Weatherford - Indian Givers: how native Americans transformed the world

Native Americans and other tribal people from the Ainu to the Zulu have a legacy as important to the modern world as any great power of Europe, Asia, or America, but too often their stories are marginalized as regional and unimportant in the greater sweep of history and world events. I began the research for this book in 1981 and published Indian Givers in 1988 with the goal of integrating the native peoples of North and South America into the mainstream of world history.

This book appeared at a moment when it seemed that a Native Renaissance had finally emerged. Dee Browns Bury my Heat at Wounded Knee and Vine Delorias Custer Died for Your Sins put the Indian experience in a new historical and cultural light and showed wide popular appeal. Films such as The Mission and Dances with Wolves found critical as well as financial success as popular Academy Award winners. The American Indian movement brought dramatic attention to the plight of the native people, and other organizations campaigned for land rights, increased education, and religious freedom. On the Mall in Washington, the Smithsonian inaugurated an Indian art museum, while universities across the Americas founded programs in Indian, Native, or Indigenous Studies. The United States Mint issued a coin featuring Sacagawea of the Shoshone as a symbol of freedom. In 1992, for the first time, an Indian, Mayan Rigoberta Mench of Guatemala, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism. The United Nations declared the Year of Indigenous People in 1993 and prominently featured the music of Cree singer and songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie on whom France also bestowed the award of International Artist of the Year. Even Pope John Paul II somewhat belatedly canonized the first Native American saint, the Aztec convert Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin.

The brief flurry of attention to tribal and indigenous people during the late twentieth century has now passed, and public attention has moved on to other topics. At the highest levels of art and scholarship, the native cultures are more steadfastly segregated from the mainstream than ever before. Indian art has been removed from the museums of natural history to separate art museums. The poems, plays, and novels of native writers failed to join the ranks of general literature; instead they found their own shelf labeled American Indian Literature or Native American Writers, as though they did not qualify as authentic contributors to the canon.

Similarly, American Indian history and culture form a separate sphere of scholarship. Such ethnic apartheid arises from the false notion that the history of certain people must be separate in order to keep it from being lost in the maelstrom of larger history, as though Indian history is so delicate, weak, or fragile that it might quickly drown if combined with the history of the great civilizations. In the drama of world history, the only appropriate role for Indians seems to have been as villains, in the work of scholars who disdained them, or as victims, in the work of scholars who championed them. Instead, we need a history that moves beyond stereotypes to assess the importance of Indians in world history. Like all societies, native culturesboth before and after contact with European settlerscontained a mixture of good and bad, and to confine them to one image, no matter whether done sympathetically or maliciously, subverts the truth and prevents a just understanding of their part.

There is only one history: the history of the world. There is only one story: the story of humanity. Yet, history must always be written from a particular time and a particular perspective. No writer can hover above the earth like a god offering an objective account of what transpires below. Just because it is not possible to create a single objective view of events, however, does not mean that we must abandon the search for truth through history. Culture is relative, truth is not.

No single nation and no particular place necessarily dominates history for long. The focus of history may highlight one place and people for a while, but it quickly moves on to another and then another. Each has a role to play. On some level, any honestly rendered perspective is legitimate, but being legitimately felt does not make the perspective true. We should view the world from many different cultural perspectives, but the quest always remains to arrive at a better understanding that, in turn, leads to truth.

No matter who or where we are in the world today, the history of the American Indians helps us to understand our own story because their achievements, deeds, and influence persists in us: in the food we eat, the government we create, the money we use, and the clothes we wear. From the global economy to the local fast-food stand, the influence of the American Indians is now universal; their achievements spread from Timbuktu to Tuva, from Berlin to Beijing.

Recognizing the greatness of one people does nothing to diminish the achievements of another. The mathematical and astronomical achievements of the Maya does not detract from those of Isaac Newton or Gottfried Leibniz any more than appreciation of the Aztec poetry or Navajo song detracts from the sonnets of Shakespeare or the psalms of David. The ability to understand one heightens the capability to appreciate others. The enjoyment of Russian ballet can be refined by an understanding of the pow-wow dancers of the Great Plains, just as contemporary art might acquire more power when juxtaposed with the pictographic images from the Iroquois.

My purpose, at the time I wrote the book and still today, remains to bring the native people of the Americas out of academic apartheid and back into world history. I seek to share the absolute awe that I feel in beholding the grandeur of Indian cultures and the amazement at how much they accomplished and gave to the world. Despite everything that happened to the native people of the Americas, they still have a profound influence on the modern society in which we live, if only we are willing to see it. American Indians form an essential core of the epic of humanity. They produced a cultural genius that helped to make the world a better place.

Jack Weatherford,
2010

E ach 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 Potos, the worlds 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 Potos and the tall black hats native to the area.