Everybody
knows who Christopher Columbus was, but very few know the
name of the first Native who welcomed Columbus. to the
Americas. The main objective of the "Amauta" Series
is to educate people about the little known history of the
America's Indigenous people.
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The President of the United States,
George W. Bush said:
"The
strength of our Nation comes from its people. As the early
inhabitants of this great land, the native peoples of North
America played a unique role in the shaping of our Nation's
history and culture...I call on all Americans to learn more
about the history and heritage of the Native peoples of this
great land. Such actions reaffirm our appreciation and
respect for their traditions and way of life and can help to
preserve an important part of our culture for generations
yet to come."
President of USA George W. Bush on November 19, 2001
National American Indian Heritage Month Proclamation
The President of the United States,
William J. Clinton said:
"So much of who we are today comes from who you have been
for long time. Long before others came to the shores there
were powerful and sophisticated cultures and societies
here--yours. Because of your ancestors, democracy existed
here long before the Constitution was drafted and
ratified...I believe in your rich heritage and in our common
destiny. What you have done to retain your identity, your
dignity and your faith in the face of often immeasurable
obstacles is profoundly moving--an example of the enduring
strength of the human spirit.""
President of USA Williams J. Clinton on April 29,
1994
From the Book: Native Time written by Lee Francis, pp.
328-329
USA SENATE RESOLUTION/76
ABOUT THE IROQUOIS CONSTITUTION
NATIVE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM AND THE EVOLUTION OF
DEMOCRACY
THE GREAT BINDING LAW, GAYANASHAGOWA
TESTIMONY OF JOSEPH DE LA CRUZ, CHAIRMAN, QUINAULT INDIAN
NATION
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA, SENATE RESOLUTION 177
NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN MONTH PROCLAMATION IN 2000
NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN MONTH PROCLAMATION IN 2001
THE INFLUENCE OF INDIAN CULTURE IN THE CULTURES OF THE
WORLD:
Native
Americans had a great influence in the cultures of the
world. While Native life and culture were greatly affected
by European "conquest" and settlements, at the same time
many elements of the Indian's own culture have been
incorporated into the way of life of their "conquerors."
Later, the knowledge and benefits acquired from Natives was
transfer to the way of life and culture of the world.
Assistance to Early Settlers:
In the beginning, the Native Americans made possible
the first precarious existence of the first settlers
in the "New World." The Natives supplied to the new
neighbors with food, teaching them how to plant, fish, and
hunt with Indian's methods, guiding them through the
wilderness over Indian trails and in Indian-style boats, and
introducing them to Indian implements, utensils, tools,
clothing, and ways of life that made their existence easier
and more secure.
Trade and Wealth:
By friendly trade Indians supplied the settlers with
furs and other goods that helped revolutionize styles and
materials in the Old World; and Indian art forms, crafts,
and cultural objects heavily influenced certain aspects of
European artistic and intellectual life. The plunder of
native American gold and other treasures helped to finance
the courts armies, and navies of European rulers and
nations. At the same time, the wealth of Natives people
made possible a strong banking system and later the
Industrial Revolution.
Native American Foods:
Probably the most important contribution of Native
Americans to the rest of the world were corn and potatoes.
These crops are major portion of the world food supply. Corn
and Potatoes were first domesticated by American Indians.
Cassava, or Manioc from the tropical regions of the Americas
and the sweet potatoes were also Indian crops. Native
Americans introduced other domesticated plants, including
peanut, habas, quinoa, amaranth, squash, pumpkins, melons,
peppers, paprika, wild rice, sassafras, turnips, cucumbers,
beets, chiles mangos, papayas, pineapples, pomegranate,
chayote, avocados, cranberries, blackberries, raspberries,
cherries, strawberry, several varieties of grapes,
chestnuts, edible mushrooms, vanilla, tapioca, tomatoes,
pumpkin, sunflower, many kinds of beans and sugar maple.
