Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  My priorities shifted at the Canada house as I got older. The year I turned ten, I was expected to help Grandpapa mornings and evenings in the barn, raking the horses’ stalls clean and refilling their buckets with cold, metallic well water from the hose. Well into the last year of his life, Grandpapa was as strong and active as someone in his thirties—he single-handedly cared for the animals, chopped firewood for the furnace, and fixed things constantly around the house. On top of our language barrier, he was a man of few words who was hard of hearing, so our barn chores were completed mostly in silence. But talking wasn’t necessary; we were doing what needed to be done, hoisting forklifts of hay to hungry muzzles, helping one another take care of the beloved creatures that occupied our days.

  It was around this time that my mom allowed me to ride La Fille Fille, who became stubborn and uninterested with a saddle on her back. We took turns warming her up on the lead and then willed her into canter drills around the pasture while Storm and Petit Prince munched on carrots in their stalls. With the increasing chaos of our family life back on the Rez—my parents’ separation only seemed to exacerbate my dad’s drinking as the years went on—I cherished the semblance of structure and responsibility dictated by the parameters of my quiet, Québécois farm life.

  Grandma Hannah likes to joke that my Mikasuki name, Loka-eechete—which roughly translates to “something passing by in the distance”—is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I graduated from college in Manhattan, I stayed in New York City, opting for the less hectic borough of Brooklyn. Today, I’m still in the same sleepy Brooklyn neighborhood, piecing together my own life far away from the Hollywood Rez. I fly back for holidays, but extended stays are a confusing mixture of triggering and healing. This became especially true when my dad lost his battle with addiction in 2013.

  Recently, Dante moved back to the Rez after their college graduation. We talk on the phone often; they’ve become my closest connection to the place that, for better or for worse, will always be my home. So it’s on an unremarkable spring afternoon when Dante calls to tell me about our paternal great-grandfather, Harjo Osceola.

  Though we grew up on the Rez, my siblings and I had never heard of Harjo Osceola. We knew about his son, Genesis Osceola, our father’s father, but even that knowledge was severely limited. Genesis was absent from my dad’s life completely; we never got to meet him before he died.

  Since our own dad passed, we’ve begun the project of reanimating the life he never really shared with us. We cling to every shred of information gleaned through family stories, social media, or Rez gossip. We compare notes, carefully weaving facts and feelings together to fill in the blanks left behind by generational trauma and decades of communication breakdowns. Dante’s phone call is energized with the air of potential, a chance to understand who our dad was as a Seminole man, who we are as Seminole people.

  “Apparently, he was a prominent Seminole cattleman,” Dante says. They text me a black-and-white photo from what looks like a history book and explain that their colleague, another Tribal member, sent it to them when she found out who our father was. I zoom in on the photo, a group portrait of seven Seminole men from the 1950s. They sport baggy button-up shirts tucked into heavy denim and lean against a tall wooden fence surrounded by the twisted branches of Florida’s live oak trees. They all wear cowboy hats and grip cattle-branding irons. My Harjo’s eyes are cast down, his cheekbones small but sharp, his iron spelling “HO.”

  I wonder if my dad knew his grandfather was a Seminole cattleman, if that would have made things different between us. Would he, instead of Grandma Hannah, have taken me to the rodeo? Would he have found pride in who he was, giving him the bravery to fight a little harder to stay around? From what I’ve heard, all it took was one scary fall as a kid in Big Cypress for him to write off horseback riding forever. It strikes me that most of my friends in Brooklyn have no idea that I ever rode. I consult the group Instagram DM I have with my siblings: “You guys ever contend with the fact that we were horse girls?”

  Tia—a classic middle child keeping the peace with something witty at hand—answers immediately: “I talk about it nonstop.” I laugh, because it’s kind of true. When the three of us are together, we’re always bringing up our memories of horse camp, of Petit Prince. It astonishes me that I never associated these facts with the broader consciousness of the pervasive “horse girl” memes and stereotypes. “I buried it so deeply in my subconscious,” I type, “but I’m finally excavating.”

