The Equestrian Rites and Ceremonies:
To Paint, to Dance, to Heal

The relationship of the Native American peoples of the Plains with the horse was not confined to daily life: to the hunt, to riding, to observation. It ran through the whole of ritual and spiritual life. Births, rites of passage, wars, mournings, healings, celebrations: the horse was present at each of these moments, not as an accessory, but as a full actor in the sacred world.

This article explores that ritual equestrian life in all its density: from war paint to the warrior societies, from healing ceremonies to ceremonial art, from the giving of horses to rites of passage.

War Paint: A Prayer Painted on a Living Body

We touched in an earlier article on war paint as a spiritual act. It is time to explore its full depth.

Before any battle or important hunt, the horse was painted according to a precise protocol, often performed by a medicine man (wičháša wakȟáŋ). This was not decoration: it was an invocation. Each color, each symbol, carried a precise meaning and conveyed an intention to the spirit world.

The colors and their meanings:

Red (drawn from iron oxides, red clays, barks, and berries) symbolized strength in combat, power, and success in the hunt. Yellow (produced with buffalo bile on the Plains, or from yellow clays and flowers) expressed the will to fight to the death, but also intelligence and vigor of heart.

Green (drawn from moss, flowers, berries, algae, or copper ore) was the color of nature, harmony, and healing.

Blue (obtained from dried duck droppings, blue clays, sunflower seeds, or oxides) evoked sky and water: wisdom, trust, hope.

Purple (drawn from blueberries, black-eyed Susans, and wild hibiscus) was associated with magic and mystery, reserved for shamans and medicine men, never used for ordinary combat.

Black (obtained from charcoal or black earth, mixed with bear grease) was the color of victory and power in battle: a warrior who had killed an enemy returned to camp with his horse and his face painted black, publicly proclaiming his feat of arms.

White (drawn from white clays and ground eggshells) carried the double meaning of mourning and the spirit world: purity, passage, communication with the dead.

The symbols and their meanings:

Zigzags reproduced the lightning of the Wakíŋyaŋ, invoking their speed and power upon the horse. Circles around the eyes or nostrils spiritually reinforced the animal's senses for battle.

Hoofprints painted on the flank tallied the warrior's victorious raids.

A printed hand signaled a fight successfully waged at point-blank range.

Two crossed bars indicated that the rider had survived an ambush. Red bands on the horse's face proclaimed the defeat of an enemy village.

The bear paw invoked strength and courage: the heart of a warrior as powerful as a bear.

Hail spots made up an offensive prayer: calling misfortune down on the enemy as hailstones strike the earth.

Arrowheads painted on the hooves made the horse fast and nimble.

Fire arrows carried disorder and destruction to the enemy.

Finally, the highest symbol of all: the Pat Hand Print, the left hand drawn on the horse's right hip. It was reserved for the horse that had brought its rider back unharmed from a particularly perilous mission. It was the supreme honor: granted not to the warrior, but to his mount.

A Teton Sioux named Brave Buffalo summed up the underlying philosophy: "If an Indian wishes to gain something, he promises his horse that if it will help him he will paint it with native dye, that all may see that help has come to him through the aid of his horse." To paint the horse was to seal a pact. A promise among the warrior, the animal, and the spirit world.

The Warrior Societies of the Horse

The Plains nations had developed warrior societies: male organizations that structured the military, social, and spiritual life of the community. Among the Lakota, these societies were numerous and hierarchical: Kit Fox (Tȟokȟála), Brave Hearts (Čhante T'inza), Omaha, Bone Keeper, and others still. Each had its own rituals, insignia, obligations, and ceremonies.

Among all these societies, one deserves particular attention for its direct link with the horse: the Sunk'ska Akan'yanka, the White Horse Riders Society.

Founded in the late 1860s by Brings Three White Horses and his brother Red Fish of the Brulé branch of the Sioux, this society brought together veteran warriors: men who had accumulated enough deeds of valor to display them publicly. The white coat of their horses made an ideal canvas on which to paint their war exploits, visible from afar to enemy and ally alike. The white horse was literally a living book of honor: a red hand meant an enemy killed, a hoofprint a captured horse.