Other Native American Products:
Cacao (chocolate), chicle (gum), and tobacco were also
raised by Native Americans. Many varieties of cotton with
higher quality than the cotton of the old world were already
produced by Native Americans. Native Americans also
extracted drugs from many plants, they were used by Native
people and later, because of their medicinal value, these
plant were accepted in modern pharmacology. These drugs
include cocaine, a pain reliever obtained from coca
leaves; curare, a muscle relaxant from the bark of a
South American tree; cascara, a cathartic from the
shrub cascara sagrada; atropine, a heart stimulant
from the weed datura and quinine, from the bark of the
cinchona.
Other Contributions of Native
Americans:
Many Native American devices were adopted by the new
settlers, including hammock, canoes, kayaks, dog sleds,
toboggans, snowshoes, moccasins, pipes, and ponchos. Native
Americans designs affected many manufactured goods, such the
rubber tires, rain coat, and rubber balls. Some Native
Americans games such lacrosse were also adopted for the new
neighbors.
Native American Names and Words:
Half of the
names of the States in
United States have Indian names.
There are also thousands of names for cities,
lakes, mountains, rivers, and other geographical
sites. European languages contain many words that derive
from Indian languages. Among the hundreds of Native words
incorporated to the English language are tobacco, barbeque,
wigwam, succotash, tobogan, papoose, opossum, skunk,
hickory, squash, moccasin, chipmunk, moose, macknaw and
tomahawk.
Source:
Amauta Series Lectures
NATIVE
AMERICANS FICTIONS AND FACTS
From: Ten Lies About Indigenous Science by Kay Marie
Porterfield (Co-Author of the Book Encyclopedia of
American Indian Contributions to the World)
Fiction:
Europeans "discovered" scientific knowledge, but
American Indians "stumbled upon" it – they didn’t know what
they were doing.
Fact: All scientific
knowledge comes from a process of trial and error – a messy
guessing game that involves many false starts and much
stumbling. Scientists first make an educated guess based on
their observations. Then they test it and carefully observe
the results to see if the guess was correct. If it wasn’t,
they guess again. The haphazardness of this process led
Albert Einstein to say, "If we knew what it was we were
doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
Pre-contact
American Indians used trial and error, carefully observing
the results of these trials. Three pieces of evidence,
selected from many, are:
-
Indians in the
North American Northeast used foxglove (Digitalis purpurea)
to treat heart problems. They administered it with extreme
care since high doses were needed and the plant is highly
toxic.
-
Manioc, a
staple food crop of Mesoamerican, Circum-Caribbean and
South American Tropical forest peoples, is poisonous in
its natural state. Four to five thousand years ago
indigenous people discovered a process to detoxify the
plant and began cultivating it.
-
Indigenous
people of Mesoamerica invented a four-step process to cure
vanilla, transforming it into a flavoring ingredient.
Vanilla processing plants were not established in Europe
until the 1700s because Europeans couldn’t figure out the
indigenous process.
Using loaded language to hide
the fact that pre-contact American Indians gained knowledge
in the same way all scientists do is not only biased
scholarship – it is racist scholarship.
Fiction:
American Indian knowledge and inventions sprung from hunches
or intuitions, rather than rigorous and systematic study.
Hunches and intuitions aren’t valid; linear thinking is.
Fact: Undoubtedly many
American Indian scientific discoveries were initially based
on intuition, as are many modern Western discoveries today.
Intuition is a critical part of science. If knowledge based
on hunches, intuitions and lightning bolts of inspiration
doesn’t count, then organic chemistry is invalid. (Freidrich
August von Kekule’s dream of a snake biting its tail enabled
him to visualize the structure of the benzene molecule and
birth the field of organic chemistry.) So is the periodic
table of elements, an inspiration revealed to Russian
chemist Mendeleev in a dream.
We can forget
about neurochemistry. (A dream showed Nobel prizewinner Otto
Lowei that the chemical messengers, we now call
neurotransmitters, are responsible for the flow of
information in the human brain.) We can write off
pasteurization, penicillin, and hundreds of other modern
discoveries and inventions while we’re at it.
Alexander
Graham Bell used intuitions that he called "a conquering
force within" to invent the telephone and Henri Poincare,
the mathematician who created the science of topology, said,
"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition
that we discover."
Holding American Indians to a
narrower definition of the scientific discovery process than
is used for Europeans is not only unfair scholarship – it is
racist scholarship.
Fiction: American Indians
did not know about the scientific method, so their knowledge
and inventions could not be scientific.
