Indian Contributions :: essays research papers

President BushThe strength of our Nation comes from its people. As the early inhabitants of this bang-up land, the native peoples of North America played a unique lineament in the shaping of our Nations history and culture. During the month when we prevent Thanksgiving, we especiall(a)y celebrate their heritage and the contributions of American Indian and Alaska Native peoples to this Nation.The contribution of the American Indian to the English language is something that is a lot overlooked. These words range from such everyday English words as "raccoon," "moose," "quahog" and "mackinaw" to literally thousands of head names "Chicago," "Tallahassee," "Cheyenne," "Hackensack," "Keokuk," "Rockaway," and many others. Historians point out that the graduation settlers on American shores discovered many things they had never seen before and which appeared nowhere else in the world. To shell the English words for an Indian objects the settlers simply spelled out as exceed they could in English their impression of the Indian sounds. Understandably there were often various spellings. An early spelling for skunk was "squuncke," a persimmon was first spelled "putchamins" and the Niagara was the "ongniaahra." One political word widely used today, "caucus," appeared in some(prenominal) of the Indian languages.A case can be made that bear on with American Indians actually served as one of the catalysts for the Scientific Revolution in Europe. In 1571 King Philip II of Spain commissioned physician Francisco Hernandez to document the medicative seeds, plants, and herbs that the Aztec used. Spanish physicians exploring indigenous American cures soon published three textbooks base on this information including one on surgery.Although more than 200 of the plants that American Indians (from North, Meso-, and south-central America) used as remedies became p art of the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, an official listing of all effective medicines, the originators of these remedies often remain unacknowledged.Freeze-dried food, syringes, rootbeer, rubberized clothing, beef jerky, and many of the tenets of the coupled States Constitution are only a few of the independent inventions and pilot program discoveries that American Indian people gave to the world.American Indian agriculture has had a significant effect on worldwide agriculture and economy. Jack Weatherford, in his book Indian Givers How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, pointed out that Indians cultivated over three hundred food crops, and contributed to the world three- fifths of the crops now in cultivation. The Indian farmers of North and South America gave the world corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, squash, chocolate, vanilla, papayas, persimmons, jicama, pecans, chilies, hickory nuts, peanuts, cassava, sunflower seeds, maple syrup, tapioca, and avocados.