The famous economist Thomas Sowell once wrote, “No race has a monopoly on high achievement and no race is incapable of producing high achieving individuals.” If we look across the arc of history, from the Chinese dynasties to the Indigenous peoples of North America, this truth is so plainly evident that it’s difficult to understand how eugenics programs ever gained traction. And yet today I read a CBC story, Ojibwe horses are endangered, that undermines the legacy of Indigenous ingenuity by building a narrative of mysticism while rejecting both science and history.
The overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that there were no horses in the Americas when Europeans made first contact. The vast majority of reputable sources on the evolution, domestication, and the history of the horse state that while horses existed in North America tens of thousand of years ago, they went extinct well before European contact and were only reintroduced after the arrival of Columbus. Genetic research shows that all horses in the Americas descend from Eurasian stock. Yet the CBC reports that the Ojibwe horse “lived around the Great Lakes long before European contact”.
Without question the Ojibwe horse, also called the Lac La Croix Indigenous Pony, is a national treasure fully deserving of protection. The breed nearly disappeared in 1977 and the Herculean preservation efforts since have given the breed a chance. The most remarkable fact is that the Ojibwe horse is a breed of pony matured by Indigenous people in Canada. Indigenous people used them in the bush along trap lines in Northwestern Ontario. As a breed, they are perfect for such conditions. Genetic testing shows that the Ojibwe horse originates from European introduction. Professor Gus Cothran, an expert on the genetics of horses says in Equine Monthly, “They are derived from horses that Europeans brought to North America. They did not originate in North America as a distinct strain of horse.” Research shows that the Ojibwe horse is a cross between the Spanish mustang and Canadian horses originally from France, but it was Indigenous people who created the breed.
Instead of doing research on the Ojibwe horse, the CBC simply states myths as facts. My guess is the CBC is trying to be sensitive to some Indigenous groups who insist horses in North America predate European arrival. (There are other groups in North America that insist on pre-contact horses, including some Mormons who wish to reconcile passages in their religious texts. I suspect that the CBC would be less generous entertaining Mormon narratives). By promoting mythical or religious beliefs to fact, the CBC not only undermines Indigenous ingenuity, but science itself. How does the CBC retain any credibility when confronting the anti-science crowd on climate change or vaccines when the CBC shows a willingness to behave exactly the same way with Indigenous issues? I find the CBC’s story on the Ojibwe horse disheartening – almost racist – because it robs us of the real story worth celebrating: Ingenious Indigenous people created a new breed of pony from European stock to fulfill their needs. It’s fine to discuss Indigenous beliefs, to create a greater understanding about rich Indigenous story telling, but it’s a form of neo-Lysenkoism to dismiss genetics to serve a political purpose.
Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, answers the question why the Europeans didn’t encounter a mirror copy of Europe in the Americas. The racist and terribly incorrect answer that has shaped so much of the awful history of this continent is based on racial superiority. But Diamond points out that the confluence of poor geography, and the general lack of domesticable plants and animals, such as the horse, meant that the flow of people from Europe to the Americas was always destined to go in that direction. The genetic potential of both peoples were the same, it was their unfair respective environments that set the course of history. The story of the Objibwe horse shows that if Indigenous people did have horses pre-contact, they would have created a plethora of breeds for every single need. And if that had happened, Columbus and Champlain would have faced Indigenous armies more powerful than the Huns – and perhaps during Indigenous first contact in Europe.
Thomas Sowell is right: No race has a monopoly on high achievement and no race is incapable of producing high achieving individuals.