Fact: Even if the
scientific method were the only way to make discoveries,
American Indians can’t be faulted for not using it before
1492. Europeans didn’t use it either because it hadn’t yet
been invented. Historical researchers seldom mention this
critical fact.
Most scholars
credit Francis Bacon, an English philosopher and statesman
who lived from 1561 to1626, as the father of the scientific
method. Sometimes Galileo, an astronomer, who lived from
1564 to 1642, is also credited. Both were born well after
Columbus landed in the Americas. The fact that Galileo was
arrested by the Catholic Inquisition in 1633 for heresy and
held prisoner until he died in 1642 indicates that the
scientific method was not only unwelcome in Europe for at
least 150 years after 1492 – it was considered a sin and a
crime.
Insisting that pre-contact
American Indians ought to have used the scientific method
before it existed is not only sloppy scholarship – it is
racist scholarship.
Fiction: American Indians
(the Maya) independently invented the wheel, but it isn’t a
real invention because they only used it for toys.
Fact: Many European
scientific inventions started out as toys or "curiosities."
These include the telescope and the microscope. "We are more
ready to try the untried when what we do is
inconsequential," wrote philosopher Eric Hoffer. "Hence the
remarkable fact that many inventions had their births as
toys."
Scholars who
use wheeled transportation as a benchmark for measuring
civilization rarely take the natural environment into
account. Suitable draft animals did not exist in the
pre-contact Americas. The two largest animals – bison and
llamas – weren’t easily domesticated to pull carts or
chariots
Terrain was
another factor that discouraged the development of wheeled
transportation in the Americas. European new to North
America often found their wheeled wagons inappropriate for
the land they were trying to cross. Frequently they traded
this clumsy transport for American Indian forms of
transportation – the canoe, snowshoes and toboggans.
Indigenous people throughout the Americas used runners to
deliver communications. The Inca built a road system that
included suspension bridges for their runners.
Failing to consider the
environmental context in which American Indian science arose
is not only superficial scholarship – it is racist
scholarship.
Fiction:
American Indian people were living in Stone Age
culture at the time of conquest.
Fact: Although the polar
Inuit near Baffin Bay did use meteorites to make iron
blades, for the most part, other American Indians did not
work with iron (a prerequisite for entering the Iron Age).
American Indians did begin making metal tools before
Europeans did. The people of the Old Copper Culture in the
Great Lakes region of North America 7,000 years ago are
considered by many scientists to have been the oldest metal
workers in the world. They developed annealing to strengthen
the tools they made.
Pre-Columbian
metal workers invented sophisticated techniques for working
with other metals. Pre-contact metallurgists living in what
are now Ecuador and Guatemala learned how to work with
platinum, a metal that has the extremely high melting point
of 3218 degrees by developing a technique called sintering.
Europeans were unable to work platinum until the 19th
century. Metal workers in other parts of the Americas knew
how to solder, could make foil and used rivets to fasten
pieces of metal together.
In areas
where no metal deposits lay close to the surface, American
Indians made tools of bone, wood and stone. The blades of
their flint surgical instruments were so thin that the
incisions they made could not be duplicated until the advent
of laser surgery.
Focusing on the Iron Age while
failing to mention the metallurgical abilities of many
American Indian culture groups is not only ignorant
scholarship – it is racist scholarship.
Fiction:
The Aztec use of ritual sacrifice proves they were
bloodthirsty and barbaric. This deserves our attention, not
their accomplishments.
Fact: The Aztec did
practice did practice ritual sacrifice, using large numbers
of prisoners of war in these rituals. The Old World has a
history of ritual sacrifice and killing prisoners that could
just as easily be termed bloodthirsty and barbaric.
Hammaurabi’s
Code, considered a sign of emerging civilization by
scholars, established the death penalty in Babylon for 25
crimes in the Eighteenth Century B.C. By the Seventh Century
B.C., the Greeks of Athens had established the Draconian
Code that established death as the punishment for all
crimes. Roman law in the Fifth Century B.C. mandated
drowning, impalement, live burnings, drowning or beating to
death for executing prisoners.
