A Sudden Awakening to the Gifts of Indians : Culture: A chance encounter in Europe led to an obsession with American Indians. Now, Jack Weatherford aims to promote their place in history.

As a budding anthropologist, Jack Weatherford went to Kahl, Germany, to study the impact of an atomic power plant on the 2,000-year-old town. He figured the technological behemoth was the biggest thing to happen there since the Roman Empire sent its legions into the dark forests of Central Europe.

Instead, in this unlikely setting, he discovered the American Indians and their often-overlooked contributions to the world--including the daily life of an obscure German village.

Weatherford found that life in 17th-Century Kahl improved greatly because crops first cultivated by American Indians had been transplanted to Europe. The potato directly benefited townspeople. As a livestock feed, corn ultimately increased the population’s protein intake. Imported cotton spawned small-scale manufacturing plants that meant residents “had more clothes and cleaner clothes.”

The more he learned, the more intrigued the soft-spoken South Carolina native became. “I was literally just very surprised by it,” he recalls. “I was thinking: ‘God, why didn’t I know that. I’ve got a Ph.D. in anthropology and I’m here in Europe, and I’m bumping into this American stuff.’ ”

Today, Weatherford, 44, speaks of that moment in the mid-1970s as an intellectual and emotional awakening. Propelled by his newfound curiosity, he continued to investigate Indian culture after returning to this country. The result is that Weatherford, who has never taken a course on the American Indian, has become a popularizer of their cultures and their accomplishments and contributions.

“It was this intellectual thing that hooked up with something inside, and it grew from a little bit of an interest toward a hobby or a vocation to an obsession,” says Weatherford, a professor of anthropology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn.. “Finally I said: ‘What the hell, even though I’m not an expert, this stuff is so interesting to me I want to write it.’ ”

Four years ago, Weatherford published “Indian Givers,” a widely praised assessment of the influence of American Indian civilizations on the rest of the world. This year he is back with “Native Roots,” a survey of North American Indian life from the pueblos of the Southwest to Cahokia, a huge and ancient pyramid complex on the Mississippi River across from modern-day St. Louis. The latest work covers American Indian life in the days before European contact and also assesses the impact of that contact on the native populations.

Although he is sometimes mistaken for a polemicist, Weatherford cautions that he is not another firebrand decrying the despoliation of the continent by the conquistadors, explorers, early settlers and all their descendants. In the contentious buildup to next year’s 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World, enough people already are doing that, he believes.

“Unfortunately, a lot of it’s just rhetoric,” he says with some distaste. “People are hollering at each other about this issue. I regret that it got so nasty so fast.”

Rather, Weatherford prefers to look for the silver lining. The next couple of years offer an opportunity to increase awareness of native culture and history, he asserts, noting that 1993 has been named the International Year of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations.

“A lot of people are very interested in learning more and are thinking about these issues of native people,” he explains. “It seems, though, that Indians are popular about every 20 years as a topic, and it’s always a little difficult to separate genuine progress from just the fad.

“People are trying to find out a little bit more about who they are as Americans and also trying to understand their history as Americans. How do we really fit into the world?”

Along those lines, Weatherford says his message is more neutral and simpler than the passions aroused by debates about Columbus. Weatherford wants to elevate the importance of all Indians in the eyes of others. On the whole, he argues, North American Indian culture has been consistently dismissed or belittled. It is, he says, “the ugly stepchild of the rest of the world’s cultures.”

What amazes Weatherford is that this attitude has proved so durable. “People wanted to believe there was not much here and we pretty much have persistently believed that,” he says. “Even though we have destroyed, literally, tens of thousands of burial mounds, we still act as though there really wasn’t much here.”

A prime example Weatherford cites in “Native Roots” is the urban complex called Cahokia, which lies in southern Illinois next to Collinsville, “the horseradish capital of the world.”

Much of Cahokia has been plowed under or paved over. Of its 120 original pyramids, only about 45 remain. The biggest of these, Monk’s Mound, is larger in volume than the largest Egyptian pyramid. “No other structure in the United States approached the size of the Cahokia pyramid until the building of airplane hangars, the Pentagon, and the skyscrapers of the 20th Century,” Weatherford writes.

At its peak in about the year 1250, Cahokia probably had more than 20,000 residents, making it larger than London at that time. Archeological work has shown that because of its central location, Cahokia “united a trading empire larger than the combined area of France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Greece, Denmark, Romania, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Luxembourg and Bulgaria.”

Yet much about Cahokia and the Mississippian culture that built it remains a mystery, says Weatherford, adding that the same holds true for most American Indian cultures.

“We’ve never as a nation put a lot of resources into figuring that stuff out,” he says. “Indians are only a local subject. They’re only regional history, they’re not a part of world history. . . . I think there is a lot we can learn if we try. But if you don’t look for an answer to something, you never find it. And I think that’s been the problem with American history from the beginning.”

He blames academic snobbery in part for the lack of knowledge. “At any university, the American historian is always the low person on the totem pole, and it’s always European historians who have pride of place in the university because you have ancient traditions and ancient documents to deal with,” he says. “So the work here simply hasn’t gotten attention that’s adequate, I think.”

Remembering his own ignorance about the American Indian origins of crops grown on his boyhood farm in South Carolina, Weatherford says he tries to explain the importance of everyday items.

“That’s why I sometimes tell my students they have to be able to read an ear of corn as well as they can a Shakespearean poem, because we overlook that stuff in our lives,” he says. “I don’t want them to be as ignorant as I was.”

Even though he tries to avoid controversy, Weatherford acknowledges that he has been attacked for “trying to make a mountain out of a molehill” regarding Indian accomplishments and for over-interpreting, being selective or merely restating information that was already known.

To these charges he replies that his books represent his own self-education. “Since I’m not an expert, I’m not just sharing my wealth of knowledge with people,” he says. “I really am in the book looking at an issue and trying to explore and figure it out.” After a pause, he concedes, “And I may be wrong on a few things too.”

On the plus side, he notes that “Indian Givers” has sold more than 100,000 copies without any advertising, Weatherford says. He is especially pleased that the book has been used by many teachers because it brings together information that is unavailable in a single source. Over the next three years, Indian filmmakers will produce a PBS documentary series based on his work.

Then there are occasional surprise gestures of appreciation, such as a recent phone call from an Indian leader. Weatherford recalls him saying: “I didn’t know you were in the canoe with us. I just wanted to thank you for paddling.”