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It’s Thursday, eight hours before the first heat, and Richard Longfeather, a Dakota Indian and relay team owner hailing from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, has just been disqualified. He pulled into Shakopee this morning after making the eight-hour drive with his wife, their son, his son’s best friend, and their nephew, and a trailer full of five thoroughbred horses. Longfeather is wearing tight blue jeans and a big belt buckle, with an Under Armour baseball cap pulled down over his closely cropped salt and pepper hair. According to SMSC’s Andy Vig, one of Longfeather’s horses didn’t have the correct vaccination paperwork. He’s near tears as Vig explains that he shares his disappointment, especially since Longfeather’s team was the only Dakota Sioux relay team at the event—meaning that in some ways his team would have been the de facto local favorites.

“But at this point,” Vig sighs, rubbing the red hair cropped underneath his Stetson, “there’s not much that can be done.”

It’s disappointing for me as well. I had Longfeather marked down as a possible central character for my story. His home reservation in South Dakota, Standing Rock, had been in the news perpetually for months. And Longfeather is a native Dakota speaker, steeped in the culture of the horse. Raised by his grandparents on a ranch without electricity, he’s been around these animals his entire life for both work and play, whether in the form of relay or rodeo (Richard’s half-brother is a professional bull rider to boot). He explains that the Dakota received the horse centuries ago, but he doesn’t credit the Spanish, which is how most historians believe the horse made its way to the indigenous people of the North American plains.

“In Dakota,” he says, “the horse is called ‘sunka wa ka’ which combines ‘sunka,’ basically dog, and ‘wa ka,’ the powers of God.”

To Longfeather, the horse is kind of a dog—man’s best friend—with divine superpowers.

We walk away from the officials and he takes me to his camper trailer to introduce me to his horses and his family. He shows me his team’s homemade fluorescent green pullovers, decorated with an eagle feather in the front and a wolf on the back.

“Earlier this summer, we drew the #NODAPL hashtag on the backs of these,” he says. “And we got big cheers from the grandstands.”

But they sewed together brand new uniforms for this meet.

“We wanted to avoid politics this time around,” he says.

As Longfeather huddles with his family to worry about having to make the long drive back to Little Eagle, South Dakota, the other 13 relay teams are getting their horses situated in the receiving barn. This year, most of the teams have brought four or five horses, which is a big change from previous relays at Canterbury, when many teams would show up with three horses and purchase one or two extras from local owners. Many of the teams were grumbling about the new policy. The mile long Canterbury track was intimidating. Nearly all of the Indian relay races take place on dusty rodeo short tracks, where most teams use quarterhorses, a sprinting breed that’s much less temperamental than the high strung thoroughbreds who race on mile long tracks. Up until this year, the relay teams were allowed to buy thoroughbreds here—the back barns at Canterbury is an active horse market, accommodating up to 1600 horses during the high point of the season. But during one of the races last year, a horse that was bought here was entered into a race the next day, and it injured its leg and had to be euthanized, right on the track. Because the horses that race in the Indian relays aren’t under the jurisdiction of the State of Minnesota racing commission, rumors circulated about that horse’s health and why it was cleared to race in the first place. It wasn’t a good look for the Indian Relays, so this year, the policy was changed.

While most of the teams stay ten minutes away in rooms at the Mystic Lake Casino hotel, the Mountain River team from the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana has pitched tents across the parking lot from the receiving barn. You can see their nation’s flag flying as soon as you drive past the McDonald’s on the backside of the track. Two separate tribes live on the Fort Belknap rez—the Gros Ventre Indians and the Nakoda—a mountain tribe and a plains tribe, and they don’t interact that much. This kind of enforced awkwardness was mandated by the federal government when the reservation was established in the 19th century. Near the barn, one of Mountain River’s muggers, Al Kulbeck, says that even though Canterbury has an $82,000 purse—the most of any race—most of these teams are in it for the love of the culture.

