Where are the Amerindian Einstein or Newton or Beethoven or Shakespeare?
  At the risk of being accused of "Political correctness," (a term which has
long ago lost any specific referent other than generic right-wing attacks on
anything to the left of Ross Perot), I think this question is misguided.
Western culture judges its production through individual accomplishments. Other
cultures do not necessarily do so. I would place the rich folklore, music, dance
 and art of the native American nations as worthy  of consideration alongside
the western worlds' production, but the works created tended to be anonymous,
collectively shared, building upon community traditions, rather than seen as
autonomous works created by expressive individuals. We would also have to
recognize that there are different aesthetic traditions at work in the two
cultural realms which makes cross-cultural comparisons difficult and
cross-cultural evaluations meaningless. For that matter, we have to recognize
that Shakespeare, that great poacher of plots, characters, situations, lines,
etc. operated within a profoundly different cultural context than our own and
was probably not treated as the "great man" he has become through generation
after generation of dissertation topics. So, no -- the Amerindian population
would probably have never produced a Shakespeare, but it produced much which
is just as valuable.
 
Henry Jenkins