All too frequently in an understandable but ethnocentric concern for our own lives and the problems associated with living the present it is forgotten that what is now Indiana had been occupied for thousands of years prior to the appearance of the first Europeans. Yet the contributions to contemporary life made by the first occupants, the American Indians, are inescapable to even the most casual observer, although Indian societies in our area have long since been decimated.
The names of our state and capital city are obvious reminders of the Indian peoples who once lived here, and the designations of the four neighboring states are even more directly derived from Indian cultures. Reference to a map of Indiana reveals an abundance of place names having comparable origins. For example, there are Miami, Tippecanoe, Ohio, and Wabash counties. The Wabash, Ohio, Tippecanoe, Kankakee, Maumee, Mississinew, Salamonie, and Iroquois rivers and such lakes as Manitou, Wawasee, and Maxinkukee all reflect the Indian heritage. Kewanee, Mishawaka, Nappanee, Osceola, Wanatah, Wawaka, Wawpecong, and Winamac are among the colorful names of the communities that have a similar derivation.
But the native peoples also made nearly incalculable contributions in even more fundamental ways, particularly to the economic well-being of the state and nation. The vast acreage in corn, the leadership in popcorn production, the contract tomato crop in the north, and tobacco in the south all depend upon plant products originally domesticated by the American Indian. To this list can be added such common plant foods as the "Irish" potato, sweet potato, squash, pumpkin, many varieties of beans and peppers, and sunflowers. It has been estimated that as much as 50 percent of the world's agricultural wealth derives from plant products first cultivated by the Indian and which were totally unknown in the Old World until after the settlement of the New beginning in A.D. 1492.
American Indian influences have impacts in other ways as well, particularly in literature, cinema, and television. Unfortunately, these customarily rely upon the Indian-European settlement conflicts or sentimentalize a "man in nature" theme with the result that the contrived events too frequently convey stereotypes or have little relationship to actual happenings.
In any case, the early documentary history of the United States, as well as much of the recent, would have been markedly different had there been no human antecedents to contest the European claim to what was erroneously called a "virgin wilderness." It was no such thing to the Indian whose ancestors had lived in the Americas for thousands of years adapting to its varied environments, founding in some areas cities that rivaled Old World communities in size and complexity, and creating life-styles that have influenced the present in fundamental ways. (Driver (1961: 583-612) provides an extended discussion of American Indian contributions and achievements.)
However, because writing systems appear never to have developed providing a medium for transmitting "history," other methods must be employed to gain an understanding of this ancestry.