40 pages • 1 hour read
Jack WeatherfordIndian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World
Jack WeatherfordNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Architecture and Urban Planning”
Chapter 12 centers on architecture and urban planning. Most Indian civilizations, Weatherford observes, are built on the Pacific Coast’s Ring of Fire, a chain of active volcanoes; “despite this precarious situation, nearly every major Indian civilization was built on or very near this mountain range” (220). Indian buildings on fault lines have survived for centuries—while many modern buildings topple and fail—because Indian architects built with shock accommodation and movement in mind. The flexibility built into the masonry allows the buildings to move with the quakes (221). While modern buildings may borrow from the aesthetics of Indian architecture, “none of them uses Indian principle of architecture or science” (222), and Indian technology in this area is largely forgotten.
Weatherford attributes this to the Europeans’ “fanatical obsession with the arch” (222). Vaults, domes, and arched windows were highly preferred in the Old World over the straight lines and pyramid shapes used by the Indians (222). While the Indians did occasionally use arches, they preferred it for their homes rather than for large public works. As smaller arched buildings made with flimsier materials, wigwams, sweat lodges, and igloos would either survive an earthquake or not create too much damage if they collapsed (223).
The Europeans did borrow some elements of Indian architecture. Spanish colonists used the mud-brick materials of the Indian settlement of Acoma. The English copied the stockade and wooden fort design from the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Virginia, and settlers in the Great Plains adopted underground sod houses—that is, until they had the materials to shift to above-ground, wooden homes. The latter, Weatherford notes, cost much more to heat and cool, and are more susceptible to tornado damage (226).
Indian urban planners were also influential. The Inca preferred to build their cities on a grid, in contrast to Old World European cities, where streets were narrow and twisted and turned. Recognizing the benefits of this layout, Europeans settling in the Americas often built their cities on old and well-situated Indian settlements, embracing their grid structures but destroying the Indian towns and forgetting that it was in fact the Indians who had settled and picked the location first. Weatherford notes, “Myths rose about how the colonists literally carved their settlements out of the uninhabited forest”—this is even true of Washington, DC (230-31).
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Pathfinders”
Chapter 13 concentrates on Indian vehicles (or lack thereof) and on the roads and highway systems they blazed. Indian vehicles are, above all, reliable. When gasoline runs out in remote locations, the canoe remains the most reliable form of transport: “Newer technology had brought in faster vehicles, but they depended on outside lines of supply that flowed only sporadically. By contrast, the canoe always worked” (237). European boats simply required more to function properly. Heavy and clunky, they need oars and multiple rowers, while the canoe can be used by a solitary person and easily carried on land (238). In the Arctic the kayak filled a similar function (239).
There were drawbacks to the Indians’ vehicular priorities. They never developed larger ships necessary for ocean travel, as the Europeans did; “consequently, the Americans never became sailors of the high seas, and their civilizations remained inward-looking” (24). Their ships were ideal for traveling inland in difficult-to-navigate areas.
While the Old World specialized in wheel-based vehicles like carts and carriages, Indians did not, as they lacked the domesticated animals (oxen, horses, etc.) to pull them (241). Nevertheless they built incredible roads to travel by foot (241). The Inca paved the Capac Nan, or “Beautiful Road,” which at over 5,000 miles in length was the longest road in the world (244). Indian messengers called chasquis used the Capac Nan and other roads to transmit messages at the same speed as the Pony Express hundreds of years later—all on foot (245).
Ironically, it was the Indians’ incredibly developed path system that allowed Europeans to conquer them with such ease and speed. Weatherford notes, “Those areas with the best roads were conquered first” (245). Even where roads did not yet exist, the colonizers still benefited. By pushing Indians from their homelands into new territories, white people forced them to blaze new trails, which colonizers then benefited from after expelling the Indians for good (246). The impact of Indian trailblazing can be seen to this day: The modern-day highway systems in the United States “largely follow Indian trails and roads” (247).
Chapter 14 Summary: “When Will America Be Discovered?”
Chapter 14 opens with Weatherford meeting an old Yuqui woman in the Southern Amazon. Blind, deaf, and helpless, she was the oldest survivor of her tribe, which had barely come into any contact with the outside world; “like the evil spirits of the dead, the whites brought disease and death to the Yuquis, the real people” (249). As Weatherford ponders on the end of her life, he reflects on the depressing reality of many Indians today. In light of all their innovations and strengths, he cannot “help but wonder why [the Indians] had fallen so low and been so oppressed” (251).
He attributes the subjugation of American Indians to several factors. First, they lacked domesticated animals. For Europeans, horses proved incredibly useful in war. Cattle could pull heavy loads and plow the earth. Animal products of many kinds—eggs, milks, cheeses, etc.—enriched the European diet (251). Beyond their utilization of animal resources, Europeans also innovated sophisticated machines and technologies like ships, mills, and firearms. In short, they appropriated both animate and inanimate power to enact their will.
The Indians also lacked resistance to the virulent epidemic diseases the Europeans brought over from the Old World. Disease arrived as a grim bannerman of the European colonizers; before the Europeans even engaged in battle, epidemics had preceded them, decimating native populations. Weatherford argues, “The Indian civilizations crumbled in the face of the Old World not because of any intellectual or cultural inferiority. They simply succumbed in the face of diseases and brute strength” (252).
Weatherford returns to the Yuqui woman to make his most pressing point. In her death only a few weeks after his visit, human civilization lost a treasure trove of knowledge. As more Indian cultures are lost or fall to the wayside, how many more amazing innovations might we lose? Weatherford concludes, “The world has yet to utilize fully the gifts of the American Indians” (254).
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
As Weatherford concludes his examination of Native American contributions—vehicles, architecture, urban development, and roads—he emphasizes that the Indians focused on developing internal, self-facing technologies. Meanwhile, Europeans put their energy into outward-facing activities: global commerce, exploration and colonization, and military conquest. In the context of Chapters 12 through 14, this manifests in their development of ships capable of crossing the Atlantic Ocean, which enabled them to come into contact with the New World—the advantage that proved most crucial in their dominance over their rivals in Muslim and Asian empires and the entire world.
Weatherford emphasizes that American Indians were not defeated due to any innate weakness or inferiority. Instead, it was their cultural prioritization of skill sets like farming and medicine that rendered them unsuited to resisting large-scale conquest. He argues that “while the American Indians had spent millennia becoming the world’s greatest farmers and pharmacists, the people of the Old World had spent a similar period amassing the world’s greatest arsenal of weapons” (252). Crucially, it was the European expertise at this particular skill set—large-scale military action and conquest—that rendered all the Indians’ genius subsidiary. Furthermore, because the process of colonization encourages not the complete destruction of indigenous peoples but the assimilation of their knowledge and settlements, Europeans could still obtain technologies in those areas they had neglected. They did not need to innovate grid-based towns, or lengthy and complicated road systems, or any of the Indians’ other inventions; they simply conquered their creators and took them.
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