Before Indians, no one in the world had ever smoked tobacco. That the United States should now be so determined to stamp out all smoking seems historically revisionist and strange. Surrounded as we are today by pavement, we assume that Indians have had to adapt to us. But for a long time much of the adapting went the other way. Europeans who survived here became a mixture of identities in which the Indian part was what made them American and different than they had been before.
Influence is harder to document than corn and beans, but as real.
We know, too, that Thomas Jefferson thought that American government should follow what he imagined to be the Indian way. It will be said, that great societies cannot exist without government. The savages, therefore, break them into small ones. Indian people today sometimes talk about the need to guard their culture carefully, so that it won't be stolen from them. In colonial times, Indians were known for their disregard of titles and for a deep egalitarianism that made them not necessarily defer even to the leading men of their tribes.