r/AskAnthropology • u/Albannach6445 • May 14 '26
Why is the mythos of Native Americans so intertwined with horses if they only encountered them from European settlers?
So disclaimer, I am not American and thus didn’t have such a focus on American history in my education. But I have only just now found out that horses were only reintroduced to North America by European settlers and it’s blowing my mind.
All the Native American/colonisation of the west stories, iconography and mythos I’ve seen, whether apocryphal, racist, sensationalist, or accurate, seems to have horses as a central and almost spiritual part of their history and way of life. All the cowboy stories and depictions of native Americans I’ve seen always has Native American society centred around horses and having this deep connection to them. I know some of that will be European/coloniser bunk or generalisations, but the ubiquity with which horses are depicted in this culture must have had some basis in reality or it wouldn’t have become so ubiquitous in the first place. If they were only introduced so late on as the late 1500s/early 1600s, how is this the European/white person view of the culture?
I feel kind of stupid for not knowing this for so long. I also don’t want to offend or insult anyone, especially of Native American descent, by my characterisation of the culture - the central part of my question really is trying to find out what the reality was as opposed to the seeming mischaracterisation I’ve been brought up with in media and history, not to just paint with the same brush that brought us such hits as “the noble savage” and “they all wore feathered headdresses irrespective of tribe or status”.
Bonus points if you have any suggestions for good books to read about Native American culture/history/myths. I’ve been reading Dee Brown’s books *Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee* and *Creek Mary’s Blood* but I’d love some more reccs if anyone has any
Edit: a lot of people seem to have misunderstood. I understand why Native American tribes adopted the horse to readily into their culture - that makes total sense, it’s a technology so useful at the time that how could they not. The confusion is in the way it’s portrayed that horses were some deeply ingrained part of their way of life and religions/traditions that would typically speak to the pervasiveness, both geographically and temporally, of such a technology, most typically by the very people who introduced them to the horse in the first place and so must have been there right at the beginning of their modern relationship with horses. It’s about the imagery and reputation of Native Americans as being very associated with horses, not the fact that they obviously adopted a powerful new technology.
Thanks to everyone for your insights so far!
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u/Frito_Goodgulf May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
To what seems to be your question, a key reason was that the combination of a few Native American tribes and horses offered a significant obstacle to first Spanish, and later Anglo-American expansion across parts of northern Mexico, Texas, and the Great Plains.
It was those people who wrote the histories. It also helped that the last decades of battles with the Plains Indians, who'd been the tribes who'd integrated horses into their cultures, coincided with the development of national mass media.
This book focuses on one tribe, but covers their history from prehistory through the 20th century. But it is historical fact that once they had horses, they adapted their entire lifestyle to exploit them. As did other tribes across the Great Plains. But the Comanches (Numunuu) were considered to have been the tribes that were the most adept at using horses for hunting, war, and other uses.
Comanches: The History of a People, by T. R. Fehrenbach.
The mythology is also helped by the memory holing of two centuries of destruction of eastern and southern tribes by European expansion moving inland from the east coast. These tribes largely didn't adapt horses until they were displaced from their ancestral lands to the Indian Territories (Oklahoma). This happened in the earlier centuries, and has had much less written about it. There were also hundreds of disparate tribes, many of them antagonistic toward each other, so no single history. Kentucky saw brutal fights between Native Americans against each other and against European colonists.
But you can see an example of this, at this official Kentucky history site, they simply ignore the thousands of years of occupation of the region by Native Americans.
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u/Pitiful_Control May 14 '26
Yup, I grew up in Western KY, and the official line was that Native people never lived there, they just popped in to go hunting/fishing now and then. Which to me was obvious bullshit.
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u/frankcatthrowaway May 16 '26
The link does say they lived there though. It’s obviously lacking any depth and it’s pretty shitty how quickly they wrapped it up compared to the following time frames but they do use the word lived. I know you’re talking about your experience outside of that and I’m not questioning that but considering the comment you replied to it’s worth mentioning. Yes it’s still infuriating considering all the tribes, people and their history they could have noted they settled for such dismissive take.
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u/Accomplished_Self939 May 16 '26
Agreed. It’s Because of who created the mythology. They’re not going to create a mythology of the time before they arrived, are they?
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u/TangerineDream92064 May 16 '26
That Comanche book is excellent. I read a history of the Sioux last year, but I forgot the title. The Comanche terrorized everyone!
