In this season of thanksgiving, it is a tradition of our faith and part of our cultural heritage to remember all the ways in which God has blessed us and to give thanks. The focal point of our Thanksgiving celebration has always been found in the collective memory of the moment when the first pilgrims at Plymouth celebrated their existence in the New World. Faced with complete unfamiliarity with the challenges of the new world, with devastating waves of disease, and with periods of famine that almost extinguished the Pilgrim community, their governor, William Bradford, set aside a day of thanksgiving to celebrate the miracle of their continued existence. This memory is especially dear to me, because on both my mothers and my father's sides of the family our lineage can be traced to Governor Bradford, who initiated this first thanksgiving celebration. But we all know that without the aid and support of the First Americans there would have been no thanksgiving celebration. It was not just because their Indian neighbors brought gifts of food that the Pilgrims were able to celebrate the original thanksgiving feast. Without the ongoing aid and support of Native Americans, the first colonists would simply have not survived at all. Since that first thanksgiving, Native Americans have given and continue to give gifts to the culture of our nation and to the world that have become so much a part of who we are that the givers of the gifts have been forgotten. In this thanksgiving meditation, I would like to lift up some of the enormously significant contributions that Native Americans have made to our nation and to our world. My reflection is entirely indebted to the work of the anthropologist Jack Weatherford and the research that he has put together in the book Indian Givers.

Yes, Native Americans brought food to the first thanksgiving feast celebrated by our Pilgrim ancestors. But it was their agricultural expertise that taught the Pilgrims and other colonists up and down the East Coast how to successfully grow the food that they needed not only to survive but to become self sufficient. Irrigation, terracing, mixing crops, crop rotation and organic fertilizers are just a few examples of the kinds of agricultural expertise that Native Americans taught to the colonists. Native Americans helped Europeans overcome their distaste for shellfish, clams and oysters, mussels that were repugnant to the first European immigrants. But the contribution of Native Americans went even further than this. The introduction of Native American foods to the diet of Europeans would bring about a food revolution that would cure Europe of episodic famines that had devastated the Old World for centuries. The exportation of the potato by itself saved hundreds of thousands of people from starvation. The potato and other American foods - corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers and squash - would become the mainstay of European agriculture and food consumption. But it was not just the food itself, but how it was prepared that made such an impact on Colonial America and on Europe. The uses of spices and chiles changed the culinary habits of Europeans. Anyone who enjoys barbecue should know that it is a derivative of an Indian way of preparing meat. Cajun and Creole foods were again a mix of African, European and Native American cuisine. Been to a baseball game lately? "Popcorn, peanuts, get your popcorn, peanuts." Both are Native American contributions. You hikers carrying trail mix. Indians taught us how to go on long journeys carrying seeds and dried fruit for sustenance. Along with these foods came other gifts that Europeans have not handled as well: things like sugar, chocolate, coca and tobacco.

Beyond food, there was enormous natural wealth to be found in the gold and silver in the Americas. In good faith, we cannot really call these Indian gifts because they were forcefully taken by Europeans, using the forced labor of millions of Native Americans to extract or collect the gold and silver from mines across the Americas. But the infusion of this gold and silver into the economy of the Old World of Europe created huge amounts of wealth and an explosion of economic activity.

The next great gift of Native America to our nation and to the world came in medicine and the healing arts. Native Americans possessed knowledge of natural pharmaceuticals that had been passed down for centuries. One example is Peruvian bark, which contained quinine and was exported all over the world as a cure for malaria, cramps, chills and cardiac arrhythmia. Emetics were common in Native Americans household items for ridding poison and some infections. Finding sources for vitamin C allowed Native Americans to avoid scurvy. Native Americans had a natural remedy for almost any condition, from constipation to goiters to headaches to burns to fevers. The only diseases they seemed to have no remedy for were those brought by the Europeans themselves, which swept away millions of Indians in the first century after contact. The first colonists were not given to bathing very often but they began to notice that the Native Americans bathed on a regular basis and seemed to be healthier; the sweat lodge among some tribes had a healing cathartic effect. Some nations like the Incas and the Aztecs had amazingly sophisticated surgical procedures.

The First European immigrants did not hack their way through an impenetrable wilderness. They followed a well laid-out transportation system of trading paths, navigable rivers, and in some cases actual paved roads, traveled for centuries by Native Americans. Much of today's interstate system is laid out exactly along the old trading paths of Indian nations. The Incan Empire in the Andean highlands was traversed by a highway system that rivaled that of the Roman Empire. But in North America, we have only that mysterious set of highways extending out from Chaco Canyon to various cardinal points of Anasazi civilization. Though there is no evidence that Native Americans ever developed great seafaring expertise or technology, their contribution of the canoe and the kayak and the raft helped early European immigrants navigate the vast waterways of America. Native Americans were the pathfinders of a vast continent. They did not carry maps for long journeys across hundreds and hundreds of miles, because they memorized the directions as songs to be sung as they traveled. Their maps were songs sung along the journey.