“Fort Belknap is a basketball reservation for most of the year,” he says, “but in the summertime, everybody follows relay.” But Kulbeck says taking care of thoroughbreds isn’t just a seasonal situation—you’re responsible for them year round, and taking care of racehorses out on the reservation can be stressful.

“Quarterhorses will dig around in the snow but thoroughbreds won’t,” he says. “You can’t even water ‘em out in our pasture, really—you bring ‘em to a crick and they won’t know what the fuck that is.”

And while some teams come from reservations with more money, or can find sponsors to offset costs—a bar near the reservation sponsors Mountain View’s horsefeed, for example—the humans on the team are oftentimes left to their own devices. “We left the race before this one with $2,” he says.

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One of the favorites to win the relay is Starr School, a Blackfeet team from Browning, Montana. Last June they won the Muckleshoot Gold Cup, a big $50,000 purse Indian relay held at Emerald Downs, a track owned by the Muckleshoot tribe out in Seattle, Washington. There’s a concerted effort to establish Mystic and Muckleshoot as two thirds of a triple crown of Indian Relay (the third leg has yet to be determined), so the Starr School team is eligible for a $10,000 bonus if they win Mystic Lake.

Because of the Muckleshoot win, Starr School’s 21-year-old Isiah Crossguns is quickly becoming a star in the relay world. Like most relay riders, Crossguns is tall, much taller than the horseworld’s typical jockey. But he’s thin, with a build as willowy as the mustache that darkens his upper lip. He says he weighs around 125 pounds. His team’s captain is burning sweetgrass, an herb sacred to most tribes of the Great Plains, in order to remove bad vibes and calm the animals down before their race. The horse standing behind Crossguns bends down to nuzzle his ear. Both of them exude the eerie calm of professional athletes before a big game.

It’s just after before twilight, and time for the first heat of the evening. In an unexpected development, somehow the veterinarian back in Standing Rock has unearthed the correct herpes papers and Richard Longfeather’s team has been cleared to race. This would be fishy if this had happened in any other sport, and it is in this one as well, I guess, but when I find Richard by the barn with his horses, he’s ready to race, wearing his homemade lime green team Longfeather jersey. He breaks down in tears and tells me how much this means to him, how much this means to his family. Earlier, Longfeather told me a story about his son, Jace, who will be riding for his team in front of thousands of fans tonight. When Jace was a ten-year-old, he enrolled him in a bull riding training class. Somehow, during one of the early training sessions, his boy was allowed to ride an actual 5000 pound bull, and although Longfeather offered him sage advice on how to dismount safely, the boy was thrown, and one of the bucking bull’s hooves came down on the boy’s forearm, “squishing it like a ripe tomato,” as Longfeather describes it. He vividly remembers holding his son’s arm together in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The boy was banned from riding bulls again by his mother (temporarily, as it turned out—he started again this past summer.) But now, Jace is focused on Indian Relay, and while this sport may be slightly safer than riding a bull, it’s not without serious risk.

A quick note on how a relay race actually works: Right in front of the winners circle area on the grandstand side of the track, there are seven boxes painted in the dirt with white chalk. While the seven riders get off to a running start, in the boxes the captain, one “set-up man,” and one “mugger” hold the two extra horses who will run the second and the third legs, respectively. The mugger gets his name from his job: when their rider comes around the track with the first horse, and then again with the second, he has to throw himself in front of a racehorse and accost it, like a mugger, in order to slow and ultimately stop it. The rider, who is riding bareback, attempts to leap down from one horse as cleanly as possible; if the set-up man has the next horse positioned perfectly, the rider will be able to execute his footwork in textbook fashion, taking the minimal amount of steps necessary to jump off one horse and spring up onto the back of the new one. Remounted, the rider then slaps the horse on the ass and goes flying down the track. In the chaos of a relay, the exchanges, of course, aren’t always clean, and sometimes a mugger finds himself in the mud under the hooves of a 1200-pound racehorse. As Mountain River captain Byard Kirkaldie says, “it’s modern day warfare—some people just come out to see us wreck.”