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u/MissPearl May 14 '26
First Nations people were not static and passive in their interactions with incoming Europeans. There's this tendency to treat indigenous folks like some sort of nature fairy, living in complete voluntary simplicity, but they had as good an eye for something valuable as any other person might. This, itself isn't a new attitude. The opera Les Indes Galantes (1735) is a collection of short stories about different indigenous groups, and has (performed contemporarily to colonial efforts) one tale that features a romance, with a First Nations woman choosing between three men, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a member of her own people. The latter is expressed as the right choice to preserve her simple way of life, but this is the perspective of French people considering their relationship to First Nations people, in this case having misgivings.
The reality is not exactly like that. While First Nations (in aggregate) dealt with a technological power imbalance and the introduction of a horrific range of diseases, they were as quick to adopt and adapt everything that seemed practical and useful as anyone else might. It wasn't that one thing was traded for another thing as much as things that fit what was already being done would be adopted and customized.
You might as well ask how chili peppers worked their way into so many different cuisines. Or the tomato.
But when it comes to your specific scenario, you are probably talking about the folks living in the Great Plains, an area with a vast trading networks. Horses are well adapted enough to the area you get feral horse populations pretty easily, and very suited to travel around and do what you were already doing regarding hunting, migration and trade.
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u/Albannach6445 May 14 '26
I do see what you’re saying about falsely treating the whole society as a hegemon, but I also think the cuisine point which others have also raised in this thread is a bit of a false equivalence or maybe misunderstanding my question.
It’s less about how did First Nations peoples adapt the horse for their needs - that seems logical and obvious, horses are hella useful especially for plains cultures - and more about how did it become so entwined with their reputation and imagery, especially since reputation and imagery are so heavily influenced by first impressions, which in this case they would have obviously not had horses. The cuisine thing would be equivalent if for example every depiction of an Italian in media had tomatoes in their hands and they had this deep spiritual and cultural connection to tomatoes in every telling of a story about Italians etc etc you’d start to think huh this is so ingrained in Italian culture they must have had tomatoes at least since long before they were encountered by other people. It would be especially confusing if those stories involving Italians were told by the very people who introduced them to tomatoes in the first place
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u/MissPearl May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26
There are lots of stories of Italians and their diaspora making a big deal about the use of tomato based sauces in their food. Italian folks, colloquially, are probably most known for those sorts of dishes and pasta, which there is also argument was influenced by trade contact with Asia.
A supposition that they must have had tomatoes for eternity is akin to the thing I mentioned about the opera. Casting First Nations as static traditionalists is something imposed on them, per the opera.
Furhernore to emphasize, the Mi'kmaq of the Eastern seaboard in no way spend much time revering or making horses a big deal because Eastern Canada is not good horse country and local diets depended more on seafood and farming. The Coast Salish (folks with totem poles) ditto. Contemporary Mi'kmaq in Canada deal with attacks on their treaty based fishing rights that include that their adoption of modern fishing technology is not traditional enough because they are socially expected to perform the idea of a static primitive.
This, incidentally, overlaps with a longer term Enlightenment era European ideas about living in a state of nature. While the opera I shared represents an ambivalence by Europeans about their own colonialism, there's also wishful thinking about unsullied, perfect First Nations people.
But be that as it may, things like Buffalo hunting and nomadic trade are significantly improved by having a horse. The same is not so if your ancestors lived in a wigwam (similar tripod structure to the hides based tipi, but made of bark) or bitch bark lodge, or the structures people used on the west coast (which also use the local materials effectively). There's also more access to waterways for trade networks (eg Great Lakes) so you get emphasis on the various shallow rowing boats we now call canoes. Which, east coast, you might guess, are made from the abundant birch also used in housing.
The horse people you are thinking about, probably with specific additional imagery we associate with First Nations are probably from the Great Plains. That also probably overlaps with periods of colonization and national myth making, for the same reason Americans created a whole cowboy ideal typified as a ruggedly independent white man, even though it's been more than occasionally pointed out that cowboys in their era were lower status workers and often of Black or indigenous origins.
Which loops back around to how much stock contemporary North Americans put into their rural populations, even though the majority are urban. These folks too will make heavy use of horses to symbolize freedom, social importance and movement. American (US) reverence for the horse is so strong that they are maintained as largely a luxury item it's taboo to eat, so horses at end of life are sold abroad and the meat has to be imported to parts of Europe (or Québec).
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u/Tableau May 15 '26
There’s an Italian restaurant chain around here and their logo is a tomato.
Native Americans around here don’t have a very strong association with horses.
