He remembers watching the men lead the horses away. He says the ponies would roam in the woods near their homes and help with tasks like hauling wood. KRAKER: Norman Jordan was a young boy at the time living at Lac La Croix. HEATHER O'CONNOR: They piled in a pickup truck, hooked up a horse trailer, drove across, like, beaver dams and portages and frozen ice in the middle of February. Heather O'Connor, a Canadian author who spent five years researching Ojibwe horses, says it was dubbed the heist across the ice. Word spread that the Canadian government planned to exterminate them, so four men from the Bois Forte Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota launched a rescue mission. By 1977, there were only four left on the Lac La Croix First Nation in Ontario, just north of the U.S.-Canada border. In the early 1900s, they were killed to make products like dog food and glue. KRAKER: But the Ojibwe horse almost wasn't able to survive its greatest threat - people. It also protects them from the cold, but it also protects them from black flies. And then you probably noticed his really small fuzzy ears. LOERZEL: It's this little kind of, like, inside flap that you see here. KRAKER: She pries open Mino's nostrils to point out a small flap inside. KRAKER: Loerzel says the breed developed a few ways to adapt to the harsh Northern climate. LOERZEL: He's, I think, just one of the sweetest guys. Mino is one of only about 180 Ojibwe horses remaining. Earlier this year, she created a nonprofit called The Humble Horse to raise awareness about the breed and to help revive it. KRAKER: Em Loerzel is a descendent of the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota. Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Kraker reports on the effort to keep it there.ĭAN KRAKER, BYLINE: Inside a barn on a farm in the rolling hills outside River Falls, Wis., stand six small, sturdy and very friendly horses.ĮM LOERZEL: This is Mino, short for Mino Bimaadiziwin. The Lac La Croix pony, also known as the Ojibwe horse, is found mostly in the thick forests along the U.S.-Canadian border. A breed of tiny horses once faced extinction and is now recovering.
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