How were native (first nation) societies in America affected by the Essay

How were native (first nation) societies in America affected by the introduction of the horse - Essay Example Native Americans always adjusted according to postulating and diverse environments and they also remolded the natural environments to fulfill with their needs. After the arrival of Europeans, many different societies emerged having different languages, ethnical conventions, and history. Europeans had an extremely devastating impact on the New World environment as they cleared vast piece of ground of woodlands and unwittingly introduced a huge variety of Old World weeds. They introduced domesticated animals who transubstantiated the ecology for grazing animals which consumed many indigenous plants to survive.2 Despite all the certain differences, Native Americans also benefitted by the European contact which eternally changed the livings and cultures of the Native Americans. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the profound impact of introduction of horse on Native American societies. Former horse species were eradicated by climatic alterations and disappeared entirely from Nor th America. For the first time around 3000 years ago, horses were domesticated in European regions and used for conveyance of both humans and freight.3 The horse had been extinct in the America for 10,000 years before European colonists arrived and it was reintroduced when the Spaniards, inhabitants of Spain, brought their higher-up breed of Arab horses to North America in the 1600s, transforming the culture of the Native Americans nearly infinitely.4 Impact of Horse Introduction on Native Americans Culture The horse held particular attraction and brought the best acknowledged and most spectacular change.5 Clark Wissler (1927, p. 154 cited in Ewers 2001) has called the time period from 1540 to 1880 in the history of the Native Americans "the horse culture period." The arrival of horses produced a cultural revolution among Native Americans and radically remolded the livings of the Americans by transmutation of transportation, hunting and warfare. Some groups called horses as elk dogs , because initially Native Americans did not know the use of these huge animals.6 Before the early 1700s the Native Americans depended on human beings or dogs for transporting their loads. Some famous groups of Native Americans such as Sioux, Kiowa and Cheyenne shortly determined that the horse could become crucial element of their lives, and its usage diffused to other tribes. Horses were being traded and sometimes allowed to wander away and even got stolen from a tribe. They were used to pull heavy loads, faster and farther than a human or a dog, through merely bounded poles made from young trees which were primitively designed for dogs and easily adapted to horses subsequently.7 Many Natives exchanged their goods for the horses which helped them get released from the particular area of the Plains and agricultural environment of their villages. Horses altered Native’s culture and way of life to become nomadic and mounted hunters as with horses, people can carry heavy loads, travel across long distances and hunt for their food and other needs. They searched for game particularly for hunting the thundery, roaming herds of bison.8 The vast herds of bison, which departed seasonally big distances from place to place, could move much faster than a man on foot and there was small cover on the vast plains for hunters to hide themselves for stalking which made it exceedingly hard for them to hunt. Only adept hunters managed to