Denver, Colorado – The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations won a 2002 Colorado Book Award from the Colorado Center for the Book on October 2.
"I’m encouraged that the judges honored our book," said Kay Marie Porterfield, the book’s co-author and a former instructor at Oglala Lakota College. "It sends a signal that non-Indians are ready to acknowledge that pre-Columbian Americans had an advanced civilization and a strong intellectual tradition."
Porterfield, a Colorado resident, added, "Ancient American Indians were building pyramids before the Egyptians. They domesticated corn from a wild grass. They performed complicated surgeries. They also knew how to work with platinum and how to vulcanize rubber, two things Europeans could not do until the 1800s."
Emory Keoke, the book’s co-author, said, "We wanted to change the way American Indian history is taught." He is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and lives in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Keoke, who had dreamed of writing such a book for years, first began collecting information about American Indian achievements in 1972. “My goal was to show people that our ancestors had minds and they used them,” he said. “It is important for American Indian young people to know that math, science, technology and medicine aren’t just a white thing – they’re an Indian tradition."
The Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World published by Facts on File, Inc. is the first A to Z reference book that extensively details and documents the inventiveness of American Indians. It contains over 450 separate entries that cover the contributions of North, Meso-, and South American Indians. Over 180 tribes and linguistic groups are mentioned in the book, which is written in a lively and easy-to-read style.
The Colorado Center for the Book is a non-profit organization affiliated with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Its mission is to stimulate public interest in reading, books and the book community.
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