In 2000, Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Saskatchewan-born singer, artist, teacher and Academy Award-winning songwriter, was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters Degree by Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. During her convocational address, she mentioned some of the breakthroughs of aboriginal peoples in science and technology.
Inspired by her address, Lakehead University shortly thereafter set out to develop an aboriginal innovations handbook, to educate the public about aboriginal innovations and their impacts on Canada and the world.
Among the highlights are long lists of agricultural and medical innovations. Consider maize, which became corn; also beans, squash, avocado, cacao, cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, lima beans and peanuts. In all, six of what are considered the 15 most crucial world food crops originated with American Indians: maize, potato, manioc, sweet potato, common bean and peanut. Throw in cotton and rubber and (less positively) tobacco, and crops first cultivated by American aboriginals have come to plan an enormous role in the world’s agricultural economy.
On the medical side, innovations included a number of medicinal teas, tonics and procedures, including Witch Hazel, an astringent derived from the wild geranium; oil of wintergreen, originally used to soothe sore muscles and now a flavoring for medicines and candies; papiani, used in everything from emetics to underarm deodorants, breath fresheners and toothpaste; coca, from which cocaine is derived, ipecacuanha, from whose dried root ipecac syrup, still an important medicine for fighting poisoning, is made (it causes vomiting); bitter root, a pain reliever used to relieve labor pains; petroleum jelly, still used as a moisture barrier to treat diaper rash and wounds and to prevent skin chapping and wind burn, and willow bark, whose active ingredient, salacin, is related to acetylsalicylic acid–aspirin. American aboriginal people also knew how to suture wounds, using human hair threaded on bone needles.
Those of nervous disposition might consider chewing gum medicinal. The American aboriginal peoples had more than one form of it. In the north, the gum of choice was spruce gum. The Indians introduced the habit of chewing spruce resin to the early European settlers, and the first commercial chewing gums were lumps of spruce resin.
However, the first modern chewing gum harked back to the Indians of the second century A.D. in Central America, who liked chewing chicle, a natural resin from the latex of the Sapodilla tree. In 1869 New York innovator Thomas Adams, attempting to develop a new form of rubber out of chicle (at the behest of Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna), instead came up with a superior chewing gum. Before long, chicle-based chewing gum became far more popular than other gums based on spruce or paraffin. (Today, most chewing gums use synthetic ingredients.)
Tar and asphalt were also used by American Indians long before the Europeans figured out what to do with them. Wherever it was found–near the Athabascan oil sands, for instance–aboriginal people used it for waterproofing boats, baskets and cloth.
Speaking of boats, both canoes and kayaks were aboriginal inventions. In Canada, a traditional birch bark canoe, a little over four metres in length, weighed only 22.7 kilos and could carry a large amount of cargo through even shallow water. Europeans recognized the superiority of the aboriginal canoes over their own boats, and adapted them for exploration and the fur trade.
The kayak, a long, low spruce-and-sealskin boat used by hunters in the north, featured a gut-skin apron connecting the paddler to the kayak, keeping out water during the now-familiar “kayak roll.” Today, kayaking and canoeing are both popular recreational activities worldwide.
Another transportation innovation was the toboggan (our version of the original word, odabaggan). Made with two or more larch or birch boards, turned up at the front to allow clear passage over bumps, toboggans could be used to transport heavy loads or people over the snow.
Frozen food is another aboriginal invention. The faster you can freeze food, the fresher it stays, because if it freezes fast enough, ice crystals don’t have time to form in it. From 1912 to 1916 a fur-trapper by the name of Colonel Clarence Birdseye watched the Inuit fast-freeze fish and game. By 1929, he’d figured out how to do artificially what the Arctic air did naturally, and was selling packages of Birdseye frozen vegetables, meat and other items in grocery stores.
There are many more examples of scientific, technological and artistic innovations created by the aboriginal peoples of North and South American in Lakehead University’s Aboriginal Innovations Handbook. You can view it online.
