Climate change at the end of the last Ice Age killed off large numbers of the large grazing animals in North America. The steppe died off, the animals that ate that vegetation died off, and the specialized predators that ate those animals for food died off. Species couldn't recover because of a new predator they didn't evolve with — humans. Ancient native people didn't ride horses. They ate them.


You can't declare that something is true when it is not — no matter how badly you want to.


https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230126-the-return-of-the-spirit-horse-to-canada

The commonly accepted story is that colonisers introduced horses to North America. But some people believe there was a surviving native breed of horse when the Spanish arrived.


It was a bright day in December 2021 and snow was lightly falling over Mādahòki Farm, an Indigenous visitor attraction and event space just outside Ottawa, Canada. I was at the Pibón (winter) festival, and the Anishinaabe artist Rhonda Snow stepped on a small stage that still seemed to tremble from the exuberant footsteps of just-departed pow wow dancers. Nationally renowned for her vivid Woodlands-style paintings, Snow was here to talk about her lifelong work preserving the endangered Ojibwe spirit horse; the breed, also known as the Lac La Croix Indian pony, is the only known indigenous horse breed in Canada.

Snow explained that she was a young girl living in north-western Ontario when she overheard some elders talking about these small, hardy horses that lived free in the boreal forest. She was captivated.

"I thought to myself, someday I'm going to find them," she said.

She travelled around Indigenous communities and heard many stories of Indigenous peoples' reciprocal relationship with the Ojibwe spirit horse, seeing the animals as guides and teachers. Such as the Métis fishermen who partnered with the horses each winter to haul fish off frozen lakes – although the horses were never domesticated back then, they would use their hooves to create ice fishing holes in return for food and shelter from the fishermen. But, having been culled to near-extinction by European settlers who considered the wild animals a nuisance, the horses themselves were few and far between.


That the breed has survived is due to an event Snow depicts in her painting titled The Heist Across the Ice by the Light of the Moon. It's a story that could have been written in Hollywood.

In 1977, only four mares remained on an island in Lac La Croix, north-western Ontario. Having deemed the wild animals a health risk, Canadian health officials made plans to slaughter them. But, before they could do so, four Ojibwe men staged a daring rescue. They rounded up the mares, put them on a trailer and spirited them across the frozen lake and over the border to Minnesota, where they were bred with a Spanish Mustang. Careful management and selective breeding has since revived the Ojibwe spirit horse, which now numbers around 180 and is back in Canada.

The stories Snow heard of the Ojibwe spirit horse's long and close relationship with Indigenous people counter the commonly accepted history of horses in North America. That story goes that horses once ran freely across the continent before going extinct during the last ice age thousands of years ago, and that they remained absent until Europeans arrived. According to Indigenous oral histories and spiritual beliefs, however, horses have always been on the continent they know as Turtle Island, and recent research – though contested by mainstream science – may back them up.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2023 06:47AM by anybody.

Yeah, everybody's got stories.

The Lakota had ghost shirts that would protect them from cavalry bullets. Mormons have temple garments that also protect against other stuff, since the cavalry hardly ever shoots at Mormons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_shirt

Find me some horse skeletons in Ojibwa villages that date back one or two thousand years, and I'll listen. Meanwhile, if the evidence for something only exists in people's minds, the default assumption is that it was created by people's minds, subject to change of course if actual external evidence is found.

Humans are spectacular adept at making stuff up.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2023 12:24PM by Brother Of Jerry.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4786

"But now, quite suddenly, this history is being called into question by some who say the horse was never extinct in America. There are basically three groups promoting this, and it's a virtual guarantee that any published research you find that makes this claim was written by someone representing one or more of these groups. The first consist of Native American groups. Certainly not all Native Americans are on this bandwagon, but those who are generally come from the perspective that the histories of the horse and of Native Americans are deeply intertwined and they take some affront at the notion that European invaders should be due any credit for what was such an immense leap of progress for their ancestors. The evidence they present is mainly in the form of oral histories from various tribes. The second group of advocates are scholars working on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), who have long argued in favor of certain alternative histories in the hope of bolstering recognition of their Book of Mormon as a factual historical document. The Book of Mormon is full of horses in the Americas during Biblical times — a clear impossibility; this fatal error having been made because it was written during the 1800s by people who had no knowledge of equine history.

The third group of proponents are the ones who have brought this question into today's headlines, and they are the wild horse conservationists."

"For there to have been an indigenous American breed, it would mean that all genetic traces of its existence have vanished, totally replaced in just a few hundred years by a relatively tiny imported population. Given this evidence, there's simply no room for the indigenous horse conjecture to be correct. When we can go back through Terra's genes and find a single foundation sire like Janus, it's simply not mathematically plausible for the genes of an entire continent's founding population — genetically distinct from all European breeds — to have completely vanished from the genomes of all the horses ever sequenced by Texas A&M. The explanation, of course, is that there never was such an indigenous population."

the much-touted Ice Age didn't cover all of North America Do your research!

When you have Faith, facts don't matter.

MoronicPriesthood,inc lives by this as the Prime Directive.