No sooner did the first Whites arrive in North America than a disproportionate number of them showed that they preferred Indian society to their own.… - Peter Farb

The Ghost Dance made its unfulfillable promises at a time when the Indians were ready to rebel. The teachings of the Native American Church spread at a time when the Indians were ready to admit defeat. ...The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous. The solution had been to borrow freely from White culture while salvaging what is considered important in Indian religious thought.

At the time of the Europeans discovery of North America, the American Indians already cultivated a wider variety of plants than did the Europeans.

The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. ...what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish.