Alvin Josephy said that Americans—settlers, politicians, and historians—were often guilty of “Eurocentrism,” seeing everything through old European eyes. Their understandings of the peoples of the “New World” were clouded. Naming the people “Indians” was a first example of this misunderstanding. They did know something of India, and with Columbus searching for a passage to the spice wealth there, the quick response was that they had touched India—and the people were then Indian. And still are.
Today’s topic is “horses,” what we thought we knew about Indians and horses, what we have preached and believed for a few hundred years, and what we are just beginning to understand about the relation between Indians and horses today.
Until very recently, the story of Native people and horses has largely been told through the lens of American Colonial history. Indians got horses from the Spanish, who had brought them to America, after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. (There is another word—“America”—that came with a historical, and distinctly Euro-centered, mistake. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller made a first map of the “New World.” He had read Amerigo Vespucci’s writings, and thought him the “discoverer” of the two continents—which he wasn’t.)
Historians—until the developments of anthropology and oral histories—relied on written documents. There were plenty of documents about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Natives chased the Spanish out of the Southwest. When historians got around to telling the story of Indians and horses, they relied on those written documents about the removal and the Spanish horse herds then left to the Indians. And that this was the genesis of the American Indian-horse relationship.
Riding alongside the quest for writing documents was the default prejudice against Native peoples and disregard for their own stories. Without written documents, where was their history. Or did their history begin with the arrival of white settlers?
Until recently, history texts built the story into an arrival of the horse among the Nez Perce and their Plateau tribal cousins at 1730. I don’t know that there is a written document regarding that date, or if it is white colonial logic tracing horses from tribe to tribe from 1680 and the Comanches to the Shoshones and then to the Plains and Plateau tribes. Either way, 1730 has been the date for decades in historical texts.
Filtering of Indigenous horse cultures through a European framework left narratives unrecognizable to many Indigenous peoples—who have always had their own stories. Fortunately, over recent years archaeology has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring aspects of the human-horse story that may not have been written down in books. In Mongolia, for example, archologists have shown that steppe cultures herded, rode and cared for horses centuries before their first mention in historical records.
A recent study in Science Magazine, May, 2023, tells us that Native American accounts have long contradicted the timeline centered on the Pueblo Revolt, suggesting some tribes had acquired horses much earlier. But “oral tradition was discounted,” says Comanche historian Jimmy Arterberry, a co-author of the Science study. “The end result has been to discredit the antiquity of the relationship between Native people and horses,” adds University of Colorado, Boulder, archaeologist William Taylor, also a co-author.
Current science says that the horse did come to the Tribes from Europe—although the story is now that the horse first developed on this continent, made its way to Asia and became extinct here some 10,000—12,000 years ago. It was reintroduced by the Spanish in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. And now, archeological evidence dates horses used domestically by tribes to the early 1500s. Without going into detail—read it in Science—archeologists, some of them Native, have analyzed skeletal remains, dated them, and shown that they have the marks of being led and ridden in their bones.
Nakia Willimason-Cloud, Cultural Resources Director of Cultural Resources at the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho, pushes the Nez Perce acquisition of the horse back into the 1600s.
Which would add decades onto the time for the Nez Perce to become the proficient horse people that Lewis and Clark marveled at in 1804-06.
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