Choctaw Horses

Ponies with a connection to the past are preserved for the future.

By Kenny Coogan
Updated on February 3, 2025
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by Ian Thompson

Intelligent, hardworking, and even-tempered with a gentle disposition, the colorful Choctaw horses are a strain of the Colonial Spanish horse. While held in high esteem by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and anyone who has worked with the ponies, they’re unfortunately listed as Critical by The Livestock Conservancy. The Choctaw ponies that exist today are descendants of animals that survived a trans-Atlantic journey and the forced relocation of the Trail of Tears. Therefore, these animals are tough, strong, and willing to perform a variety of tasks.

Pony History

The ancestors of the Choctaw people and horses indigenous to North America lived together during the Pleistocene. Evidence shows that horses were hunted 13,000 years ago for their meat in the Southeast. Whether through overhunting or climate change, horses went extinct at the end of the last ice age in North America.

According to Ian Thompson, “Choctaw society for 600 generations or so developed without the horse, and then the horse was brought back into Choctaw country by the Spanish.” Thompson is the tribal historic preservation officer of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and senior director of the Historic Preservation Department. He has a doctorate in anthropology with a focus on Native American studies.

“Possibly with the de Soto expedition, or possibly with some of the groups that came a little bit before de Soto, the Choctaw were reintroduced to the horse,” Thompson says. “The Choctaw name for horse is issuba, which comes from issi holba, which means ‘like a deer.’ That’s significant, because at that time of the 1500 and 1600s, the deer was the most important animal in the Choctaw economy.”

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