Indian Givers Quotes

“Even in this high-tech age, the low-tech plant continues to be the key to nutrition and health.”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

“The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense.”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

“The myth of the pioneer family or lone frontiersman venturing into virgin forest to hack out a meager homestead is belied by the thoroughly organized commercial value of such ventures. The main figure in the settlement of the west was the land company, which frequently operated not only on the edge of civilization but on the edge of legality as well.”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

“Tobacco was the first of the New World drugs to be widely accepted in the Old World, and the European zest for it played a major role in opening North America to colonization. Contemporary civic mythology of the United States overlooks this role of America as drug supplier to the world.”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

“The industrial revolution did not begin in villages such as Kahl, in the workshops of skilled urban craftsmen, or even in the factories of Manchester and Liverpool—it began in the mines and on the plantations of America.”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

“discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

“By contrast, the subsequent waves of Puritans in their search for profits quickly uprooted all natives and sold many of them into slavery without bothering to extend to them the right to become Christian before being sold or killed.”
― Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World