From the tip of South America to the Arctic, Native Americans developed scores of innovations—from kayaks, protective goggles and baby bottles to birth control, genetically modified food crops and analgesic medications—that enabled them to survive and flourish wherever they lived.
In fact, early European explorers who reached the Western Hemisphere were apparently so impressed by the achievements of the people they encountered that they felt compelled to dream up stories about Native Americans being descendants of ancient Phoenician traders or a lost tribe of Israel, in an effort to explain the source of their technological prowess.
“People don’t realize the ingenuity or the knowledge that native people had, and continue to have about the world around them,” explains Gaetana De Gennaro, a supervisory specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, who manages a permanent interactive exhibit on Native American inventions.
Because various Native American tribal nations were connected through trade routes, new inventions created by one group could quickly spread from North to South and East to West, according to De Gennaro, a member of the Tohono O'odham tribe in southern Arizona.
Kayaks
Inuits in kayaks in Noatak, Alaska, 1929.
The Inuit in the Arctic developed the concept of a small, narrow boat, with a sealed cockpit to protect the paddler from sinking in the event that the craft capsized, according to Canadian technology historians David Johnston and Tom Jenkins. The classic vessels were fashioned entirely from natural materials, with wood or whalebone frames covered by stitched sealskin or other animal hides. Today, the kayaks in use across the world are sometimes built from modern materials such as plastic and carbon fiber, but as De Gennaro notes, “the design is still essentially the same.”
Snow Goggles
A wooden case and pairs of snow goggles made by the Inuit people.
The Inuit also invented goggles fashioned from wood, bone, antler or leather to protect their eyes from over-exposure to sunlight reflected from expanses of snow. “They’d put a slit in there, to simulate the way that you can squint,” De Gennaro says. “It cut down on the ultraviolet rays that got into the eyes.” The snow goggles were the predecessors to today’s sunglasses.
The Iroquois took dried and greased bear gut and added a nipple fashioned from a bird’s quill to create bottles that could be used to feed infants, according to Iroquois historian Arthur C. Parker.
