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

The German village of Kahl serves as the European companion to Potosí. It was Weatherford’s research as a PhD student there on social and technological organization that tipped him off to the incredible impact of the Native Americans all over the world. In a 1991 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, he said, “I was surprised at the impact of Indian crops on this village […] Suddenly, when I was in Germany, I realized I knew nothing of my own world. I didn’t even know that cotton was an Indian crop.”

For centuries life in Kahl went unchanged. Weatherford notes that “a peasant would probably have felt equally at home farming in the Kahl of 700 BC or AD 1700” (40). The industrial revolution, as precipitated by contact with the New World, changed the village in virtually every way. Weatherford uses its dramatic transformation to represent the reciprocal impact the Old and New Worlds had on each other. The colonization of the Americas did not affect the Americas alone; Europe, too, was transformed, both positively and negatively. The potato and other American crops greatly enriched Kahl’s villagers’ diets, but its traditional craftsmen were put in competition with factories. Manufacturing demands led to the exhaustion of local coal and a new dependence on nuclear power. While Weatherford does not address nuclear power directly, he uses charged language to describe its presence in Kahl: “on the edge of town by the river looms Germany’s first atomic-powered electric plant” (39). Kahl represents the irrevocable change ignited by the meeting of the Old and New Worlds, for better and for worse.

Weatherford describes in great detail the food and drink of the places he visits in Indian Givers. Chapter 6 in particular focuses on the many national dishes made possible by Indian contributions. These culinary delights, however, stand in stark contrast to the Indian meals Weatherford describes. Chocolate and vanilla are the most common flavors for American snack foods (11), but on the Mamore River in South America, Indians are still manually chewing cacao seeds for others. Weatherford notes, “For those Indians the chocolate amounted to cash; it was too valuable a commodity for them to eat it themselves. Even the toddlers unable to talk knew to spit out the cacao seeds when eating the fruit” (91). At a Zanzibar hotel patrons dine on American delicacies, “large trays of tempting desserts that included freshly sliced pineapples, bananas, and papayas, as well as rich Black Forest tortes” (102), while at a powwow in North Dakota, “a food concessionaire sells fry bread, Indian tacos, hamburgers, and bratwursts” (120). Weatherford never shows Indians feasting or enjoying their food; rather, their meals are cheap, of poor quality, or even processed for someone else. His intent is not to denigrate the modern native lifestyle but to provide another example of how Indian innovations have so benefited others but not necessarily equated to a higher standard of living for them.