User:Hemiauchenia/sandbox00

There is currently a discussion over at the talk page for the Mustang article over whether the following footnote should be included in the article. "According to Claire Henderson, an ethnohistorian at Laval Univeristy Lakota Sioux oral history and the reports of early European explorers of the Upper Missouri River, there is a hypothesis that Equus was not completely extirpated from North America, but that the northern Plains Indians had domesticated and preserved a Tarpan (Equus ferus ferus) like horse prior to the arrival of the Europeans. (Yvette Running Horse Collin pursued this idea further in her 2017 PhD thesis The Relationship Between the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and the Horse: Deconstructing a Eurocentric Myth). However, no physical evidence such as bones dating after 8000 B.C.E. and prior to 1500 A.D.E. have been found." This relates to the "horse continuity theory" in the americas, the (fringe) idea that horses in Pleistocene North America are the ancestors of living mustangs, despite the lack of genetic or archaeological evidence. This theory is often found on self published pro-mustang websites and blogs. The first source is "The Aboriginal North American Horse" a statement apparently given in 1991 by Claire Henderson, an ethno-historian at Laval University (I have been unable to find any other information on her other than this story relating to the statement in the Chicago Tribune) the second is "The Relationship Between the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and the Horse: Deconstructing a Eurocentric Myth" a 2017 PhD thesis by Yvette Running Horse Collin in Indigenous Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Both studies have the same issues, both are arguably WP:SPS, don't have any evidence backing up their claims, only reasons to cast doubt, and rely on the oral tradition of various elders, and oral history is notoriously unreliable for long timescales. The latter paper also includes this wild quote "In keeping with the traditions of my Plains Indian ancestors, my education began with a spiritual experience I had involving a gift from an Indigenous “medicine man and woman” who lived on a New Mexico Pueblo. During a time when I was in desperate need of healing, they gifted me with two horses - a red roan mare that had been trained (according to their People’s traditions) to protect others during spiritual battle - and her four-day-old paint foal. My education continued with a vision that I experienced from my Ancestors. I gained this initial knowledge through firsthand observation, the utilization of all of my senses, and other experiential learning methods. Thus, began my role as a participant-researcher."

I honestly was at a bit of a loss which noticeboard to post this to. My own view is that neither of these sources are reliable enough to cite as an authority, even for a minority view and that the footnote should be removed entirely. Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:35, 14 June 2020 (UTC)