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A new study confirms many tribes’ oral histories that Native Americans utilized horses long before Europeans entered the picture. Previous theories attributed Spanish settlers with introducing horses to the Indigenous people they encountered in North America. Today on Native America Calling, we dig into a new study, published in the journal Science, that finds anthropological evidence which suggests tribes domesticated horses almost a century before the Spanish brought horses to tribes in New Mexico with Chance Ward (Lakota from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe), grad student at the University of Colorado Boulder and a graduate research assistant at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History; Carlton Shield Chief Gover (Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma), assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University and curator of public archaeology at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; Yvette Running Horse Collin (Oglala Lakota Nation), Executive Director and Principle Science Officer of Taku Škaŋ Škaŋ Wasakliapi: Global Institute for Traditional Sciences; and Will Taylor, Assistant Professor, Curator of Archaeology, University of Colorado Boulder.
Break 1 music: For the Horses (song) Randy Wood (artist) My Heart & Soul (album)
Break 2 music: Heeia (song) Henry Kapono (artist) The Wild Hawaiian (album)
This was fascinating to listen to!! Thank you all!!
I have a book called Walking With Grandfather, a collection of Lakota stories, and some of them as told by the author take place in a time “before we had the horse” and so I would love to understand how that squares with this research.