Indian Horse Book Pdf

[Carol Gudes]

Mill Swamp Indian Horses is a program of Gwaltney Frontier Farm, Incorporated, a 501 (c) 5 non profit breed conservation program. Located outside of Smithfield, Virginia, the program works to prevent the extinction of the Corolla Spanish Mustang, perhaps the oldest and rarest distinct genetic grouping of American horses. Other nearly extinct strains of the earliest horses of America are also preserved and promoted here, including the Marsh Tacky, Shackleford, Grand Canyon, Brislawn, Galiceno, and Choctaw, comprising one of the largest and most diverse herds of Colonial Spanish Horses in the world. From the desert southwest, eastward through Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, into the swamps of South Carolina and the sandy beaches of North Carolina--these were the horses that built America. Their ancestors arrived in the New World nearly one hundred years before the English set foot on Jamestown.

While the movie delves into some dark territory, there are some brief moments of levity. One that sticks out in particular is when young Saul, desperate to learn hockey, teaches himself to shoot with frozen horse dung as pucks.

Saul proves to be a talented hockey player with a bright future ahead of him. It is heartbreaking to see him downward spiral when unexpectedly confronted with his past. This makes it difficult to deal with the racism directed towards him.

Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn moreJanuary 25, 2020Share on FacebookShare on TwitterEmail to a friendPrint "Aggressive assimilation" was a policy developed by the government of Canada in 1880 to ensure that children from indigenous communities would be able to adapt to modern, mainstream society. An estimated 150,000 First Nation, Inuit and Mtis children were torn apart from their families and sent to be educated in state-funded, church-run "residential schools" tasked to supplant their native languages with English or French, rescue them from their "heathen" superstitious practices and convert them to Christianity.

It is the fall of 1959, a 6-year-old Anishinaabe boy by the name of Saul Indian Horse (Sladen Peltier and Forrest Goodluck) and his older brother (Skye Pelletier), with their parents and grandmother Naomi (Edna Manitowabi), are fleeing the threat of family separation and forced confinement to the residential schools.

Heading north on the Winnipeg River on a canoe and through a rough trail on foot, the family navigates an arduous course while Saul's brother succumbs to what they describe as "white men's disease." Saul's parents, who are converts, insist on taking their dead son back for a proper Christian burial, but Naomi, who remains faithful to the ways of the ancestors, refuses to join them. "Your Jesus never fished in these waters," she retorts. She and Saul are left behind and they journey to seek out their relatives through the unforgiving winter. When the elderly woman dies en route, the authorities catch up with Saul and transport him to a residential school.

The St. James Residential School, which is run by Catholic priests and nuns of the inhuman kind, is anything but a place that fosters faith and care. Subjected to constant humiliation and multiform abuse in the name of God and Christianity, the children are living a hell-on-earth; some are pushed to suicide in the face of harsh punishment and repeated psychological torture.

An unexpected redemptive window opens for Saul in the form of ice hockey, a national sport of Canada; Father Gaston, (Michiel Huisman), a young priest who appears to be more open-minded and caring than his colleagues, organizes a team to compete in inter-school tournaments. Deemed too young to play by the school administrators, Saul, improvising with frozen horse dung as hockey slugs, self-trains in the early hours. Gaston discovers the boy's hidden talent and recognizes his potential to be a hockey prodigy. Just as Saul, who is depicted in his growing up stages to young adulthood, is poised to become a hockey phenomenon, the ghosts of his past continue to haunt him as he experiences relentless racism in a white man's game.

The young indigenous actors, Peltier and Goodluck, portray the 6-year-old and 15-year-old Saul, respectively; both give convincing, intuitive performances. Manitowabi never made me think that she is anyone else but Naomi, Saul's wise Ojibwa-speaking grandmother. Manitowabi is a professor and custodian of indigenous traditions at Canada's Trent University and a real-life survivor of a residential school; her presence and performance, at once powerful and wounded, evidently come from a deep place.

Owing to the masterful work of Yves Blanger, a cinematographer from Quebec acclaimed for his work in "Brooklyn" (directed by John Crowley, 2015), "Indian Horse" is awash in beautiful cinematography set against the backdrop of the untamed Canadian winter scape. Touches of magic realism punctuate key sequences when Saul is revisited by his personal demons, haunting materializations of Saul's trauma.