  Sure, I was the weird girl in middle school who kept to herself, read horse-themed YA, and sketched wild stallions on ruled paper. But I wasn’t a horse girl—I couldn’t be. I wasn’t a white, rich femme like the Clique’s Massie Block or the girls I competed against from places like West Palm Beach and Boca Raton. I couldn’t relate to the privilege or sheltered existence that people around me projected onto the young women who openly loved horses.

  Even within the barely-there mainstream representation of Native Americans in movies and TV shows, I wasn’t the type of Native that non-Natives associated with riding. At my elementary school, where I was the only Indigenous student in my grade, classmates would come up to me during recess and ask me if I lived in a teepee, if I had electricity, if I rode a horse to school. “Um, we have a car,” I would scoff back to hide the water rimming my eyes. I vividly remember the burn of my face when a kid told me my dad was stupid because he was an Indian who “danced around a fire.”

  I saw that for my peers, “Native American” evoked only imagery they were familiar with: Plains Indians, like the Lakota and Blackfoot, frozen in the nineteenth century. To them, I was buckskin, headdresses, and Appaloosas with war paint. That’s just not what my family looked like. Our history classes also taught them that Natives were dangerous “savages” who were vanquished by our forefathers because they were intellectually inferior. We learned that the first “American Dream” was “Manifest Destiny,” the delusion, veiled as divine purpose, that Christian settlers were destined by God to expand across the New World. I’ve lost count of how many times children and adults alike have said, “I didn’t know you still existed” to my face. Off the Rez, I was either invisible or an uncivilized relic on horseback.

  By the time I started high school, my parents had been separated for around seven years, and my dad’s drinking was at its worst. He became a ghost of the person I loved, so I rejected him and the parts of myself that were him, alchemizing my broken heart into anger and self-hate. I wanted to be all Frenchie and no Indien. I wanted so desperately to be like everyone else at the small, predominantly white private school I transferred to and attended on a scholarship. I wanted to be thought of as “normal,” and maybe, one day, even cool.

  I quickly surmised that horseback riding would not help my case—not as the only Native American in the class, and most definitely not as a socially awkward newcomer who still shared a bedroom with their sibling because our HUD house was so small. I went from daily lessons to biweekly to none at all; competitions became a thing of the past. I felt guilt when Grandpapa asked me about riding once I’d stopped. But who could blame me for abandoning a world that never fully welcomed me to begin with?

  What I’ve been taught since I can remember and what I know is true: the Seminole Tribe of Florida never signed a peace treaty, never surrendered our land or our people to the United States. In college, studying the nuanced Indigenous history I wasn’t exposed to in the Florida education system changed my life. It gifted me with the vocabulary to unpack my experiences as an Indigenous woman and a space for me to contextualize the pain my dad experienced as an Indigenous man, how he coped with what was available to him. In his death, I forgave him, accepted him, and began to accept myself, too.

  But when I follow the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s history with cattle and horses, our unconquered resilience goes back even further than I imagined. According to leading Seminole historian and anthropologist Patricia Riles Wickman, the mastery of cattle herding
and horseback riding defines the Tribe’s relationship with colonization. It was the ancestors of the Seminole people—the precontact tribes of what is now known as Florida—that were some of the first Indigenous nations to husband these animals.

  In the late 1500s, Spaniards established the first permanent European settlements in what they called “La Florida.” The land was occupied by many different societies, including the Maskókî, Hitchiti, Calusa, Yamásî, Chicása, Apalachi, and Timucua tribes. As foreign invaders, the Spaniards’ dealings with the original peoples were an ever-evolving hybrid of violence and diplomacy, depending on what they needed.

  Much like the rest of colonial history, the Spanish established mission villages to “save” the Indigenous peoples’ souls and assimilate them to Western ideals of civilization through the vehicle of religion. (Because of this, my dad instilled in us a healthy dosage of skepticism when it came to Christianity; I still reflexively cringe at the mention of Jesus.)

