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Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World
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Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Indian Healer”
In Chapter 10 Weatherford argues that New World pharmaceutical agents and medical innovations represent “the basis for modern medicine and pharmacology” (184), but he notes that these cures—and the Indian role in their discovery—have not yet been appreciated. He lists several cures discovered by Indians to establish a pattern: the Indians often had remedies that went unheeded for years, sometimes centuries, until Europeans “discovered” them later. These cures were “gifts,” Weatherford argues, “that western medical science failed to recognize and then had to invent independently through a laborious and expensive process of research” (165).
Primary among these medicines is quinine, the cure for malaria. Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that the Europeans introduced to the Americas (176). Though the Quechan-speaking people of the Andes first discovered a cure in Peruvian bark, from which quinine is derived, Sir Ronald Ross won a Nobel Prize for his research hundreds of years later, in 1902. The Quechuan Indians who first discovered the cure received no such honors (178).
Another cure discovered by the Indians is ipecac. Ipecac induces vomiting and is used to treat the lethal malady of amoebic dysentery. A Dutch doctor named Helvetius, called a “quack” by Weatherford, supposedly cured French King Louis XIV’s son with it in the 1880s, launching him and his family to wealth and fame (181). Well into the 1500s the Europeans still had no remedy for scurvy, the scourge of seafarers, until the Huron showed French explorer Jacques Cartier a tonic of pine needles that cured it. As Weatherford sardonically notes, “In appreciation Cartier kidnapped the Indian chief and the other Indians in hopes that they could lead him to mountains of gold” (182). Europeans lost knowledge of the cure until the 1790s, when James Lind “walked into history” (183) by discovering the disease to be caused by vitamin C deficiency.
Whatever reputation the Indians did enjoy as healers was quickly exploited by capitalists. A prime example of this is found in soda drinks, in which stimulant medicinal plants were combined with caffeine and other flavors to make Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi. The hawking of these sodas by salesmen, who connected them to Indian medicine to push product, contributed to a new association of Indian remedies with “shams and quackery” (171).
Meanwhile, Old World diseases ravaged native populations, which had no natural immunity to smallpox, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, and other maladies (174). Weatherford writes, “Probably 90 percent of the American Indian population died within the first century after the European arrival” (174).
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Drug Connection”
Chapter 11 explores narcotics and alcohol in the New World. First, it shows how the Europeans appropriated drugs that the natives had previously used for spiritual purposes and in moderation. Second, it examines how the peddling of these drugs became immensely profitable to colonizers in the 20th century and beyond.
While Indians had long chewed the coca leaf, in the 1880s Europeans discovered how to create cocaine. The drug exploded in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. In the ’80s Roberto Suarez emerged as a cocaine kingpin in Bolivia, while the drug was refined and processed in Colombia (178). As a result the price of coca leaves has skyrocketed, meaning the Indians are priced out of a commodity that is “a focal point of [their] cultural identity” (177). The peyote plant in Northern Mexico and the Southeast United States underwent a similar change. Like coca, peyote and psychedelic mushrooms were wrested from natives, who used them as an “escape from the strictures of white civilization,” until both became “just one more drug used solely for secular purposes by whites” (210-11).
Europeans also distilled various American plants like corn, potatoes, and sugar into powerful liquors. Besides profiting immensely from their export, Europeans used these liquors to subdue the native population, which was unused to alcohol of such potency. As one Mexican viceroy, Bernardo de Calvez, observed, liquor “forces [the Indians] to recognize very clearly their obligatory dependence with regard to ourselves” (214).
The peddling of narcotic substances has been immensely beneficial to colonizers. The British processed and sold opium to the Chinese for access silver from the mines of the Americas (205). The Spanish rendered the fruit of the cacao bush into chocolate, a stimulant whose flavor and reputation as an aphrodisiac made it incredibly popular the world over (206-8). The propagation and trade of tobacco, another New World drug, was critical to the success of the American colonies and, in turn, the United States. In his studies of far-flung places Weatherford concludes that tobacco use has spread to the farthest reaches of the world: “Contemporary civic mythology of the United States overlooks this role of America as drug supplier to the world“ (180-81).
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
In these chapters Weatherford makes especially clear the clash of cultures between the Indians and the Europeans. Many New World innovations were palatable to the Europeans: the concept of liberty, for example, was agreeable to most. Similarly, good-tasting and easy-to-grow food cannot be argued with. Perhaps it makes sense that matters of medicine and the body would be most controversial, as these values are often intensely personal and culturally distinct from one group to the next.
The Aztecs, for example, had detailed knowledge of blood circulation early in their history; they “may have had,” Weatherford writes, “the most thorough understanding of human anatomy of any society in the world of the sixteenth century” (188). This detailed knowledge came from the practice of human sacrifice. On several feast days every year, the hearts of thousands of sacrificial victims were ritualistically removed—a practice Europeans found abhorrent. Weatherford does not go into the European taboos that precluded these anatomical discoveries in the Old World, as it is outside the scope of his work, but it is worth noting them here. The Europeans had a strong cultural taboo against the breaching of bodily integrity, particularly of human bodies, until the mid-to-late 17th century. Ironically, if the Europeans had consulted with the Aztecs more closely, they might have learned that they conducted their rituals for a meaningful religious purpose: they did so in emulation of their gods, whom they believed sacrificed themselves for the salvation of mankind and the cosmos. This tradition is not unlike the Christian story of Jesus Christ and the practice of the Catholic Mass, which itself represents a reenactment of God’s sacrifice for the world.
Europeans were repulsed by some cultural differences but used others to their advantage. While the Indians maintained a healthy relationship with the narcotic substances they were familiar with, like the coca leaf, peyote, and psychedelic mushrooms, “this moderation disappears when it comes to alcohol” introduced by the Europeans (214). We have been exposed to this concept before; at the powwow in Chapter 2, a call for donations is made to “a program combating alcohol and drug addiction among Indian people […] they denounce the evils that these two substances have brought to them” (120). The European attitude toward this discovered weakness sits in stark contrast to the behavior of the Indians. Seeing the Europeans suffering from scurvy, the Huron tribes readily provided them with a pine needle tonic that cured it (182). Seeing the natives afflicted with alcoholism, the Europeans used it to subdue them (213-14).
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