Holiday Celebrations

By Megan M. Seckman Years ago on the North Dakota Chippewa tribe’s reservation, Turtle Mountain, there lived a family of four little girls and a pasture of broken-down thoroughbreds. Each day, the girls would exercise these horses the rest of the race industry no longer deemed valuable. The girls’ father, Sylvester Alex Poitra, may have quietly wished for boys, but taught each daughter to ride before they could properly walk. And that is how he made a living out of these discarded, maned athletes — and how Reta Underwood was introduced to the world of [...]