Logan Red Crow, a young Blackfoot horseback rider from the Siksika Nation, has always found comfort in horses. “[They] are there for me more often than people,” she says in a new documentary. “I’d like to keep it that way.”
UBC alum Banchi Hanuse was toying with the idea of directing a horse documentary just months before she was called to collaborate on the project that would become Aitamaako'tamisskapi Natosi: Before the Sun, which appeared at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.
The documentary follows Logan’s journey to the top of bareback horse racing, and it is not for the faint of heart.
In the male-dominated sport, riders vault from horse to horse around a track in a quick-witted loop. But with stamina and discipline, Logan is determined to make it to the top, even with the odds stacked against her.
“My mom and dad get concerned for her, but it’s still hard to tell her not to race,” her brother Racey says, who is an athlete himself, being an avid hockey player.
Logan’s routine is relentless. She rises at 4 a.m. to words of affirmation sketched on papers taped to her walls.
“I find there’s a lot of pride [behind] waking up before the sun,” she says.
She breathes in crisp air during a 10-kilometre run, still managing to save time to train under her brother’s guidance. Despite the “badass” deep cuts from previous falls visible on her legs, Logan maintains her drive for success.
Living on a ranch, she spends her days rigorously training her racing horses, which were found in the wild then tamed by her father. Eventually, she hopes to make it to competitions across the country and beyond, starting with the Calgary Stampede, where Indigenous pride is central.
Logan lost her grandmother — a skilled horse rider in her prime — to dementia. This year, for her grandmother’s birthday, she wants to make her proud by competing in the Stampede bareback horse race as the only woman to do so under her father’s relay team Old Sun.
She ducks down and sweeps around the loop in fantastic blue and yellow. Horses fly in and out of the track, and spectators roar in waves. She crosses the finish line, having not fallen off of her horse at all, but she is still sure she could do even better.
As the commentator commands a round of applause for the gentlemen, Logan realizes that under her uniform and goggles, the crowd is convinced she is just another one of the boys.
“My brothers, they don’t see me as the girl,” she says.
But what if they could?
The Enoch Park Indian Relay is Logan’s next milestone, where she advocates for an all-women's race — the first of its kind in Canada.
When Logan gets the call that there will be one, she scrambles to get to the competition, inching across the Albertan plain in her mother’s car while mounds of hay mounted on the top of the trunk tumble off at bumps in the road.
The race is a pivotal outpouring of girlhood, love and support. Logan is told that her support team must be completely composed of women, despite her team usually being made up of her male family members. Luckily, her aunt and a kind stranger step in to coordinate efforts to mount Logan on and off her horses in a skilled choreography that can either make or break the rider’s loop.
In Wyoming, Cowboy State, Logan finishes third and qualifies for the championship in Casper. Her family watches on like hawks — her mother in the stands, her father and grandfather hunched and concentrated on the couch at home.
In a nail-biting pursuit, Logan wins second place in the women’s relay in Casper, making history as the first Indigenous woman to do so.
While some may find the train-race-train-race nature of the plot repetitive, it is precisely this that demonstrates that nothing real comes without consistency.
Aitamaako'tamisskapi Natosi: Before the Sun highlights the Siksika Nation's way of the horse, and all the love, perseverance and tradition that comes along with it. It is a liberating celebration of feminine power, and Indigenous relationships with the land and its inhabitants.
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