Before the first race starts, the Eagle Whistles, a legendary pow wow “drum” (the term Natives use for a pow wow singing group) with roots in the tribal lands of Mandaree, North Dakota, ratchets up the intensity by throttling a deer skin drum and intoning songs in an ancient style. Even surrounded by a grandstand filled with suburban horseracing aficionados drinking big plastic cups full of Budweiser, you’re transplanted to the pre-colonial age. The eerie sound lends an immediate martial seriousness to the proceedings. After the intros of each team over the P.A. system by “the Voice of Canterbury” (and Minnesota Vikings super bro play-by-play man) Paul Allen, the entire field gets off to a galloping start. This is different than the gated start used for all the other races held at Canterbury, where the horses are lined up and released from a mechanical chute that ensures a fair start—and this is the main reason why the Minnesota racing commission doesn’t allow Canterbury patrons to actually bet on the Indian relay races.

To no one’s surprise, Isiah Crossguns takes the lead over the first lap. He’s ahead by more than five lengths on the backside before being slowly reeled in by a horse and rider from the Tissidimit team, from on the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho. The first exchange is frantic, with Crossguns, who holds his whip between his teeth and the Tissidimit rider, Jered Cerino, bounding off their charges onto two fresh horses. Coming in immediately behind them, the Mountain Crow team from Southern Montana wrecks. The rider hops off right before the mugger attempts to catch the horse. While the rider mounts the next horse cleanly, the mugger doesn’t fare as well, getting knocked into the mud as he grabs the reins and holds on for dear life. The set up man tries to snatch the dangling reins himself and also gets dragged down. It all happens fast and looks like it could’ve been much, much worse. The crowd loves it.

On the second lap Tissidimit takes the lead. Their rider maintains his lead coming out of the second exchange. Crossguns gives one more valiant charge on the back stretch, but Tissidimit’s rider has obviously left something in reserve for the home stretch, and wins by two lengths at the stripe.

During the break between heats, I run into a member of Canterbury’s Racing Commission who I’ve known for years.

“Steve!” she said, “What are you doing here?”

When I explained that I was here to cover the relay races she looks stunned. “Why?” she asked. I told her I thought it was a good story.

“I think it’s disgusting,” she said. I tell her I understand Indian Relay is less regulated by the state than thoroughbred racing, but is it really that much more dangerous to the horses?

She doesn’t want me to use her name on the record. Instead, she introduces me to the woman standing next to her—the track’s head vet, Dr. Lynn Hovda, a woman with long grey hair and an arresting set of eyes, one green, one blue.

“Go ahead,” she says. “Ask her.”

I ask Dr. Hovda if she thinks there might be something amiss with the veterinary paperwork for Richard Longfeather’s team. She rolls her heterochromatic eyes almost to the back of her head and says she will schedule an interview with me in the morning. (When I meet her the next morning in her office on Canterbury’s backside, she walks back the eyerolling, but expresses concern that Indian Relay is regulated by Canterbury Park, not the State of Minnesota. She explains the epidemic potential of Equine Herpes, and says the track did the right thing by disallowing horses to be raced on the same weekend they’re bought.)

Longfeather’s team is set to race in the second heat. He has exchanged the Under Armour ballcap for a white Stetson and he’s wearing his team’s lime green shirt., He’ll be working as his team’s mugger, tonight, and there has been one more dramatic last minute change regarding personnel. His son Jace feels like he’s carrying too much weight for the the mile long track at Canterbury, so his friend Justin Fox is atop the horse. When the gun goes off, Longfeather’s thoroughbred doesn’t react, perhaps due to the last minute rider switch. The previous year’s champion relay team, DD Express—Sioux Indians from the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, the same Reservation the famous chief Sitting Bull lived on in the late 19th century— shoot ahead by 20 lengths. Longfeather’s team finishes dead last.