Based on Richard Wagamese's 2012 bestselling novel, which draws on the horrific experiences of family members and friends who lived through the sentence of Canada's shameful racist history, "Indian Horse" is a dark story that needs to be told in its raw truth. But unlike the similarly-themed Australian film "Rabbit-Proof Fence" (directed by Phillip Noyce, 2002), which is nuanced by a mytho-poetic layer that subversively upholds the agency of the indigenous spirit, "Indian Horse" often hangs on to a one-note brooding mood with only the barest allusions to Saul's inner journeying. One is left wishing there had been more glimpses of the young Saul's deepening self-awareness and desire for liberation as a child born and raised in the rich culture of the "Fish Clan" of the Northern Ojibwa.

"Indian Horse" is flawed, but it is that rare film that brings to light the sins committed against indigenous peoples by the unholy alliance of Eurocentric colonization and Christianization. Indigenous cultures continue to bear the stigmata of an aggressive and condescending mission history. Even Pope Francis' token reconciliatory inclusion of an Andean Pachamama image at the pan-Amazon synod elicited an iconoclastic response from exclusivist circles that have not been willing to accept the meaningful gesture as an option for the poor indgena.

If "Indian Horse" can kindle our theological imagination so that we can envision an inclusive table where those we have "othered" are welcomed and cherished, it is well worth its 1-hour-41-minutes' viewing time.

[Precious Blood Br. Antonio D. Sison is associate professor of systematic theology at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, and author of the book The Sacred Foodways of Film (Pickwick, 2016). "Indian Horse" is available on DVD format and video streaming from Elevation Pictures.]

As seen on 60-minutes, the Championship of Champions Indian Relay Races in Casper, Wyoming is an event that you have to see in person to really understand how unique it is! Quickly achieving recognition throughout the West, this premier event features only the best riders as they compete in multiple thrilling races. For those of you who are not familiar, Indian Relay is a highly competitive traditional Native American sport that consists of four Warriors and three Thoroughbred/Quarter horses that compete on a half-mile circle racetrack. With six teams on the track, this event showcases the horsemanship skills, coordination, speed and sportsmanship of 24 Warriors and 18 horses.

Located atop Casper Mountain at Beartrap Meadow and County Park, the Beartrap Summer Festival is like a midsummer getaway for music and nature lovers. For 25 years, this weekend-long outdoor music event has brought festival vibes to the meadow on Casper Mountain.

The upcoming program of relay racing includes an event for women this year, as well. After all, indigenous women in many if not most tribes had an equal and sometimes greater say in matters than their spouses.

The Shoshone, located in Fort Hall, Idaho, are believed to be the first Indigenous Americans to obtain the horse. As Spanish explorers infiltrated the West, their horses often escaped and began life in the wild where they created feral herds that transformed Shoshone society.

The mobility of the horse expanded their range to hunt and gather food. Horses enabled them to follow herds of bison with greater range, adding that meat to their diets in more substantial quantities, and animal hide and bone to other cultural and survival needs.

A frequent visitor to these people in the early 1800s was the Hudson Bay Company, conducting business at Fort Colville where extensive trading took place. The confederation of tribes was formed around the same time. Trading transpired over a sixty-year period with goods such as beaver, bear, fox, muskrat, mink and raccoon.

Many of these people became residents of Canada after a boundary was established between the U.S., in this case Washington, and its northern neighbor. The Colville people have experienced numerous issues with the U.S. government regarding their reservation land and its agriculture after the construction of electric plants and the Grand Coulee Dam. Many of their crop locations and salmon reserves were destroyed by flooded lands.

The consolidation of so many different cultures created a hodge-podge of languages that has created communication difficulties at times. Jonathan Abrahamson is the owner/captain of the team representing the Colville.

Various explanations are given for the derivation of the name. French traders, upon observing the blackened moccasins of these people, who walked across acreage blackened by their slash and burn methods, began calling them black foot.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wintered near these tribes during their Corps of Discovery expedition in 1804, the grand trek westward to the Pacific Ocean. They stayed that winter at Fort Clark, very near the villages of the three tribes. This is also where they acquired the services of Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman, kidnapped as a young girl by the Hidatsa. She helped guide the trip Westward. The Fort Berthold Reservation was created for the tribes by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. The treaty also granted the three tribes twelve million acres, although the reservation today contains a mere 425,000 acres and of that only a fraction is tribally owned.

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