Lakota Horse Symbols
Clip: Season 16 | 1m 1s | Video has closed captioning.
Lakota people traditionally painted symbols on their horses. Cultural Arts Specialist Steve Tamayo describes a few of those symbols and their meaning.
Aired: 05/01/14
Dakota Life is a local public television program presented by SDPB.
- So these are symbolisms of the Lakota people.
We would actually want to incorporate, a keener eyesight for our horses, and that's why we would encircle around his eye.
And then usually off of that, we would have lightning bolts coming down, to incorporate the speed and agility, that the horse is gonna need during hunts and raids.
And so we bring that down all the way down into his legs.
The X actually marks where the horse himself, was actually struck during a war raids.
Right here is where we would mark.
This is the symbol, in which we would incorporate the horse being shot and the blood spewing out.
This is a tally of how many horses we've actually captured during one of our raids.
And then in the rear, here are the encampments that we raided together.
And so this is, once again, in just the tally, of the exploits and deeds of of a warrior and his horse.