The members paraded on great occasions, their horses adorned with beadwork and porcupine-quill embroidery. In return, those who witnessed the parade sang honor songs for them. Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and Sitting Bull were among their members.

Among the Cheyenne, the most feared warrior society of the Plains (the Hotamitaneo, or Dog Soldiers) also kept an intense ritual bond with the horse. Before each battle, the Dog Soldiers painted their horses as much as themselves. Four elite warriors carried into combat a dog rope (a long strap of rawhide adorned with porcupine quills and feathers) which they staked into the ground with a picket pin, the same pin used to tether horses at camp. This gesture meant that they would fight on that spot to the death, without retreating a single step. Their ritual ceremony numbered four hundred songs and unfolded over four days. The horse was their companion in this ultimate vow: painted, sung to, and committed with them to the sacred act of combat.

Cheyenne equestrian culture was not limited to male warrior societies. On June 17, 1876, at the Battle of the Rosebud, a Cheyenne woman entered history: Buffalo Calf Road Woman, also known as Brave Woman (Muts'i-mi-u-na in her language). Her brother, the chief Comes In Sight, had just had his horse shot out from under him and found himself exposed to enemy fire. She charged alone on horseback into the heart of the battle, saved him, and carried him off on her mount. Her bravery galvanized the Cheyenne warriors, who returned to the fight and won the victory. Eight days later, she fought again at Little Bighorn alongside her husband. Ever since, the Cheyenne have commemorated the Battle of the Rosebud under the name "Where the Girl Saved Her Brother": a name that honors not a chief, but a horsewoman.

The National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) also documents the horse's role in the dance sticks and coup sticks of the warrior societies (a coup being a feat of touching an enemy in battle). A Piikuni (Blackfeet) coup stick held at the NMAI bears rawhide depictions of horses, each horse representing one of the warrior's mounts in combat. A Hunkpapa Lakota dance stick (circa 1899), adorned with eagle feathers, brass bells, pigments, and horsehair, represents a beloved horse commemorated at each ceremonial dance. This gesture of memory (honoring a specific horse through a ritual object) ran through the whole equestrian culture of the Plains.

The Horse in the Ceremonies of Life

The horse was not present only in war: it ran through the entire cycle of life of the Plains nations.

Among the Oglala Lakota, a rite of passage involved piercing the ears of young boys and girls with rings made of horsehair, according to the testimony of Loretta Afraid of Bear-Cook, an Oglala elder, cultural keeper, and board member of the Sacred Way Sanctuary (Florence, Alabama). This gesture anchored the child in the alliance with the Horse Nation from the earliest years of life.

The giving of horses (giveaway) was the highest form of generosity in Lakota culture. At naming, healing, or mourning ceremonies, to offer a horse (and above all a horse of value) was the most honorable act of generosity a man could perform. The NMAI documents a beaded Lakota horse mask (circa 1904) whose craftsmanship was meant for presentation at a naming ceremony. Wealth was worth something only because it circulated. A chief was measured not by what he owned, but by what he gave.

The Horse Dance: Reenacting the Alliance with the Spirit World

We touched in an earlier article on the Horse Dance of Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa). It is worth exploring here its deep ceremonial dimension.

Taught by the medicine man Black Road after Black Elk had revealed his Great Vision to him, the Horse Dance was a public reenactment of the spiritual vision the young man had received. Riders mounted on horses of the four colors, black (west), white (north), sorrel (east), and dun (south), represented the powers of the four directions. The ceremony involved the whole community: singers, dancers, keepers of the sacred circle.

The Horse Dance was not a performance. It was a reactivation. To replay its images was to renew the alliance between the Lakota community, the world of horses, and the Great Mystery. Black Elk himself reports that the anxiety that had tormented him for years vanished at the close of the ceremony. The Horse Dance had not merely consecrated him a medicine man: it had made his vision real and operative within the community.