According to
limited archaeological evidence, some groups of the Celts, a
dominant tribe of Western Europe that settled in what would
become the British Isles, practiced both ritual sacrifice
and headhunting. By the Eleventh Century A.D. William the
Conqueror outlawed the death penalty except during war, but
in the Sixteenth Century, Henry VIII ordered an estimated
72,000 people executed. Favored methods were burning at the
stake, boiling, beheading hanging and drawing and
quartering. In the 1700’s Britain had 222 crimes punishable
by death including stealing a rabbit and cutting down a
tree.
The
Inquisition, begun by the Catholic Church in the early 13th
century and that peaked between 1550 and 1650, focused on
eliminating heresy. Researchers who studied court documents
estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were put to
death in Europe. Many more were tortured. Victims included
midwives, herbal healers, single women who owned property
and lived alone, pagans, people whose neighbors didn’t like
them, and those who were in the wrong place at the wrong
time.
Emphasizing Aztec sacrifice in
order to minimize the culture’s accomplishment while turning
a blind eye to European historical violence is not only
self-serving scholarship – it is racist scholarship
Fiction:
European scientific knowledge was more advanced than that of
Indigenous Americans at the time of contact.
Fact: Pre-contact
American Indian healers had developed a sophisticated system
of medical treatment compared to European healers of the
time, who relied on bloodletting, blistering, religious
penance, and concoctions of lead, arsenic and cow dung to
treat disease. In addition to performing surgery, American
Indians from several culture groups understood the
importance of keeping wounds sterile and used botanical
antiseptics. They made syringes out of bird bones and animal
bladders to administer plant medicine.
Indians of
North, Meso and South America had developed so many
botanical medications by the time of contact that the
Spanish King, Philip II sent physician Francisco Hernando to
the Americas in 1570 to record Aztec medical knowledge and
bring it back to Europe. Eventually 200 American Indian
botanical remedies were included in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia,
an official listing of all effective medicines and their
uses.
Another area
of scientific knowledge in which American Indians excelled
was plant breeding. American Indian farmers, who had formed
a working knowledge of plant genetics between 5200 and 3400
B.C., used seed saving to create hundreds of varieties of
food crops.
By comparison
Europeans showed little interest in plant genetics. In 1865
when Gregor Mendel made public his experiments with hybrids,
the European scientific community scorned him. Not until the
early 1900s did European scientists begin to take
agricultural experimentation seriously.
Omitting the scientific and
technical accomplishments of American Indian while ignoring
the shortsightedness of the European science is not only
incomplete scholarship – it is racist scholarship.
Fiction:
American Indians have invented a number of positive things,
but they also invented scalping.
Fact: American Indians
probably learned the practice of scalping from the
Europeans. Although archaeologists have found a few
prehistoric human remains in the Americas that show evidence
of cut marks on the skulls, they disagree about whether
these marks are evidence of scalping. Absolutely no evidence
exists that scalping was a widespread practice in the
Americas before European contact. If it was practiced, it
was done by very few tribes and then very infrequently.
On the other
hand, scalping was a well-established tradition for
Europeans. Ancient Scythians (Russians) practiced it.
Herodotus, the Greek Historian, wrote of them in B.C. 440,
"The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and
softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it
thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps
and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number
of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he
esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a
quantity of these scalps together."
Much later
the English paid bounties for Irish heads. Because scalps
were easier to transport and store than heads, Europeans
sometimes substituted scalping for headhunting. Records show
that the Earl of Wessex England scalped his enemies in 11th
century.
In 1706 the
governor of Pennsylvania offered 130 pieces of eight for the
scalp of Indian men over twelve years of age and 50 pieces
of eight for a woman’s scalp. Because it was impossible for
those who paid the bounty to determine the victim’s sex –
and sometimes the age – from the scalp alone, killing women
and children became a way to make easy money.
During the
French and Indian Wars and later during the war between the
British and the Colonists, both the British and the French
encouraged their Indian allies to scalp their enemies
providing them with metal scalping knives.
The practice
of paying bounties for Indian scalps did not end until the
1800’s.
Disparaging American Indian
culture by blaming Indians for scalping while omitting
reference to the long standing European tradition of
bounties for scalps is not only partial scholarship – it is
racist scholarship.
