Native Roots Quotes

“This appeared clearly in one of the earliest burial mounds found on the Hopewell farm. There, archaeologists found a young man and a young woman buried side by side. As Stuart J. Fiedel describes the burial in Prehistory of the Americas, “She was bedecked with, and surrounded by, thousands of pearl beads and buttons made of copper-covered wood and stone; she also wore copper bracelets. Both individuals wore copper earspools, copper breastplates, and necklaces of grizzly bear canines” (Fiedel). The skulls had even been buried with artificial noses made of copper. Their bodies were then surrounded by a line of copper earspools. Archaeologists found more than 100,000 pearls in the Hopewell mounds (Prufer).”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“Wyoming got an Algonquian name from Pennsylvania meaning “large prairie,” but the adoption came only after a long fight. Decades before the settling of the present state of Wyoming, its name achieved popular acclaim after an 1809 poem, “Gertrude of Wyoming,” by Thomas Campbell. The poem recalled the Iroquois defeat of a group of Tory settlers and the ensuing death of 350 of them during the chaos of the American Revolution. By the time Congress created the territory of Wyoming in 1868, ten communities in Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kansas, and Nebraska had already claimed the name. The name had grown in popularity and was proposed for the new Western territory, even though it had no historical relationship to the area, to the native people who lived there, or to the languages spoken there. One anti-Wyoming group of congressmen favored the name Cheyenne, since that name referred to the native people living there, but Congress rejected Cheyenne for fear that Europeans might confuse it with the French word chienne, meaning “female dog.” No one in the seemly Victorian era wanted a state whose name meant “bitch” (G. R. Stewart 1945).”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“bear Indian names such as Yukon, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in the north, and Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Arizona in the south. Often these names reflect the tribal names of the people who lived in an area. Such names might be a tribe’s own name for itself, or it might be the name given them by a neighboring group. We have states named for the Dakota, the Kansa, the Massachuset, the Illini, and the Utes. Some are names that describe the land or the water. Iowa is a Siouan word for “beautiful land,” Wyoming derives from the Algonquian for a large prairie, Michigan is Ojibwa for “great water,” and Minnesota is Siouan for “waters that reflect the sky.” The original meanings are often rather straightforward, but translators and local boosters have usually worked to derive the most poetic name possible. Nebraska means “flat” or “broad river” in the Omaha language; this makes it similar in meaning but not pronunciation to the Algonquian term for “long river” that eventually became Connecticut. Ohio means “good river” in Iroquoian languages, and Oregon means “beautiful water” in Algonquian. Kentucky has one of the more mysterious meanings: “dark and bloody ground.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“The word blizzard probably derives from an Indian word, although its origin is now lost. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written record of blizzard comes from the frontiersman Colonel Davy Crockett in 1834. Since Crockett used it without explanation, as though the reader would already know the word, we may assume that blizzard had already attained common usage by that time.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“The natives of North America were some of the best hunters ever known anywhere in the world; their skill and accuracy frequently astounded the early European explorers. When the Arctic explorer Martin Frobisher made his voyage to Baffin Island, the skill of the Inuit so impressed him that he kidnapped a hunter to take back to England as a prize. The hunter’s skill with a harpoon thrilled Queen Elizabeth I so much that she invited him to harpoon her royal swans for the amusement of her court.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“By the time the settlers and pioneers of America reached the West Coast, they had gone through many dramatic landscapes, but nothing quite prepared them for the size of the California redwoods. The giant trees led to many disputes, including the very name that should be applied to them. In 1853, British botanists proposed to name the trees Wellingtonia gigantea and called them “Wellingtonias” in honor of the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. They justified the name on the grounds that the greatest tree in the world should bear the name of the greatest general in the world. Fortunately, the Americans resisted this choice and supported instead a native American name. Conservationists felt that so great a tree should not be named for a military general. They proposed instead the name Sequoia sempervirens, “evergreen Sequoia,” in honor of the man who invented a way of writing the Cherokee language and worked hard to promote literacy among his people. Both the coastal redwoods and the giant redwoods of the Sierra Nevada bear the genus name Sequoia, in honor of one of the greatest Indian intellectuals and leaders of the nineteenth century.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“When he demanded gold, the Indians brought him copper, and when he demanded silver, they brought him silvery mica, which they mined in the North Carolina mountains, in sheets up to three feet wide and three feet long. De Soto found little precious metal, but an abundance of pearls, especially in the mortuary temples. In one town alone his expedition found 25,000 pounds of pearls. The mortuary temples of the people of Cutifachiqui astounded the Spaniards, who had already seen the cathedrals of Spain, the mosques and fountains of the Arabs, the palace of Montezuma in Mexico, and the gold ransom of Atahualpa in Peru. Outside the massive doors into the temple that housed the pearls, twelve wooden giants stood guard. The huge figures held over their heads massive clubs covered with strips of copper and studded with what appeared to the Spaniards to be diamonds, but may have been mica chips. The Indians had decorated the roof of one temple with pearls and feathers so that it looked to the Spaniards like a building from a fairy tale. Along the sides of the roof, pearls had been suspended from threads so thin that the pearls seemed to be floating in the air around the temple. Inside the temples the Spaniards saw rows of chests, each filled with pearls of uniform size. The Spaniards could not carry all the pearls, but they selected out the best ones for themselves. Ironically, even though De Soto’s expedition was the first into the area, his men also found in the temple some European trade goods—glass, cheap beads, and a rosary—indicating”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“The English explorer Martin Frobisher developed a novel technique for using the services of the Inuit as pilots for his ship during his first Arctic exploration, in 1576. When he sailed around Baffin Island, searching for a northwest passage to the Pacific, Frobisher watched for Inuit men out in their kayaks. When he saw one, he leaned over the bow of his ship and rang a bell, which he held out as though offering a gift to the passing native. When the friendly Inuit came closer and reached up for the bell, Frobisher grabbed him and forced him to pilot the large ship through the Arctic bays and inlets.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“Soon after Cortez conquered Mexico, the French explorer Jacques Cartier cautiously sailed his ships up America’s North Atlantic coast. In 1534 his expedition explored the coast of Canada, and like Cortez, he also wanted to venture inland in search of treasures and new cities. To prepare for the excursion into the interior, he kidnapped Taignoagny and Agaya, two coastal natives whom he took back to France with him to teach them to speak French. Cartier returned in the spring of the following year with the interpreters, whom he used to guide his ships up the St. Lawrence River to the Huron territory of Chief Donnaconna and on to the Huron village of Hochelaga, which became Montreal.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“Despite all the Indian ruins and the abiding native communities, plaques around Lake Itasca proclaim that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft discovered the source of the Mississippi River in July 1832. For the Indian people who have lived here so many thousands of years, Lake Itasca was obviously not “lost” or “undiscovered” before 1832. They knew it well, albeit under another name. Schoolcraft “discovered” the source of the Mississippi only because an Ojibwa chief guided him and his small expedition to the site.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

“The white settlers of St. Louis nicknamed their settlement “Mound City” in recognition of the twenty-six Indian mounds they found there, but those mounds have since been cleared away to make room for the modern city.”
― Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America