The Return of the Ojibwe Pony, the Midwest’s Native Horse

On a cold April day in 2022, six shaggy, stocky ponies huddled together in the chill Canadian air, hot breath pluming from their noses. The whites of their eyes and bright face markings stood out against their full, dark winter coats. Their hooves crunched through frost on the hard ground as the small herd was hurried onto a stock trailer.

The horses hardly knew a human’s touch, and shifted around nervously as the trailer slid out of the driveway. Usually, their concern would have been warranted: Many of their relatives had been sold at auction and sent to slaughter. But this time was different. The lucky bunch was headed to a forever home where they’d be part of a growing mission to bring back their rare breed: the Ojibwe pony, which had roamed North America for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, before being nearly wiped out in the last two centuries.

The six ponies headed to a nine-acre oasis in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, a small town nestled in farmland and forest, about an hour’s drive east of Minneapolis. There are fewer than 200 of these animals left; while there are a handful of them scattered from Minnesota to Alabama, most live in Canada. The arrival of these six stocky horses was the first time in more than half a century that the breed set hoofed foot in western Wisconsin.

While there are conflicting narratives about how long these ponies have lived in North America, their place in Ojibwe culture and history is self-evident, and the six ponies’ arrival in Spring Valley would be the catalyst for a local movement to rekindle that long-held spiritual relationship between the Ojibwe people and their spirit horses.

“It’s like bringing a family member home,” said Em Loerzel, a White Earth Nation descendant and proud caretaker of the small herd. Loerzel didn’t grow up with horses, but was still, as she puts it, a “horse-crazy kid.” Her uncle, Mark Denning, regaled her with tales of the dark-colored, tiny horses that reached only 14 hands, or five feet, in height. They roamed freely in the forests around his village—until one day, they didn’t.

In the early 1900s, the Ojibwe pony, also known as the Lac La Croix pony, numbered in the thousands, spending their summers in the woods and fields surrounding Ojibwe communities around much of the Great Lakes region. Come winter, the horses helped Ojibwe communities haul wood and nets. While their relationship was practical, there was a spiritual element as well.

“Our ancestors utilized them for all the different aspects of what they offer, not only in the utilitarian way of using them, but for the connection to spirit, and like a family member,” says David Wise, who runs the Native Wise farm in Minnesota with his wife Patra, where they look after two Ojibwe ponies.

The Wises, Loerzel, and other members of the larger Anishinaabe community spread throughout the Great Lakes region are dedicated to reigniting that cultural and spiritual connection. In 2022, Loerzel and her husband rallied local support to start The Humble Horse, a nonprofit aimed at not just promoting responsible breeding of the horse, but also bringing the horse and their people back together. Their efforts, along with others doing similar work in Canada and the United States, is much needed, considering the tumultuous history of the breed, which was nearly lost altogether.

In the early 20th century, Ojibwe ponies, like the Ojibwe people and other Indigenous communities, faced persecution from settlers and the government. The horses, seen as pests and vectors for disease, were exterminated by the thousands. By 1977, there were only four left, all of them mares. The lonely few were isolated on an island in Lac La Croix, just north of the U.S.-Canada border. Word spread that the Canadian government planned to cull the last remaining ponies, driving the community to an action plan involving crossing borders, traversing ice-covered lakes, and a whole lot of apples.

The Heist

“Don’t believe the movies. The last roundup did not occur many years ago. It did not involve sun-baked young cowboys, sun-baked plains, box canyons, and the like,” wrote journalist John Murrell in 1977. Murrell tagged along with four men hell-bent on bringing the breed back from the brink. The reporter dubbed the operation “the last round-up,” but it’s more commonly referred to as “the heist.”

The group was led by Fred Isham, an Ojibwe man living in Nett Lake, a reservation in Minnesota, who had bought the mares a few years earlier. He had tried to bring them to Minnesota before but had been stopped at the border. Border or not, the trip from the Minnesota reservation to La Croix Village is not easy in any season. The village is only accessible by crossing several lakes, via air, water, or ice. Three years earlier, Isham led a team to bring out the horses via snowmobile, but was stopped at the border and had to turn back. Since, he’d even considered swimming the herd out in the summer. But as the winter months dragged on, the horses became worse for wear, and Isham decided to give it one more go.

On the cold morning of February 18, Isham, Murrell, and three horse-savvy men from the Bois Forte Reservation began their drive from Minnesota to the Canadian village. The fresh snow would be the least of their worries as they wove a truck and 20-foot trailer over frozen lakes and careened through snowmobile paths closed in by the undergrowth.

When they arrived at the village, the real hunt for the horses began. Villagers joined the search, scouring the woods on foot and snowmobile, searching for the small dark horses through the snow-dusted winter trees. After a long search and a bit of a chase, the horses appeared—all bays with brown coats, black manes and tails, and unique white blazes and stars on their faces—standing calmly in a clearing, happily taking apples from Isham’s hand. Besides manes full of burrs, the horses were well kept. They took easily to being haltered and led, except for one young horse who bucked and reared. As the sun set over the frozen landscape, the four horses, finally loaded onto the trailer, settled in for the journey to their new home.

The heist wasn’t just about the mares, but the breed as a whole. These four horses held the key to bringing back the Ojibwe pony. After settling into their new home in Minnesota, on the land of farmer Walter Saatala, the mares were bred with a Spanish mustang, and slowly, through generations of careful management, the population began to rebound. Saatala would give away or sell ponies to different homes, but a local man named Bob Walker realized there was no official system to keep track of where the horses went or who they mated with. “At a certain point he realized, if we keep doing that, then once again we’ll be in a position where we lose the breed,” says Trevor Kirczenow, a breed registrar for the Ojibwe Horse Society, which preserves, protects, and raise awareness about the Ojibwe ponies. “At a certain point, people wouldn’t even know what they have.”

