How animal agriculture was brought to the americas

Among indigenous peoples of the Americas, animal husbandry is now common practice – but not prior to the Columbian Exchange era. Prior to contact, there was relatively little keeping of animals by humans in the Americas. Animals were our relatives, living within our shared habitats. They helped shape our world views and cultures. Our hunting was done in a religious and ceremonial manner. For the purposes of food, the antepasados would even influence the terrain to hold herds in vast areas that made them easier to observe and hunt without the need to contain, control, and feed them with our own hand.

After one hundred years of European contact, the implementation of relatively small-scale cattle and sheep ranching was well established in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. But it wasn't long before the settlers were ready to expand their operations to the northern lands– to La Gran Chichimekah. For a number of reasons, indigenas, africanos, and various mixed people were sent to stake claim on the northern lands and set up the Spanish hacienda/ranching lifeways they had been coerced into adopting. And so the very first large scale ranching communities in North America were born. 

Over generations, an often violent clash of cultures created a distinct northern culture, shaped by the distinct desert landscape in which it formed. This way of life was not only accepted by those groups which we now tend to think of as indigenous or mixed Mexicans, but many groups who we now associate with North American indigeneity also took up the practice of animal husbandry. These practices were adopted, seeing that it could provide a consistent source of food and secure a livelihood which might have otherwise slipped away in the changing cultural tides. To this very day, one finds indigenous communities of ranchers and herders all throughout North America – these are the surviving vestiges of now-ancient traditions of indigenous animal husbandry.