The author John G. Neihardt, in a letter to his publisher (1931), noted with wonder that the Horse Dance had been performed only three times in Lakota history, and never before white people: "It is the most magnificent episode in the vision. No ethnologist has ever heard of it."

The Ghost Dance: When Ceremony Invokes the Return of the Horses

If Black Elk's Horse Dance was a personal and communal ceremony of renewal, the Ghost Dance (the Spirit Movement) was the greatest collective expression of spiritual resistance of the Plains nations, and the horse was at its heart.

In 1889, the Paiute prophet Wovoka (Jack Wilson) received a vision during a solar eclipse. If the nations danced the ghost dance with sincerity, the earth would renew itself, the white people would vanish, the dead would rise again, and the great herds of buffalo and the wild horses would return.

For the Lakota on their reservations, stripped of their freedom and their equestrian culture, this promise was overwhelming. The return of the wild horses was not a metaphor. It was the promise of an entire world.

The Ghost Dance spread like wildfire. The Lakota sent emissaries (Kicking Bear and Short Bull) to meet Wovoka in person. On their return, they taught the dance on the reservations. Thousands of people danced on the reservations of the Dakotas, of Wyoming, and of Montana throughout 1890.

Women, men, and children danced together, as equals. The Ghost Dance had no gender: it had a hope.

The American reservation agents, terrified, called for military intervention.

On December 29, 1890, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry massacred more than 250 Lakota at Wounded Knee, South Dakota: men, women, and children, most of them unarmed. The Ghost Dance seemed to die with them. But the vision of the return of the free horses, that, never wholly went out.

Horse Medicine: Healing as One Heals Oneself

One of the most striking revelations of the Indigenous relationship with the horse is the similarity between human medicine and equine medicine in the Plains nations. This was no accident: it was the direct consequence of a worldview in which human and horse share the same status as living beings, endowed with a spirit and subject to the same imbalances.

The journal Agriculture and Human Values (Springer) states it clearly in a landmark academic study: "Because the Plains nations perceived humans and animals as closely related, medical therapies and preventive regimens often overlapped between human and veterinary practice." Horses, like humans, could possess useful knowledge in the domain of healing. The reciprocity between humanity and nature expressed itself through the interactive healing powers of humans and horses.

In practice, plants used on humans also treated horses. Artemisia ludoviciana (white sagewort), used by the Ojibwe, treated horses as well as warriors. Echinacea angustifolia was used in fumigation to treat glanders (a contagious and often fatal equine disease) in horses. Large groundsel and other aromatic plants served as insect repellents. ScienceDirect documents these practices across several nations of the Plains and the Plateau.

Among the Lakota, a specific equine medicine is attested by Loretta Afraid of Bear-Cook: once the horse had died, a particular bone of the leg (recognizable by its circular shape) was taken, dried, and worn behind the ear by the chief or the warrior. This horse medicine was invoked in any situation demanding a particular power, spiritual or physical. Among its known users: Crazy Horse himself.

The Healing Ceremonies of the Horse

If equine medicine treated the bodies of horses with the same plants as humans, another tradition went further: the horse itself could heal humans.

This belief rested on the conviction that the horse, as a wakan being endowed with a soul (Wamaka Nagi), possessed a healing energy of its own. The National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian) states it explicitly: horses were perceived as "embodiments of beauty, energy, and healing power," and their images on ceremonial objects represented this spiritual connection.

Certain ritual objects, such as the equine-medicine parfleches (folded rawhide cases) of the Piikuni (Blackfeet), were designed specifically for this dual function. The Piikuni artist Jackie Bread, invited by the curator Emil Her Many Horses to reproduce such parfleches for the exhibition A Song for the Horse Nation, refused: these objects had been given to specific individuals by spirits or through ceremonial transmission, and only those who had received that right could make them. The horse's healing power was not a general concept: it was a particular gift, transmitted under precise ritual conditions.