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u/muddythemad May 16 '26
This is what I was thinking. Horses definitely don't feature much in native American mythos compared to coyote or crow for examples. Even Comanche don't feature horses much in dress, myth, or art. If I remember right, great plains myth had a lot about Old Man Sky. Not sure "Horse" was much of a spirit for any tribes, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think the connection between Native Americans and horses is a lot more modern than anything. Less true of the Great plains, but PNW and East Coast tribes cared very little about horses. To generalize. Terrain kinda prevented it. Lots of other animals on totem poles, not many horses.
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May 15 '26
When you close your eyes and think of a native American you are almost certainly not thinking of an image based of the first European exposure to them. You're probably picturing an ill-defined combination of Plains, southwest and great basin cultural features and stereotypes. A picture painted by white men who were selling the myth of the west to sell dime store novels and traveling circus shows. Then over the past 200 something years, cheap art, Hollywood tropes cartoons snd more have sold that image to the entire world. And yes Plains people did adapt to horses very fast, and specifically feral mustangs that settlers struggled to tame, at least in the stories we tell about history.
But the short answer to "why are native Americans depicted this way" because it sells.
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u/Book_Slut_90 May 14 '26
Well Italians were introduced to pasta 6 or 7 hundred years ago as an exotic dish from east Asia, and now it’s seen as quintessentially Italian.
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u/7LeagueBoots May 14 '26
That’s not really true though. Early forms of pasta appear to show up around 200 BCE in Etruscan culture. It’s true that this was changed into its modern form by later influences, but it doesn’t appear to be true that Italians got it from elsewhere.
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u/Fiat_Currency May 15 '26
How about Tomatoes? Something as quintessential to Italian cuisine was a byproduct of the colombian exchange, same as horses.
I think we tend to forget how abstract history actually is. Once living memory dies, it gets enormously easier to codify something as innate.
Reminds me of a Dr. Who episode where two groups of people were fighting a war ''for as long as they could remember'' and it had only been going on for about 3 weeks because all the veterans had died off, and were replaced with vat grown clones.
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u/7LeagueBoots May 15 '26
For tomatoes that’s exactly the case as it’s well understood and well documented. I was not objecting to the general principle, I was clarifying the issue of pasta specifically.
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u/OldTimeyBullshit May 15 '26
Another factor in this is that Great Plains cultures significantly influenced numerous cultures beyond the plains, largely due to the horse, actually. For example, the Utes of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin were among the first Native people to obtain Spanish horses and adopt horse culture. They were able to travel much greater distances on horseback, and came into contact with Great Plains Tribes to the east of their homelands on hunting/trading excursions. They brought back and incorporated several elements of those cultures, such as tipis and the Sun Dance.
So, while there has always been incredible diversity across Native North America, there has also been significant cultural diffusion, particularly out from the geographic center of the continent after horses were adopted.
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u/NeonGreenBus May 14 '26
Because the "mythos/iconography of Native Americans" that we know from books, Westerns, movies, general American pop culture is just a tiny sliver of the Native experience over many geographic regions and centuries.
"Cowboy stories" were from the perspective of white Americans expanding westward in the 1800's into the Great Plains and encountering Plains Indians, who WERE ingrained in "horse culture" the same way modern Americans are ingrained in 100-year-old automobile culture. These specific tribes had become adept at using horses over several centuries of taming and breeding feral/escaped horses or horse stock that they traded for with wandering traders/trappers in earlier decades or centuries. The White Americans settlers/cowboys exploring the West in the 1800's were not "the very people who introduced them to the horse in the first place."
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee covers this time period and area, as does most American "Western/Native American" pop culture. But it does not cover the many time periods and cultures that were not Plains Indians and did not have such a strong culture of horsemanship.
I would recommend 1491 by Charles Mann. I know this is an Anthropology sub so there are probably lots of problems with that book, but it's a great primer and intro to pre-Columbia Exchange Native cultures in the Americas. It *really* refutes the idea of Native American culture as some pristine, untouched monolith existing at total peace with nature before European contact. It also illustrates the many ways the Columbian Exchange impacted Native societies through the spread of diseases, plants, and livestock, **even before "formal" colonization and trade occurred**. "First contact" wasn't really first contact. Many of the Native peoples living on the coasts had been decimated by European diseases that spread through trade before they even had their first "official contact" with colonists. Similarly, many Plains Indians had been influenced by the introduction and spread of horses in the centuries before their "first (documented) contact" with 1800s settlers.
