Jessica Crabtree

Question: What do chocolate, potatoes, kayaks, witch hazel, rubber, and the US highway system have in common?

Answer: They were all developed by Native Americans. Below is a brief list of some of their most noteworthy achievements. It would be easy for most people to take these things for granted, or mistakenly attribute them to European civilizations. But take another look – it’s impossible to imagine a world without the brilliant ingenuity of Native Americans.

Food

Around 60% of the world’s food crops were developed by Native Americans. Many originated as wild plants that Native Americans bred and cultivated for multiple purposes. Within the last few centuries they have been exported around the world where many have become staple crops. Among these are corn, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, pumpkins, blueberries, strawberries, sunflowers, chocolate, and vanilla.

Medicine

A huge number of the world’s medicines – including quinine for the treatment of malaria, ipecac, laxatives, antibacterials, painkillers – even petroleum jelly – were developed by American Indians thousands of year ago. Their knowledge of botany was so extensive that Western science has only begun to tap into its potential applications.

Many of the cultures of Central and South America had advanced knowledge of surgery and produced remarkable medical tools. Aztec scalpels, for example, were so finely made that none sharper have been made in modern times.

Infrastructure

The extensive trade networks of North American Indians spanned the continent from coast to coast and became the basis for our modern highway system. The Anasazi of the American Southwest designed an extremely efficient network of highways that covered an area as large as the country of Ireland. The highway system of the Inca in South America was fully maintained despite containing more than 14,000 roads and covering an area as large as Continental Europe. The main highway alone was over 5,000 miles long – the longest in the ancient world.

In modern-day Arizona, the magnificent site of Pueblo Grande built by the ancient Hohokam was engineered with water-tight clay irrigation canals that are still in operation today in the city of Phoenix, which was built over the original pueblo framework. The pueblos of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon were the most massive apartments ever built on the American continent up until the rise of modern skyscraper complexes. The Aztec pyramid in Choula is 15% bigger than the biggest pyramid in Egypt.

And did I mention democracy? The Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy is the oldest continuing democracy in the world. It is still functioning today in its ancient homeland in upstate New York. In fact, historians believe that one of the single greatest influences in shaping early American democracy, next to the ideals of the European Enlightenment, was the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy. Many of the founding fathers proposed the Iroquois as a model for the new country.

Have you thanked an Indian today?