Fiction:
Syphilis originated in the Americas. This cancels out any
positive contributions American Indians made.
Fact: Archeological
evidence provides strong evidence that syphilis was present
in Europe before Columbus and his men returned from their
first voyage to the Americas.
Excavations
at a friary in Hull, England, have uncovered at least a
dozen skulls displaying evidence of three-stage syphilis.
These have been carbon dated to between 1300 and 1450 A.D.
Pre-Columbian skeletons with syphilis have also been found
elsewhere in Europe, including Ireland, Naples and Pompeii,
as well as at an excavation in Israel. This physical
evidence lends credence to historical writings from Europe
that place syphilis in Europe between 150 and 200 years
before Columbus set sail on his first voyage.
Proponents of
the theory that syphilis originated in the Americas often
cite historical reports that an epidemic of syphilis laid
waste to French soldiers in 1494. Because the damage that
syphilis does to the body progresses at a slow rate, it is
unlikely that it could have been contracted the year before.
Authors who
claim as fact that syphilis originated in the Americas,
often fail to note that an estimated 65 percent or more of
American Indians died from small pox, typhoid, scarlet
fever, influenza, dysentery, diphtheria, chicken pox and
cholera brought to the America by Europeans. (Smallpox alone
had a mortality rate of 90 per 100 cases.)
Claiming that syphilis
originated in the Americas is not only scholarship that
draws hasty conclusions from flimsy evidence – it is racist
scholarship.
Fiction:
The indigenous peoples of the Americas were defeated by the
European military because the Europeans were intellectually
superior to the Indians.
Fact: Indigenous
populations of North, Meso and South America were decimated
by disease brought from Europe, diseases against which they
had no immunity. Modern military historians believe that
disease was the major factor in the military defeat of
American Indians.
By 1495, two
years after Columbus’ first voyage, fifty-seven to eighty
percent of the native population of Santa Domingo had died
from small pox according to R.S. Bray, author of Armies of
Pestilence-The Impact of Disease on History. (1994). By
1515, two-thirds of the Indians of Puerto Rico were dead
from the disease.
Ten years
after Cortez arrived in Mexico, 74 percent of the indigenous
people there had died from disease so that only six million
remained. Indians living in New England and Canada also died
in great numbers. All the time, more Europeans continued to
arrive on the continent.
Later small
pox would sweep across the North American continent, leaving
death in its wake. According to some estimates that about
one million one hundred and fifty thousand Indians lived
north of the Rio Grande in the early sixteenth-century. By
the early 1900s only about four hundred thousand Indians
lived in this area. Most died from European disease.
Not only were
American Indians outnumbered, one can only imagine the fear,
grief and social disruption these plagues caused them. In
addition to taking lives and land, Europeans took Indian
technological knowledge, claiming it as their own.
Asserting that European military
domination of American Indians occurred because Europeans
were intellectually superior and, at the same time, ignoring
the hundreds of Indian inventions that Europeans co-opted is
not only shoddy scholarship – it is racist scholarship.
Fiction: Europeans had
guns. Indians didn’t. This proves Europeans were far more
intellectually advanced than Indians.
Fact: While it is true
that European colonizers had firearms, this technology was a
relatively new invention. After obtaining guns from traders
and trappers, American Indians quickly became expert
marksmen. Despite their skill using guns and keeping them in
working order, they were not able to manufacture them or
able to get their hands on as many guns as the Europeans
possessed.
Although
history books often leave the impression that Europeans were
accomplished gun manufacturers well before contact, firearm
technology was still in its infancy when Columbus set sail.
The English did not have handguns until the 1375. The
Italians did not have them until 1397. The first mechanical
device for firing the handgun was not invented until 1427.
Europeans used crossbows as weapons of war until 1485 when
half of the English army was equipped with guns. Europeans
did not use guns for hunting game until 1515.
Basing a
claim of innate superior intelligence on an invention that
was only 117 years old and not in general use in 1492 is not
only is not only ridiculous scholarship – it is racist
scholarship.
Source:
Ten Lies About
Indigenous Science by Kay Marie Porterfield (Co-Author of
the Book Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to
the World)
http://www.kporterfield.com/aicttw/articles/lies.html
