Brilliant. When I became the director of the Native American-focused Funk Heritage Center at Reinhardt University, I knew next to nothing about Native Americans and began to read voraciously to fill the void. Almost by chance I picked up Jack Weatherford’s remarkable book Indian Givers on the Native American cultures and civilizations that would influence the rest of the world so profoundly after European “discovery.”

Discovery, financed with Spanish gold and inspired by Portuguese navigational expertise, opened the door to the “Entrada”-conquest by soldiers of fortune and Catholic priests for the most part. Diseases introduced by Europeans accomplished much of the subjugation of the ancient empires of the Americas and collapsed Native American populations.

Gold stolen outright from these feudal-like kingdoms flowed to Spain and enriched the state-sponsored (or often state-ignored) pirates of England. But it was silver that revolutionized the currencies and economies of most of western Europe. Silver from the mines of Bolivia inflated European currencies eight fold, fueled the growth of capitalism, and made a powerhouse of the Spanish Empire-even as the Spanish made slaves of the the Indians of the Bolivian highlands. The mining center of Potosi became the largest city in the new world . This opening description fired my imagination and introduced me to a world about which I knew nothing. And the writing was like nothing I had read before. Weatherford’s insightful and broad grasp of the subject combined with his passion for narrative is rare in historical writing–or at least rare among historians who write.

In the nether lands (and oceans) of the new world, piracy and slavery swelled the coffers of joint- stock companies., the precursors of modern corporations. Businesses like the Hudson’s Bay Company paid rich dividends to their risk-tolerant investors. European nations left much of the “taming” of the Americas to these exploitative companies.

Trading companies oversaw the enslavement of “prisoners of war,” victims of inter-tribal wars captured by other Indians and trafficked them to the the labor- starved plantations of England’s southern most American colonies-the Carolinas, Georgia and the Caribbean. Profit from indigo, tobacco, cocoa, sugar and the exotic new sources of food for a grain-dependent Europe generated the plantation economy. This near- industrial scale of production required massive labor forces. Owners were willing to pay dearly for labor and the slave economy came to predominate. Before the African trade swelled to unimaginable proportions, there was a trade i Indian slaves. Tribal wars and vendettas took on new energy as the resulting prisoners could be sold on the slave market. Inspired by demand, Native Americans themselves became the suppliers of slaves.

At the same time, Native American cultures and civilization were infecting the old world with energetic new ideas and influences that would revolutionize the west. Some of these changes began in easily forgotten and mundane ways. Weatherford says Native American experimentation anticipated and fed the rise of scientific agriculture in Europe. Potatoes, cultivated with great sophistication and in subtle variety by the people of the Andes revolutionized the agriculture and food ways of a vast majority of both Asiatic and European peoples. Cotton would inspire mechanical solutions that led to industrialization in western Europe. Weatherford attributes the cotton gin, spinning jenny, flying shuttle and all the other machines that characterized Britain’s rise as the world’s purveyor of cotton cloth to the crops developed by American’s Native Americans.

A tiny insect from Mexico, the cochineal, would add brilliant blue color to the fabrics woven in Britain’s mills as would the difficult- to- process indigo dye. According to Weathterford, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands were precursors of the factory system and were manned by Native Peoples forced into slave or slave-like conditions, a forecasting perhaps of near-slave conditions in Europe’s textile mills.

The “Food Revolution” did not end with potatoes, which were only the first of many new introductions to European diets. Sugar created a world wide appetite for sweets that has never been sated. If he were writing this book today, Weatherford might point out how sugar is one of the culprits in the diabetes epidemic.

The sudden rise in available food caused the European population to ballon. The population of Ireland doubled in the century following the beginning of potato cultivation. Weatherford argues that at the time of his writing, three-fifths of the world’s crops were of Native American origin. One only need think of the impact of corn to see the likelihood that this argument is true. Or, an you imagine Italian or middle eastern cuisines without tomatoes or chilies, or Asian cuisine without the ubiquitous sweet potato? Yet all of these-and hundreds of others- are imports from the New World.

Native American ideas also fertilized the political ideals and philosophies of Europe and the emerging American identity. The Iroquois Confederation likely inspired the unification movement within the American Revolution. Interaction with Native Americans colored the thoughts of political philosophers like Rousseau and Locke, ideas that encouraged the concept of the Rights of Man. Our “federal system,” combining centralized national authority while certain powers are reserved to the component states has its roots among the Iroquois. Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congresses, was himself a student of Native American life and their systems of government. The idea of the American Indians as “noble savages” opened the window on the idea that all men have certain “unalienable” rights and that personal freedom should only be limited by the strictest necessities of the collective best interest.

Likewise, Weatherford illustrates that there has always been resistance among America’s Native Peoples to the arbitrary and exploitative demands of governments and businesses. He goes in to some exciting details, exciting because they offer a new perspective on revolutionary movements. For example, the long and difficult challenge Mexico has faced as it imposes western-style state-ism on a population that is largely Native American. His description of the Creek Revolt (Red Stick War) against US efforts to deprive them of their homelands anticipates much of the newer scholarship focused on the Gulf borderlands, the Creek Wars, British intrigue with the Creeks and the nature of the fruitless campaign against the Creeks’ brothers, the Seminoles. He foreshadows the more recent treatments that explain how and why fugitive African slaves played a critical role in Creek resistance-apparently the first instance in which Native Americans and Africans combined to resist western expansion by the all-white democracies in the US–and in the southern states.

Before my enthusiasm for this work carries me into too much detail, I will only mention that Weatherford’s treatment of Native American medicinal practices and the proliferation of opium-based hallucinatory drugs and the legal as well as illegal industries surrounding them have played complex roles, driving the exploitation of Native Americans but also revolutionizing world-wide medical practices.

For those of us brought up on sanitized accounts of Indians as bit players, crazed savages or philosophers-in-loin-cloths spouting oriental- like wisdom, or as romantics who latched on to films like “Last of the Mohicans” (1992)or “Dances with Wolves” (1990) as accurate portrayals, Indian Givers is a cold bath indeed. But it examines Native Americans in a more realistic way. Instead of explaining their influence as the sad subplot to the europeanization of the Americas, Weatherford offers a narrative of Indian parity and influence, difficult to refute and inspiring in its richness. as well as world wide in its application. I will be reviewing Charles Mann’s best selling books 1491: America Before Columbus (2005) and his sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011), later. If your reading attention span tends to lag, read Weatherford’s Indian Givers first. This short work is like diving head first into a cold, clear spring. You will not forget the experience.