Native America Calling

Today, April 11– Reassessing the history of horses

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. We dig into a new study, published in the journal Science, that finds anthropological evidence which suggests tribes domesticated and bred 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, and 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.

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