  The Spanish also incentivized the Natives to work cattle “ranchos” with land grants, which, of course, consisted of land the settlers had previously stolen from said Natives. With a plot of land and some livestock, the Natives worked raising and selling animals back to the Spaniards at whatever price they were willing to pay. This is how they exploited Indigenous labor for profit. By the late 1600s, the Maskókî people established high-profiting cattle herds in what’s become today’s Alachua savannah in Micanopy, Florida; this prairie is where the group that became known as the Seminole people began.

  Throughout the five hundred years of violent colonization and systematic genocide, the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America) always rebelled. In La Florida, many were subjugated, but many also fought and escaped, finding refuge around the Alachua savannah cattle rancho. There, peoples from various tribes across the occupied land were able to find work and thrive outside of Spanish, then British, and then US control. Natives from territories neighboring Florida, as well as escaped African slaves, were also moving south in search of freedom.

  Using the term their countrymen coined to describe escaped slaves in the Caribbean, the Spaniards called this growing, diverse community of rebels “cimarrones,” which meant “wild ones” or “runaways.” After decades of playing telephone through multiple Indigenous and European languages alike, “cimarrones” became “Siminolie” and then eventually, “Seminole.”

  It’s satisfying to see how poorly the Spaniards’ master plan played out; I smile to myself knowing that my ancestors one-upped their oppressors. When the Maskókî and Apalachi and Timucua and Calusa and Hitchiti and Yamásî and Chicása people were forced into labor, they adapted. They learned the ins and outs of ranching, applying thousands of years’ worth of knowledge about the land to the craft of keeping herds alive as the runaway Seminole peoples. They studied the economic customs of the settlers, becoming acute businessmen for the survival of their communities in an ongoing war.

  Even hundreds of years later, during the bloodiest years of Seminole resistance against the US, the skillful husbandry of scrub cattle and horses kept the remaining few hundred rebels fed and alive. The Seminole Wars, three in total, spanned from 1817 to 1858 in a concentrated effort to eradicate the “Indian problem” of Florida. Initiated by the notoriously belligerent Andrew Jackson, the series of concentrated military efforts failed to completely remove the Seminole people every single time. During the Second Seminole War alone, the US spent almost $40 million to try to capture and relocate around 3,000 men, women, and children to Oklahoma, or “Indian Territory.” It was also the only Indian war in American history that employed the army, navy, and marine corps—unsuccessfully, I might add.

  I find Harjo Osceola listed in the United States Federal Census for Hendry County, Florida, on Ancestry.com. The document states he was born in 1913 and died in 1978 at age sixty-five. He lived twenty-six years longer than my dad.

  In a 1972 interview with the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, Harjo’s younger brother, Reverend Billy Osceola, detailed the family’s life in the early days of the Seminole Brighton Reservation near Lake Okeechobee. “That time, we [didn’t] have any reservation,” he stated. Harjo, Billy, and their siblings harvested their father’s vegetables down in Big Cypress to feed themselves. They hunted alligators, raccoons, and otters, selling their hides and meats to white traders in Indiantown. Their mother, Nancy Osceola, passed away when they were just teenagers.

  They spoke English and Muskogee, or Creek, which is one of the main languages Seminole Indians still speak today. My dad spoke Mikasuki because for a good portion of his childhood he was raised by his maternal grandmother, who didn’t speak a word of English. Grandma Hannah attempted to teach me some words; sadly, I can count the amount of things I know how to say on one hand.

  Googling “Seminole cowboys” in my Brooklyn apartment, I try to envision Harjo in the tanned faces of Tribal men staring indifferently toward the camera on their steeds. By 1957, when Harjo wrangled the fields, the Seminole Tribe of Florida became a federally recognized tribe. That meant the Brighton Reservation was officially an agricultural and livestock enterprise independent of the US government. The Tribe was able to appoint their own land trustees internally, eventually using that legal foundation for future land claims and reparations. I write this down, feverishly, in anticipation of telling Dante that our relative’s work was crucial to the political advancement of our Tribe. Our great-grandpa!