Among the Oglala Lakota, simply being in the presence of a horse, touching it, currying it, speaking to it, was recognized as a form of restoring inner balance. Oral tradition teaches that wounded or grieving warriors were encouraged to spend time with their horses to recover their spiritual strength and their equilibrium. The horse was not a therapeutic tool. It was a kin who healed by its presence alone.

Equestrian Art: Honoring the Horse in Matter

The ritual life of the horse continued in ceremonial art: a form of material memory that made it possible to honor the horse beyond its death.

Horse effigies were carved on saddle pommels, dance mirrors, pipes, and ceremonial pouches. Among the Oglala and the Hunkpapa, effigies were carved to reenact coups during victory dances, or carried by horse raiders as spiritual protection, or else kept as memorials to certain extraordinary horses. The NMAI holds, notably, the dance stick of No Two Horns (Hunkpapa Lakota, circa 1890), created to honor his beloved horse killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The NMAI exhibition label notes that this horse had suffered six wounds in combat (represented by red triangles on the stick) and had nonetheless carried No Two Horns to victory.

Horsehair held a special place among ceremonial objects. Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), curator at the NMAI, notes it explicitly: "The hair on many war shirts was frequently taken from beloved horses, because to wear a lock of hair was to keep within oneself a part of the power of its source." The death of the horse did not break the bond: it condensed it into the ceremonial object. The warrior thus carried his horse upon him, in combat and in life.

The Apsáalooke (Crow) have particularly excelled in the art of ceremonial equestrian adornment, keeping this tradition alive to this day. The NMAI documents their fully beaded horse regalia (headstalls adorned with owl feathers, buffalo horns, porcupine quills, and ermine) that transformed the horse into a sacred being visible to all. The Crow Fair Parade (Crow Agency, Montana) is one of the largest Indigenous equestrian and cultural celebrations in North America: hundreds of horses parade there in full ceremonial dress each year. In 2009, representatives of the Apsáalooke Nation rode horseback in the inaugural parade of President Barack Obama: traditional regalia worn in the capital of the country that had tried to erase their culture.

The Crow Nation also produced an exceptional female equestrian figure: Bíawacheeitchish, known as Woman Chief, and perhaps also as Pine Leaf in the controversial memoirs of the trapper James Beckwourth. Born into the Gros Ventre nation, captured by the Crow between the ages of ten and twelve, she was raised by a Crow warrior who encouraged her in the men's activities. She became an outstanding warrior and hunter, distinguished herself many times in combat, and rose to third place on the Council of Chiefs among one hundred sixty lodges. Her rise (in an essentially patriarchal society) was made possible by one thing: mastery of the horse. Without that mastery, her story would not have existed.

Elaborate horse masks (beaded, feathered) dressed the horses at the great parades and ceremonies. A Piikuni (Blackfeet) mask (circa 1830–1860) held at the NMAI is described by the curators in these terms: "Imagine a horse wearing this mask and charging toward you, you can appreciate how powerful and utterly transformative this headgear was." Beaded and feathered hoof ornaments completed this ceremonial adornment.

Until the late 19th century, when the American government banned the ceremonial practices of the Native American nations, these traditions were kept alive by slipping into the Fourth of July celebrations: cultural resistance wearing the mask of the American national holiday.

What the Rites Reveal

The Indigenous equestrian rites reveal a truth that Western civilization struggled to grasp: a being can be both useful and sacred. The horse served for the hunt, for war, for travel, and it was honored in the dances, healed with the same plants as humans, commemorated in art, promised, given, sung to.

This coexistence was not a contradiction. It was the natural consequence of a worldview in which usefulness does not erase dignity. In which a being who helps deserves to be honored. In which the death of a beloved horse justifies a dance stick adorned with its own colors, carried in ceremony years after its passing.

This is not sentimentalism. It is coherence: the same philosophical coherence we found in the methods of capture, in the natural aids, in the language of the body. A culture that thinks of the horse as a being renders it the honors due to a being.