Today's Easter intersection: Spanish Equus and the Discovery Doctrine

With help from dogs for some fifteen thousand years Indigenous people hunted and butchered the horses that evolved in North America but by about 5000 years ago American Equus were extinct or had migrated across Beringia into Asia. 

At one excavation site in Wyoming evidence revealed humans killed a mammoth with a Clovis pointed spear launched from an atlatl, a type of throwing stick. The ancestors of the Crow, Arikara and others drove bison over cliffs or into sinkholes like the Vore site near Beulah, Wyoming.

It wasn’t until 1519 C.E., when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, that horses entered the Americas again. His 16 horses stunned local people, and the shock helped him defeat the Aztec Empire just 2 years later. Dates of horse remains from sites in Wyoming and Nebraska, for example, show people far beyond the Spanish frontier were breeding, feeding, herding, and caring for horses—and probably riding them—beginning sometime after 1550, and had thoroughly incorporated them into their societies by 1650 at the latest. [Horse Nations]

I believe the ancestors of the Chacoans came up the Columbia and the Snake Rivers, through the Red Pass in Idaho then into ancient Lake Bonneville and down the western slope of the Rocky Mountains into the Four Corners Region. 

A Clovis site in Alaska dated to about 12,400 years ago has led most archaeologists to believe the culture arose only after their arrival to North America. Exploiting the gap between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets during the Wisconsin Glacial Episode those Clovis People were the first humans to see the Missouri Buttes and Mahto Tipila in Wyoming. The Clovis culture thrived on the high plains and in the Black Hills before settling the rest of the Mississippi basin but those pioneers had already explored parts of Montana long before they found Clovis, New Mexico where their stone tools were unearthed in the 1920s. 

At the southern terminus of the Rockies near Santa Fe the southwest ancients’ interaction with the Clovis culture seems perfectly likely.

The most adept country at eliminating the language and customs of the [I]ndigenous people was Spain. When Spain invaded Native nations from South America to California the first thing they did was to separate the children from their parents, use the parents as slave labor even separating husbands from wives, and begin a process of total immersion in the religion and language of Spain. The US set about eliminating the customs and language of the Indian tribes by following the proven methods of the Spaniards: separate the children from their traditional teachers, their parents and grandparents, force them to speak English only, and coerce them into accepting a new religion by catechists skilled in the art of mind control. [Tim Giago]

It's believed by most anthropologists the Indigenous population in the Americas when Spain invaded was about 60 million people.

Finally, as the Joint Statement indicates, the centuries of history at issue are complex, and the term “doctrine of discovery” has taken on various legal and political interpretations that merit further historical study and understanding. We hope for more dialogue among Indigenous and Catholic scholars to promote greater and wider understanding of this difficult history. [USCCB Statement on “Doctrine of Discovery”]

Buoyed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and General Michael Flynn are modern Falangists financed by the John Birch Society. Many catholic schools are in the Hillsdale bubble because the curriculum ignores the church’s role in the Native American Genocide.

ip image: the descendants of Spanish Equus continue to proliferate.