Hearing History Through Hoofbeats: Exploring Equine Volition and Voice in Historical Narrative

• In Event: New “Nature Fakers”?: Historians and the Animal Experience

Abstract

Human and horse histories have been inseparable for most of recorded time, but while historians take great pains to explore the motivations and choices of historical humans, they rarely turn the same lens of inquiry to their equine partners. And yet human history is full of horses whose independent choices deeply affected their human partners, like the three unruly mounts who carried terrified soldiers from Reno’s command straight into enemy lines at the Battle of the Greasy Grass in 1876. But how can historians examine the historical actions of horses without falling into sentimental anthropomorphism or pure speculation? Examining recent developments in the study of horse behavior, relational horsemanship methods found in Xenophon, Pluvinel, and recent practitioners like Bill and Tom Dorrance, Ray Hunt, and Buck Brannaman, and historically-rooted indigenous practices from Plains peoples like the Lakota and the Comanche, this paper explores the ways in which historians can, as Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrates in Braiding Sweetgrass, think and write about nonhuman animals as independent beings of will and relationship who are full participants in historical narratives.

Author

• Lindsay Marshall, The University of Oklahoma