South Peace Historical Society

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  • Table of Contents

    • Part 1: First Nations of the Peace River Region
    • Part 2: The Fur Trade Era
    • Part 3: Transportation and Communication
    • Part 4: Old Timers and the Price of Land
    • Part 5: Dawson Creek: The Story of the Community
    • Part 6: Mysteries, Adventures and Indian Legends
    • Part 7: Arts, Crafts and Recreation
    • Part 8: Agriculture
    • Part 9: Church Histories
    • Part 10: Schools
    • Part 11: Health Care
    • Part 12: Industries and Enterprises
    • Part 13: Policing the Peace
    • Part 14: Pouce Coupe, Rolla, and Other South Peace Communities
    • Part 15: Chetwynd and the Fort St. John Area
    • Part 16: The Alberta Peace
    • Part 17: Natural History of the Peace River Region
    • Part 18: Interviews with Old Timers
    • Part 19: Remembering Our Veterans

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01-115: Assessment of Indian Contributions to North American Civilization

 
By Dorthea Calverley
“Any one of these has been more valuable to commerce than all the gold the Spanish Conquistadors ever took from the (West) Indies.” That is the assessment of Dr. Z. Pohorecky of the Anthropology Department of the University of Saskatchewan. He was referring to tobacco, quinine, and rubber, and the foods maple syrup, squash, buckwheat, artichokes, peanuts, vanilla, potatoes, cacao, corn, sugar, beans (common and lima), sunflowers, pumpkins, cotton, tapioca, tomatoes, rubber and chicle (for chewing gum) and more. How could he have omitted pineapples, which Columbus discovered?

To these we must add wild parsnip used by the Indian shamans – it now yields a drug active against pneumonia and meningitis. Curare, once used for poisoning arrows, is now used routinely to relax muscle tension when doctors operate. There is a yam (sweet potato) from the tropics that yields a drug for arthritis. Angels’ trumpet or Daturia yields a poultice for blood poisoning, widely used until we got the sulphas and penicillin.

Professor Pohorecky did not mention any of the flowers whose seeds are “big business” all over Europe and North America. The list would include at least these: petunias, nicotiana, dahlia (whose tubers the Indians used as food), canna lilies, papayas, Kalmia, verbena marigold (all of the “French” and African kinds, not the “pot marigold” or calendula) fuchsias, scarlet sage, salpiglossis, Browallia, cup flower, morning glory, cypress vine, spider flower or Cleomia, nasturtium, tiger flower or tigridia, cosmos, zinnia, and poinsettia, California poppies, and many varieties of cacti.

Among the vegetables, the sweet red and green peppers are important ingredients in many dishes around the world. The hot peppers appear in almost every cuisine now, but were unknown outside of North America until the 1500’s. The potato is rated as the most important single vegetable in the world. What would cooks do without tomatoes, another North American plant? North American Indians introduced cranberries along with turkeys – think of the commercial value of the saskatoon berries in the pemmican that kept the fur traders going!

We could go on and on – but meanwhile, just consider how many gaps there would be in our supermarket shelves if all of the things that the Indians showed to the white “discoverers” were suddenly taken away!

« 01-114: Local Fur-Buyer

01-116: On the Credit Side for the Treaty Makers »

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