All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.

Reproducing Subjects: US Imperialism and Horse Breeding on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1935-1952
Jennifer Smith, University of Washington

     In the late 1930s, the US government, with the Cooperative Extension Service, implemented a horse breeding program on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation designed to improve existing grade equine stock. Although the program ostensibly provided Natives with horses suitable for travel and working cattle, extension agents hoped that their efforts might produce uniform horses that could be distributed both to the US military and civilians across the country. To achieve this, extension agents instituted a regimented breeding program that inspected, cleansed, and manipulated female equine bodies to ensure their fitness to reproduce with purebred Morgan government stallions. While many Lakotas at Pine Ridge chose to participate in the program, many instead continued pasture breeding their horses—a technique that mimicked the natural
breeding patterns of wild horses and required minimal human intervention. Eventually frustrated by their inability to control Native horse breeding at Pine Ridge, extension agents and government officials ended the program in the mid 1950s. Drawing from a collection of government records and publications, horse magazines, photographs, and cross-disciplinary secondary scholarship, I argue that Indigenous peoples and horses remained central to the advancement of US empire well into the twentieth century. This example of a government-sponsored horse breeding program on an Indian reservation represents broader concerns about empire’s ability to reproduce a homogenous subject—both human and non-human. Moving forward, my analysis opens up new sites of exploration that take seriously the varied ways horses and Native peoples became unwitting tools of empire and colonization in North America.