  Researching Harjo reminds me of one sticky night on the Rez. I had just moved to Brooklyn and I was home decompressing for a week. It had been three years since my dad died, and Grandma Hannah made a habit of coming over with her tóhche, who we called Uncle Paul, to tell us stories in the backyard while the sun sunk behind the freeway. Mosquitos pricked our backs and cicadas whirred, but Tia, Dante, and I listened attentively. Uncle Paul spoke about the way-back-when times of the Seminole Wars, detailing the lore and lessons our people bore in hopes of one day telling their great-grandchildren. I eyed the darkening skyline, my heart swelling tight at the image of my ancestors slithering into empty alligator burrows to evade US troops. “They knew the land like no white man did,” he said.

  Tia and I have settled on the loose term “Seminole horse girl.” It seems simple, but the specificity allows just enough space for the intricacies of our biracial identity. Like the Seminole peoples, “Seminole horse girls” originates from a conglomeration of cultures adapting to their environment; sometimes not belonging to one group exclusively can be empowering. I’ve found that, in our family, horseback riding is more than show titles and prestigious stables—horses are how we survive.

  For so long, horses were the love language that kept me tethered to the peace and stability my grandparents offered by way of sharing their home every summer. The Canada house was a place where I was safe to explore, process, and build the confidence I wasn’t able to in the noise and identity politics of South Florida. All those years of horseback-riding lessons, horse camp seasons, new riding boots and tack—those were reassurances from my mom that we were just as good as the snooty kids at competitions, that we’d have fun and meaningful lives, no matter how unstable our household.

  A few months after my dad died, Grandpapa passed away from cancer. The year before, in 2012, he had to put down Petit Prince due to an incurable abscess in his mouth that caused him to stop eating; Storm had already succumbed to lung disease a couple years before that. Seeing Petit Prince’s death as a sign, Grandpapa sold his remaining horse, La Fille Fille, to “une gentille vieille dame” who lived not too far from Saint-Isidore. It was a hard decision, but he visited her a couple of times in her new home. She seemed happy. Less than eight months after Grandpapa’s passing, we said goodbye to Grandmaman, too.

  I think about my Seminole ancestors every day, like I think about my dad and my grandpapa and my grandmaman. So much was lost, and yet, I am here now. I give thanks for what they’ve done and who they were. I want to stop st
rangers on the street, grab their shoulders and shake them and scream, “Do you know what they meant to me and to my understanding of myself?!” Though my Seminole and French-Canadian sides feel like worlds apart, they each gifted me with a reverence for horses that bridges the distance that once overwhelmed me. I follow the bloodline down and I see who I am: July, Genesis and Grandma Hannah, Harjo; France, Grandmaman, Grandpapa. I ride bareback in a sunny Canadian field and wonder, if Harjo could see forward, would he see me? Certainly this equestrian dynasty, this way of living that connects me to all my loved ones, could warrant such foresight.

  For the Roses

  Allie Rowbottom

  The day of the show begins in silence, the fairgrounds still before the sun comes up, the arena closed, the barns dark. I stand on a stool beside the horse. His head bobs in sleep, my stomach presses his neck. Lamps clamped to the corners of the prep-stall warm my work, the braids I make out of mane and tail and sticky hairspray, the black yarn I add in to tie each plait.

  I finish and the announcer’s voice starts up, echoing down barn aisles—testing one two—to the far edges of the grounds, where it fades. I dress myself, saddle the horse. “It’s time, Hammy,” I say and unhook his chains, offer a bit, cold and long-shanked, shaped like a weapon. He opens and takes it like he wants to. Ham, I say and tighten straps, straighten reins, Ham Ham Ham, a mantra.

  Ham is the horse’s barn name, his nickname. I gave it to him when we were young and our story was beginning. Before me, he went by Rambo and seemed dedicated to becoming his namesake. He pawed trenches in his stalls, pinned his ears, bit.