Kohala Equine Education Center (KEEC)

This is not a political post...just the funniest of the memes...

Think dairy cows and beef cattle are a major environmental problem? Please listen to the UC Davis Professor & Air Quality CE Specialist talk in this video.

From April 27, 2020: "Removing horses from their Indigenous caretakers (or slaughtering them outright) was a common tactic used by the U.S. government to force ...Native people to assimilate. 'Going through our lives, we became aware that to further invalidate our existence in our communities, the bureau, the first thing that they did was come to [take] the cattle and horses,' says Afraid of Bear-Cook. But denying Native claims to horses didn’t start with the U.S. government. Early explorers and settlers chronicled the presence of horses throughout North America. In 1521, herds were seen grazing the lands that would become Georgia and the Carolinas. Sixty years later, Sir Francis Drake found herds of horses living among Native people in coastal areas of California and Oregon. In 1598, Don Juan de Oñate described New Mexico as being 'full of wild mares.' Yet, the official story that was written into the history books, and which persists today, is that the New World had no horses before the arrival of the Spanish. According to the narrative, the first horses to arrive in the New World in 1519 were the progenitors of every horse found on the continent in later years. That it would have been biologically impossible for a small group of horses in Mexico to populate regions thousands of miles away in as little as two years is never discussed. That’s by design, says Running Horse Collin who, after being asked by elders from different Native nations to set the record straight, conducted more than a decade of research and wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of Native horses in the Americas. In the Spain of the late 15th and 16th centuries, horses were associated with nobility, power, and cultural refinement. 'If indeed there were horses here and the Native people had a relationship with them, with Europe’s standards at that time, we were civilized. And, in order for them to conquer and do what they wanted to do, we had to be uncivilized,' she says. Covering up the accounts of those who bore witness to horses in the New World and denying that horses existed in the New World at all, helped to sell the myth of settler colonialism on which the conquest of the Americas was built." Excerpts from:

This is our groups motto, I think! Imua!