The importance of the Indians in shaping contemporary cultural geography in America is clearly shown in the names of American rivers, mountains, cities and states. The first white arrivals in America tended to name everything after their place of origin like New York, New England or New Jersey, or after their benefactors, as in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. As we know, the Spanish had a proclivity for naming everything after saints. It appeared for a while that Indian names would be entirely dropped, and the map of America would read like the map of a scrambled Europe. To the contrary, Indian names have held on with great tenacity in states like Massachusetts, Mississippi, Minnesota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Kansas and Dakota, and in towns like Poughkeepsie, Tallahassee, Roanoke, Nantucket, Chicago and, oh yes, Tucson.

As familiar as they were with the earth beneath their feet, their knowledge of the stars was unsurpassed. Go to Casa Grande and learn about an ancient observatory that charted the courses of the stars. Go to the Great Kiva at Chaco and see how the light of the sun at the seasonal equinox lights up the center of the sacred space of the Great kiva. Climb the mesa near Chaco and see a sophisticated mountain observatory that boggles the imagination. After all, looking at the night sky was the chief nighttime entertainment of Native Americans, that and story telling, two pleasures that most contemporary Americans have largely forsaken. I will never forget the two days I spent wandering around the ancient Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala. If you have ever seen the pyramids of Tikal, or for that matter the great mounds of the Cherokee in Georgia, you cannot help but be impressed by the architectural achievement of Native Americans. Archaeologists are still unable to explain how it is that the massive stone blocks that make up walls of ancient Incan cities and temples could have been so precisely cut and fitted to the millimeter. Though the architectural designs of Indians never caught on with British North America, it is only here in Spanish colonial America that the architecture of the Pueblo Indians continues to combine an appealing aesthetic elegance with functional simplicity well suited for desert living.

Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of Indians to American culture and the most forgotten is in the political domain. The first colonists were amazed and baffled by the egalitarian democracies that they encountered among Indian nations. Yes, there were chiefs, but these chiefs, at least in North America, never had power over the people. They functioned as wise elders, as leaders among other members of councils who sought consensus in the decisions affecting the tribe. Colonists were filled with consternation at the equal place and status afforded women in many tribes. We tend to think that the sources of inspiration for American democracy were primarily the city-states of ancient Greece, or the humanism of the Enlightenment, or the emphasis on individual liberty among the Puritans. But the witness of democratic egalitarianism of Native American tribes was an important influence on the evolution of American political culture. An Iroquois chief, it is recorded, was the first to suggest to colonial representatives that it would be much easier to make treaties with the colonies if they would form a confederacy of states, the form of government that characterized the Iroquois nations. That the Iroquois Confederacy was a concrete model and inspiration for the American form of government is an almost completely forgotten aspect of American political history.

In economics we can only wonder if we will ever rediscover an American way of life that was practiced by Indians, who placed the common good of all as the supreme economic value. Will we ever rediscover the American way of living with the land in an ecological harmony that preserved a virgin continent for twenty centuries? More was done in one century of colonial economics to negatively impact and damage the American continent than was done in the previous twenty centuries of Native American habitation. I especially cherish the custom among several Native American tribes of the potlatch, or "giveaway". A celebration in Native tradition was an occasion to bring honor on your family or tribe, not by receiving gifts, but by giving away everything you could. It is the spirituality of the first Americans that is so very different from that of European Christianity which is perhaps the greatest gift that Native Americans have given to us. Native American spirituality is grounded in humility in the face of the mystery and sacredness of all life.

About the clash between two very different civilizations that makes up the story of American history, Weatherford writes: "The Indian civilizations crumbled in the face of the Old World, not because of any intellectual or cultural inferiority. They simply succumbed in the face of disease and brute strength. While the Indians had spent millennia becoming the world's greatest farmers and pharmacists, the people of the Old World had spent a similar period amassing the world's greatest arsenal of weapons. The strongest, but not necessarily the most creative or the most intelligent, won the day."

So many of the things that Native Americans have contributed to the planet have been so thoroughly incorporated into our global culture that the indigenous origins of these gifts are all but forgotten. On this thanksgiving, let us give thanks for all that Native Americans have contributed to the culture of our nation and to the world. America is uniquely what it is today, not just because of what Europeans did when they came to this continent, but because of what was given to us by the first Americans. American culture is a unique blend of the culture that was here before 1492 with everything that followed. In this season of thanksgiving, let us join with the spirits of our Pilgrim ancestors in gratefully receiving all that Native Americans have given us to make our country what it is today.