I was pondering in my insomnia last night how the entire culture and way of life of tribes such as the Lakota were entirely different before the arrival of the horse into North America.
It made me curious how the horse expanded across the continent, and how those cultures initially reacted. I recall in a conversation that the Aztec word for horse is essentially "large stag" or large deer, as that was the way they could understand it in linguistic concept. Was this similar in other NA tribes?
Additionally, I've heard both that the horses introduced were either traded across the vast trade networks of the continent, as well as wild herds were re-domesticated by tribes, which was more true?
How did these tribes also adapt the horse into their mythologies about their world?
I am actually in the middle of my quals exams right now (!!!), so this has to be brief before I get back to the rise of the New Right, but here is an excerpt from a book review I wrote of Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1998). - it is a great read, so I would recommend if you have any spare time and/or continuing interested in the role of the horse in the plains.
In The Contested Plains, West examines the fight for control of the plains of Colorado in America, positing that the introduction of two new commodities triggered incompatible new visions of what these plains could be in two antagonistic cultures. Horses gave the Native Americans new mobility; they foresaw a future with less diversified efforts, including farming, and more hunting and trade. The horse unleashed a new non-human energy source latent in the grasses, radically changing the human-based energy economy of the natives. Analogously, gold, as in the Colorado Gold Rush of 1858 near Pike’s Peak, inspired new visions of capitalist prosperity and western-style permanent settlement. West’s book is organized around these competing visions for the landscape: “If the environment is always helping shape and limit human understanding, people (and only people) are forever imagining new environments and trying to muscle them into being.” In this case, obstacles to achieving visions were found not only in the resistance of the landscape, but in armed conflict with the other culture. Looking back on the history and pre-history of life on the plains, West argues, “the one essential [for survival and success] was knowing the land very well--its wondrous diversity and its unforgiving limits.” Visions engendered by gold, horses and guns blinded both the Native Americans and the Euro-Americans to such limits of place, leading to environmental degradation and survival struggles for all. Even more fundamentally, however, no single place could play host to two distinct visions at once; whose place was it? Ultimately, the Euro-American settlers.
EDIT: Ultimately, West suggests that the horse tested the ecological carrying load of the plains just as much as western-style settlement did. So not only did the horse introduction radically change their survival strategies, culture, and mobility, but it also started a trend of environmental degradation that would leave the Ameri-Indians unable to fall back on traditional styles of survival and subsistence in the face of conflict and aggression from Euro-Americans. He goes into a lot of detail about how the horse influenced the blending of Ameri-Indian tribes who were migrating westward onto the plains as they were pushed out of the Eastern United States, but I'd need to crack the spine open again to recapture the nuances accurately for you. Hope this helps at all!
EDIT: **unpublished! This was just quick weekly coursework. Don't want to let anyone think this was somehow peer-reviewed.
With regards to the "horse = deer" question, the Nahuatl word initially used to describe horses was indeed mazatl, deer. I wrote a bit about this in debunking the idea that Mesoamericans thought the Spanish were some sort of centaurs. Even in the work I cited though (Sahagún's General History..., Book 12) the Nahuatl text starts by referring to horses as deer, but has adopted the Spanish cavallo by the end of the narrative. Another text, Anales de Tlatelolco, which was probably written less than a decade after the Conquest (i.e., predating Sahagún) still uses mazatl for the horses. Lockhart, in The Nahuas After the Conquest notes that cavallo/caballo was adopted fairly rapidly, but that deer-related terms persisted in Nahuatl for quite some time in referring to things like stables (mazacalli) and shoeing horses (mazacactia).
Regarding the spread, Lockhart also notes the early adoption of horses and mules by the traditional long-distance traders of Mesoamerica, the pochteca, as well as for more local trading. Owning and/or renting a pack animals was enough of a common place thing among the indigenous population that 1597 law specifically licensed them to own up to 6 horses.
You may be interested in this blog article on the The Impact of the Horse on Plains Indians: a Historiographical Analysis. It is well referenced and addresses a broad number of effects ranging from impacts on Kiowa slaves to women's roles in bison procurement. It looks pretty solid for a blog.
The Mvskoke word for horse is cerakko (also corakko and sometimes just rakko). It's derived from eco "deer" and rakko "big or large." A quick note on pronunciation: "c" sounds like English "ch" or "j", "r" represents a sound that's not found in English but is occasionally rendered as "thl" as in "monthly," so cerakko is pronounced like "chee-thlak-ko." In Chickasaw and Choctaw, the word for horse is *issoba," which is also derived from the word for deer, issi.
For some counter-examples, you've already mentioned Lakota's šúŋkawakȟáŋ, which is derived from šúŋka "dog" and wakȟáŋ "mysterious / powerful," though as I mentioned in this post, wakȟáŋ is commonly used in referenced to items introduced from Euroamericans in which context its 'myterious' to the extent that its 'foreign.'
In Seneca and Cayuga, the words for horse are kɛɔtanɛhkwih and gaǫ:danęhgwih respectively, both of which means "it hauls logs" (and despite the spelling differences, they're pronounce virtually the same way). In Oneida, however, the word is kohsatʌs, "it is often ridden."