Walker was connected with a nonprofit now called Heritage Livestock Canada that promotes the preservation of traditional animals. After learning about the ponies from Walker in the 1990s, back when the organization was called Rare Breeds Canada, they began to recognize the significance of the Ojibwe ponies and started efforts to monitor and protect the future of the breed. They sought and purchased Ojibwe ponies from across the Midwest, bringing them back to Canada to be part of local breeding programs. The wild ponies, once seen as feral pests to be eradicated by the Canadian government, were now under private ownership of a small Canadian community advocating for their protection. Slowly, the effort began to pay off. In 2017, Ojibwe ponies returned to the Lac La Croix First Nation, 40 years after the heist.

Heritage Livestock Canada and their community had the resources and support to rebuild the population, but it meant that the vast majority of Ojibwe ponies alive today live on Canadian soil. Now, the Humble Horse and other Native-owned farms in the U.S. are bringing the breed back to Midwestern Anishinaabe communities.

Spirit Horses

The Ojibwe ponies adapted to survive brutally cold winters with a stocky stature, rock-hard hooves, small fuzzy ears, and an extra nose flap that warms cold air as the animal inhales. Along the way, the horses also picked up a docile personality, and an apparent affinity for people.

“Their personalities are a lot like a Labrador retriever,” says David Wise, who adopted one of Humble Horse’s ponies, Baswewe, or Echo, to help with their own community outreach for Native youth. “They’re real friendly. They want to follow you around.”

Wise thinks that disposition could have something to do with the horse’s long history with the Ojibwe people. “I think they’ve imprinted in their genetic memory that they had a good relationship with people,” he says.

The ponies’ origins remain uncertain, however. Based on the fossil record alone, all horses disappeared from North America at the end of the last ice age some 10,000 years ago, and did not reappear until the 15th century, when the Spanish came ashore with European breeds.

There isn’t any hard evidence of the Ojibwe pony being present in North America before then, says Texas A&M University equine geneticist Gus Cothran, who has studied Ojibwe pony genetics for more than two decades. “Pre-Columbian horses, as far as we can see, don’t exist.”

Still, there are many people who stand by origin stories learned from their elders. “The old story that’s been passed on in Ojibwe language is that the horse has always been here,” says Wise. The ponies are said to have braved the Ice Age with their unique adaptations and independence from humans, feeding on twigs and bark, like deer. Yvette Running Horse Collin wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, on deconstructing the colonial narrative and timeline of horses in Native American communities, including the potential survival of the Ojibwe ponies through the Ice Age. She references not only oral histories and the horses’ adaptations, but petroglyphs of ponies from before European contact. Wise points to the little things as evidence, like how his Ojibwe ponies seem to be naturally comfortable around the farm’s bison, while their other breeds spook and bolt.

What’s certain is that the Ojibwe people’s relationship with their spirit horses has been highly revered for many generations.

Native Wise and Humble Horse both have outreach initiatives for Native and non-Native youth, bringing kids out to interact with horses, or taking pairs from the herd to the community. “A lot of the issues the ponies face, our Ojibwe people face too,” says Loerzel. “Sometimes for people, it’s a lot easier to talk about ponies than it is to talk about humans, and you have this adorable little fuzzy creature acting as an ambassador.”

The benefits of bringing horses back to their roots around the Great Lakes, and to their people, aren’t just for kids. Adults like Loerzel’s uncle Denning, who met the ponies on their outing to Milwaukee in 2022, got to see the animals leave and return in his lifetime.

“That’s really, really special to have that moment with the person who was such an important conduit of this knowledge,” says Loerzel. “Without that knowledge, I don’t know, would I have even done this?”

Humble Horse and Native Wise focus on building and maintaining community bonds with the ponies, but they also recognize that participating in responsible breeding programs is crucial to the animals’ future.

Grandpa Dad and Sister Mom

When an already small population is rebuilt from just four females, preserving healthy genetics and avoiding inbreeding takes diligence. Now, all Ojibwe ponies are registered with the Ojibwe Horse Society, which oversees breeding pairs to make the best genetic matches. Despite best efforts, some unmonitored populations of ponies bred for sale or tourism have led to extensive inbreeding.

In the small pool of ponies, it can be hard to avoid. When Loerzel got her first six ponies in 2022, she received a bonus in the form of a stowaway: One mare was pregnant. Her foal turned out to be a prime example of inbreeding. “He’s got a grandpa dad and a sister mom,” says Loerzel. Animkii, meaning Thunderbeing, was born a dark gray with a black stripe down his back and faint stripes on his legs. He won’t be able to breed, but they still love him like family.

Further genetic testing showed the other six ponies, which Loerzel had initially thought might yield some compatible pairs, were all half siblings as well.

While Loerzel is focused on primarily connecting the breed and people, healthy babies are a happy bonus at Humble Horse, and for the breed as a whole. “We could use any help that we can get,” says Kirczenow at the Ojibwe Horse Society. “Especially people who are able to keep some of these horses, and particularly to keep breeding horses, because that really comes with its own set of challenges,” like finding the appropriate registered genetic match, preventing inbreeding, and all the tedious care that comes with mating, pregnancy, and newborns.

Loerzel is up for it. On April 18, Loerzel made another trip up to Canada to adopt an Ojibwe mare who is the best—if not the only—genetic match for her stallions.

She’s named Asabikeshiinh, which translates to little spider, or little weaver, in reference to dream catchers, which are of Ojibwe origin. “When all seems hopeless, lost, or nightmarish, we can be thankful for the little weaver’s help at keeping those bad dreams at bay,” Loerzel wrote in a Facebook post about the new mare. “They are worth it when all else seems bleak—they are resilience personified.”