I’ve written before about Ned Blackhawk’s outstanding book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Here’s more.
The title itself is revolutionary—“rediscovering” echoing and countering the decades of homage to Columbus for “discovering” America. And “unmaking history” indicating that we have that part wrong too. That the history we—our government offices, popular presses, and academic and popular historians—have made, is wrong.
Orthodoxy traces U.S. history to the New England colonies and their English origins. This makes our history is a continuation of European and especially Anglo history. Blackhawk stands this history on its head, putting Native Peoples at the center of five centuries of European invasion. And he starts not with the English, but with the Spanish and their invasion of Southwestern North America. And he shows that at each instance of European intrusion, Native America counters, parries, accommodates, fights, makes and breaks alliances, moves away from—voluntarily or by force, and dies with the scourge of European diseases.
(I cannot fathom why all the American history texts and classes of long ago missed this most devastating impact on indigenous people—maybe because we were busy tracing the actions and thoughts of white men, the successions of kings, queens, explorers, generals, admirals, and presidents to pay mind to the mundane roles of smallpox, malaria, viral influenza, yellow fever, measles, typhus, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, cholera, and whooping cough that killed more indigenous Americans than did all the warfare, the sieges, and purposeful starvations visited on them by the Euro-Americans.)
Forgive the digression. Before the Mayflower, before Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin, the Spanish brought devastation to the Southwest. Santa Fe, the oldest state capitol in North America, was founded in 1610. And well before there was a United States, there was a successful Pueblo revolt. In 1680, under the leadership of the spiritual leader, Popé, several Pueblos rose up and leveled Spanish houses, churches, and towns. The government abandoned Santa Fe and for a dozen years the Indians struggled to remain united, and the Spanish struggled to regain traction. The revolution was never complete; not all the pueblos joined, and eventually and ironically the Spanish became protectors in a chaotic tribal world and regained Santa Fe in 1692. But what Blackhawk calls the “equestrian revolution” had begun.
“Surrounding Native nations that had once been entirely pedestrian now incorporated runaway, stolen, and traded horses into their societies. Before 1680 this transfer had been slow and gradual but afterward an equestrian revolution engulfed the region. None could have anticipated the far-reaching impacts… as worlds of Indigenous power increasingly stretched across the continent.” (Blackhawk, page 42)
One of my first lessons from Alvin Josephy in the 1970s was that the American government had broadcast to the world, through its State Department and the USIA—United States Information Agency—a picture of Native America that was a lie. Romantic yes, but the US icon of a Sioux Indian on horseback on the Great Plains led people to believe that Indians always had horses and that the Sioux—the Lakota—had always been on the Great Plains. Newer histories tell us that the Lakota started in the Great Lake region, and gradually moved across the country, gaining horses and guns along the way, until they were the most powerful tribe in the American heartland, controlling, for a time, the Mississippi and tributaries from its Minnesota source to the Gulf of Mexico—some 2300 miles!
The Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, Ute, Comanche, and Shoshone were early horse tribes, but we also see the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Gros Vent as horse cultures. And, in the Pacific Northwest, the Umatilla, Cayuse, and the Nez Perce as historic equestrian powers.
American Tribes and Tribal peoples took to horses as they did to no other European introduction. One cannot say or envision Comanche, Lakota, or Nez Perce without seeing horses. When one thinks about buffalo before their decimation for hides and bones, for starving Indians and for pure sport, one pictures horses and Indians with buffalo on the Great Plains. The Lakota horse power on the high plains; and, to the South, the Comanche did battle with other tribes and for a time ruled huge swaths of the country mounted on horses.
In the Northwest, Lewis and Clark marveled at Nez Perce horsemanship in 1805, and the Nez Perce 1200-mile five month fighting retreat just 72 years later is unimaginable without horses. Today among the Nez Perce, there is horse revival alongside language revival, and we see horses, like their riders, dressed in regalia.
The Nez Perce and their Plateau Tribal cousins see themselves as horse people. A recent article by a Comanche archeologist pushes that horse culture back before the Pueblo revolt. Even so, we are talking Indian horse history in the hundreds of years, not the fifteen or twenty thousand years—or more—that we now know Indian cultures have grown on these lands.
One wonders if there is some kind of genetic memory of earlier times, when horses did roam across North America. New world horses were reportedly smaller, and I’ve not heard any reports of them being ridden, but 10,000 years ago, or maybe as recently as 6,000 years ago, they were here.
I once read a Navajo quoted that his people knew horses in the past, and that the modern meeting of Native and horse was only picking up an older story.
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Photo: Native American Indians of the Columbia Plateau on horses in front of tipis, 1908. Gelatin silver print from a glass negative. Photo by Benjamin Gifford.