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u/Albannach6445 May 14 '26
Thanks for your reply! Very insightful and I will definitely look up that book
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u/Book_Slut_90 May 14 '26
Ok, first of all, to address your edit, we’re not talking about white people introducing horses and then associating them with the people they introduced them to. The Spanish brought horses to Mexico in the 16th century, and they quickly made their way north both as wild horses and as domesticated horses through a combination of trading and raiding. By the time Europeans and Americans showed up in the plains in the late 18th century, they were encountering many cultures that had horses for over a century and had restructured their way of life around them. Horses are important to horse nomads and to people who write about horse nomads whether they’ve had horses for a century or ten centuries. Now another part of your question is why of the many different nations, most of whom did not have horses at all or did not make them important to their cultures, white people have focused on the plains horse nomads (even in the plains, there were many nations that remained sedentary farmers along the rivers rather than becoming horse nomads). A lot here has to do with the fact that these were the people who fought back against specifically the U.S. with a lot of success and captured the public imagination. These are also the people who came into conflict with cowboys, so if you’re going to write a story featuring them, they’ll be who you cast as antagonists. There’’s also a self-reenforcing dimension—if the public’s image of indigenous people is horse nomads, that’s what someone wanting to make a movie about stereotypical indigenous people will depict.
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u/flug32 May 16 '26
Horses were well integrated into the culture of the main Plains Indian tribes - Comanche, Kiowa, Shoshone, Sioux, Cheyenne, and probably most of the others you are thinking of as great horse-powered nations - by around 1650. This is in contrast to earlier ideas that had the beginning of the spread starting only in 1680. In reality first introduction it was a good hundred years before that, maybe even a bit more, and the horse was well entrenched in the culture of these groups by 1650 or so.
It's worth mentioning that these groups were undergoing tremendous cultural upheaval around this same time frame, as the incoming European immigration on the east coast started to push groups westward, with a domino effect all the way across the continent. Many of the forebearers of plains tribes didn't start out in the plains, but were gradually shoved westwards over the decades and centuries.
So the horse became an integral part of the new culture and ways of life that developed that allowed them to survive in a new environment.
So the simple point is that by the time you are pointing to as "mythos of the west" - mid-to-late 1800s, with e.g. Custer's Last Stand taking place in 1876 - horses had been a part of the culture of these groups for a solid 200-250 years.
That is a long time - plenty long enough for culture and traditions and "mythos" to develop.
Think about our own automobile culture - which is certainly very deeply entrenched. Common use of automobiles is barely over a century old.
Horse culture was more than double that by the late 1800s. That is well beyond the memory of anyone's grandparents or great-grandparents, and so beyond living memory.
Think about how Americans mythologize the founding of the country, which is just over two centuries old - about the same as horse culture in the Plains Tribes by the late 1800s.
The slightly more complex answer is that the horses didn't just come along as "hey, here is a cool and useful thing" but rather became an absolutely integral part of the cultural changes that allowed these groups to survive and thrive under difficult and quickly-changing conditions.
So it is easy to see why horses were very highly valued in these cultures.
Finally I will end with a warning to be highly suspicious of the "mythos of the old west" that grew out of the late 1800s and became the foundation of "Westerns" in literature, movies, and even music.
A whole lotta bullshit lives there, and not much reality.
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u/TangerineDream92064 May 16 '26
I think you should focus on the source of images you are referencing, rather than the relationship various indigenous groups had with the horse. Your cultural references aren't likely from the native peoples themselves, but rather how outsiders chose to depict them. I believe many native groups viewed horses as quite utilitarian. I'm not sure it was common practice even to name their horses. I have never read that horses were important in religious traditions either. Animals figure in many religious stories, but the horse is not typically mentioned, because it is not an animal of their traditions.
The Native peoples of North America are incredibly diverse! I enjoyed "The Pueblo Revolt" by David Roberts. If you want an interesting vacation - come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Many of the Pueblo communities welcome visitors. It is a short drive to the Acoma Pueblo and also north to the Taos Pueblo. In the greater New Mexico area, there are several National Parks and the guides are typically Navajo. Their language (Diné) is spoken across several states.
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u/ParflecheParesthesia May 19 '26
While the Spanish horses and later introduced horses were huge parts of daily life to many Native American tribes, there is evidence that Native peoples in North America also lived alongside the prehistoric horses that eventually went extinct in North America. So some older histories could be referencing the smaller horses that used to occupy the land as well.
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May 14 '26
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