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