Horse Relay a unique way to race
It’s like horse-racing with pit stops. Indian Relay racing is back in full swing this summer in the north-east United States. The Rocky Mountains and the High Plains serve as the ground on which Native American tribes pay tribute to the values of bravery, horsemanship, and the unity of man and beast – in the form of bareback track horse-racing with the adding twist of riders having to jump from one steed to the next.
“It’s a lifestyle really,” said Jostin Lawrence of Blackfeet Nation, the co-owner of an Indian Relay in Browning, Montana. “We’re always on the road. If we’re not on the road, we’re with our horses.”
Lawrence’s team competed for $25,000 this July with 23 other teams for the four night race at the Sheridan WYO Rodeo.
“It’s very competitive,” said Lawrence at the event. “We got all these teams here and they’re all vying for that championship spot. It’s like any kind of racing. You’ve got your fights in the back, you’ve got your friends and buddies. Other teams have rivals. So it can be pretty intense. The crowds love it.”
The races have been running at the Sheridan for 14 years, and Zane Garstad, the rodeo board vice president, is well aware of their draw.
“I know local people who would say, ‘I don’t mind the rodeo, but I really enjoy the Indian Relay races,’ ” Garstad said. “So we’ve brought another group of people to the show.”
An Indian Relay racing team has seven members, four people and three horses. The team leader makes three laps around the track, one on each horse. Two teammates prepare the next horse for the coming rider, and another catches the arriving horse after the rider leaps to the next one.
The exchange is the signature part of the sport. A perfect exchange is a well choreographed manoeuvre – a rider leaps off his horse and lands his first step in a run, then his second step vaults him onto the next horse with his arms braced around its neck for the takeoff. A flawless exchange is not easy, however. 24 people and 18 excited horses on a single track makes for thrown rider, false takeoff, crashes and the occasional trampling.
“Every position on the team is dangerous,” said Lawrence. “Anything can happen at any time: horses hitting you from another team, your own horse blowing up.”
The danger of the event, if anything, adds to the cultural connection to a historic of tribal survival, hunting and warfare. Direct connections are drawn to the herding of bison, which involved exchanging tired horses for more aggressive ones, and to the stealing of horses from warring tribes.
“They would tether their horses along the route,” said Shawn Real Bird, a Crow tribal member from Garryowen, Mont., and a coordinator of the Sheridan Indian Relay. “They were herding them back, and they would jump on a fresh horse every so often all the way back to their home area.”
Organized Indian Relay does not have a documented history. The president of the relay association in Shoshone-Bannock, Idaho, explained that the races have been a part of the tribal fairs for a hundred years. At the race in Sheridan, competitors came from four states with their families, sleeping in tents and horse trailers at the stables. It is only one of a score of opportunities for large-audience competition in the north-west, prepared for with smaller local races, a distinct and unique way to preserve Native American horsemanship.
“It also gives these young men a goal so they can ride their horses, exercise their horses and lead a good clean healthy lifestyle,” said Real Bird, a competitor. “It’s a new beginning for each and every Indian relay racer every time they run a new race.”
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