Did All Native Americans Ride Horses?

Is “Dances With Wolves” Historically Inaccurate?
Or: Did All Native Americans Ride Horses?
December 21, 2007
Revised From: October 12, 2005

In “Dances with Wolves,” Kevin Costner rides out with the Native Americans and intermeshes with their culture. When viewing such a film, it is easy to say that “That’s not how Native Americans really were!” It does seem like Costner is interested in integrating himself into “Native American” culture, not the culture of “post-colonial Sioux.” If one views “Dances with Wolves” as representative of “Native American” culture, than it is indeed erroneous. However, if they are viewed as only representing the Sioux, then the film is remarkably accurate. Yet, the tendency to lump all Native American tribes together into some sort of unified cultural entity consistently works to alienate, rather than unify, the two groups.

The myth of the Native Americans as a completely mobile, roaming people is inaccurate for most tribes other than the Sioux. For instance, Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire, was remarked as, “a city as large as Cordova or Seville, entirely within the lake two mile from the mainland.” The Aztecs, a Mesoamerican people of central Mexico, were perhaps the largest empire south of the plains Indians of North America. The Aztecs were not the Native Americans that the colonists confronted on their frontier, however, and thus they are not a part of the myth of Native America that is depicted in film and movies. Even the Sioux, while they did eventually become a horse-back riding tribe, did not have horses before the European Americans imported the animals.

The Pequots, while not established in great cities like Tenochtitlan, were not a roaming band of Indians either. The Pequots, as are many of the tribes of Native America, are not incorporated into the modern popular myth of Native America. The reason for this is understandable—they were almost completely annihilated in the Pequot War. Richard Drinnon in his chapter of “Facing West” on the Pequot War, even notes that the colonist, “sought, as Mason said, ‘to cut off the Remembrance of them from the Earth.’ After the war, the General Assembly of Connecticut declared the name extinct.” The Pequots, as with many other tribes that did not last as long as the Sioux in terms of war, were annihilated so completely that no trace of them could be left for the modern mythos to accept. The myths of modern America will never be able to include these stories completely in its myth, due to the lack of information regarding the truth of the people, and the myth of Native America will never be able to accurately reflect reality.

Due to the political atmosphere of colonial times, there were strong differences in the interactions between Native American tribes and the colonists. Tribes in the southeast and northeast were exploited by the English trade in skins and slaves much more readily than did the Muskogees. The Muskogees even managed to retain cultural autonomy for a longer period of time than many of their neighbors. However, none of this mattered aside from delaying the inevitable, in terms of United States, and ironically, this indifference to Muskogee culture strengthened Muskogee resistance. While the United States, as Joel Martin explains in “Sacred Revolt”, “was determined to force on the Muskogees an ideology that not only repressed the logic of gifts and the egalitarian society that it nurtured but also asserted that the Moskogees could become fully ‘civilized’ only by becoming identical to Anglo-Americans.” While the United States general attitude was to reduce the assorted Native American tribes to that of mere savages occupying otherwise vacant land, their actions and attitude undermined their capacity to negotiate or confront the Natives at all. Martin also notes an incident in which Georgians killed Lower Muskogees in revenge for crimes of the Upper Moskogees, alienated the Lower Muskogees from the Georgians and “led to a rapport between the two major Muskogee factions.” The United States unwillingness to recognize variation in Native American culture led to increased solidarity among the Muskogees. Their denial of Indian culture, however, allowed the United States to create an economic justification in taking the Muskogees’ supposedly vacant lands. The denial of Native American cultural autonomy both ensured the animosity on racial lines, and “justified” the United States for annihilation.