This is a natural question since some tribes were “given” horses and some “discovered” them. Given, as in “learned from Europeans” and discovered, as in “found this really neat creature wandering around in the wilderness”.
The Spaniards went out of their way to “seed” the new world with creatures they wanted to see there. They would put horses and cattle on ships and stop along the coast of the new world somewhere and simply release a few here and a few there. Inside of 100 years there were horses and cattle everywhere.
Those tribes that saw Europeans riding horses simply did the same, but some tribes found these creatures and put them to use on their own.
Um… If you are referring to a specific tribe or nation, definitely it’s proper to say Lakotah, Tohono O’odham, Leni Lenape, etc. If, however, you are speaking of the general aboriginal population, then I think either Native American or Indian is correct and expedient. Some Indians I know prefer Indian, some prefer Native American, some prefer Native Peoples. In this case, even political correct terms can’t be decided upon.
Yeah, of course they did. They took animals that were worth a fortune in the old world and spent an even bigger fortune to ship them to the new world so they could just release them “a few here and a few there”. I am sure you have plenty of evidence to support this.
Closer to the Nahuatl pronunciation perhaps. Both versions are Spanish transliterations. Nahuatl had no alphabet of its own, it was ideographic. The Spaniards devised their own spelling based on Latin and Spanish to put Nahuatl phonemes into alpabetic writing. So there wasn’t a Nahuatl spelling of his name in that sense.
