry swirls even though he is only a few degrees south of the equator. He does not need to look around, for as long as his legs are climbing up the mountain he knows that he is heading in the right direction. He need not fear bumping into a tree, because he is far above the timber line and because over the last four centuries millions of brown hands have already removed every bush, weed, and blade of grass searching for rocks with traces of silver, tin, tungsten, or bismuth. He need not worry about bumping into a large boulder, because generations of Indian workers have long since pounded, hammered, and shattered every boulder into millions of rocks smaller than a child's fist. He need not fear falling into a crevice, because women carrying baskets of rock and dirt have long ago filled in all the crevices with refuse from the five thousand mines that have pierced Cerro Rico in the past five centuries. If Rodrigo did look up, he would see nothing but the endless pile of rusty brown rocks that he climbs every day.

The monotony of the mountain face is interrupted only by the mine openings that pock it like the ravages of some terrestrial cancer. Rodrigo finally stops just short of the summit of 15,680 feet, the trip from his home below has taken two and a half hours. He sits down just outside the mouth of the mine he works, opens his bag, and fishes out a flat, round roll like the ones he ate for breakfast. As he chews the roll, he looks down at the city spread out below him. Because the air is so crisp and clear at this dry altitude, he can clearly pick o'it the block of houses where he lives in the city of 100,000 people with lives much like his own. He is now ha~ a mile above the city and three miles above the ocean, which, of course, he has never seen. In the distance a small black ribbon of railroad track connects Potosi with the outside world, hauling the tin to Arica, the port on the Chilean coast of the Pacific. The line also connects Potosi to the capit~ of La Paz. Twice a week passengers can ride the day trip to La Paz on the narrow-gauge railway. Straining to cross the Condor Pass at 15,705 feet above sea level near Rio Mulato a few hours out of Potosi, this train operates the world's highest passenger railway. But all of this is far removed from Rodrigo's life.