WYOLA — A group of community organizers and local stakeholders gathered Thursday to officially recognize a joint plan to build a racetrack in the small Crow Reservation town.
About 25 Wyola residents shuffled into the town’s community center Thursday morning. They chatted, sipped coffee and gazed at a celebratory sheet cake, which featured decorative plastic horses, a corral of pretzel sticks and crushed chocolate “dirt.”
The day’s task: to sign a memorandum of understanding officially recognizing their collaboration in building a horse racetrack right outside the community center.
The planned racetrack is a collaborative effort between several reservation organizations, a local community college and a neighboring ranch.
Workers from Padlock Ranch, a cattle ranch spanning Sheridan County and Big Horn County, Montana, carved a racetrack out of the earth next to a Wyola community center and will continue to assist with the project’s heavy equipment needs. Padlock Ranch CEO Trey Patterson said the ranch’s participation in the project initiated the revitalization of its relationship and support of projects on the reservation.
Little Big Horn College, a community college located in Crow Agency, Montana, dedicated to providing educational opportunities to tribal and community members on the reservation, offered to support the project by shipping track construction materials to Wyola. Students in the college’s highway construction certification program needed experience operating heavy machinery, experience they will now receive by hauling more than 2,000 tons of sand to the Wyola racetrack. Little Big Horn College Workforce Navigator Berthina Nomee was excited to see collaboration between many organizations offer the students under her care an opportunity to use their skills.
Plenty Doors Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving conditions on the Crow Reservation, provided Little Big Horn College students with the gas money they needed to ship the sand. According to Plenty Doors Executive Director Charlene Johnson, this project accomplished the organization’s goal of economic empowerment and workforce education by offering Little Big Horn College students on-the-job training.
Although he was unable to attend the event Thursday, Apsaalooke (Crow) Nation Chair Frank Whiteclay, on whose land the racetrack will be built, also supports and plans to sign the memorandum.
All of these organizations were brought together by the Wyola Development Fund, a nonprofit corporation founded in 2020 to create systems, services and infrastructure to empower residents of the Wyola Mighty Few District of the reservation.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wyola Development Fund secretary Lesley Kabotie said Wyola has been in a “state of revelation,” powered largely by the fund. After the pandemic demonstrated the need for community and individual uplift in the small Montana town, Wyola residents and members of the fund started removing things that were “broken and encumbering the spirit” of the community, Kabotie said.
Rejuvenation quickly followed. Fund volunteers painted the local community center — the same community center where local leaders gathered to sign the memorandum — with parfleche designs, the Crow tribal emblem and a depiction of the namesake of the local Crow district, Iikooshtaka’atbaatchaache or the Mighty Few. After some reports of attempted kidnappings on Wyola sidewalks, the organizations also made plans to build and broke ground on a safe walking path by the center.
When fund stewards started thinking about their next project, Kabotie said, the pervasiveness of horse culture in the area made building a racetrack an obvious choice.
“This racetrack,” Kabotie said, “is about continuing a culture of life that is in our region, that is in our people.”
Wyola Development Fund President William Yellowtail echoed these sentiments as he presented the memorandum to signers Patterson, Nomee and Johnson. Teamwork and collaboration between organizations on and off the reservation, Yellowtail said, was essential to catalyzing growth in Wyola.
“We are more than just the tribe,” Yellowtail said. “We are [a] community, and we are neighbors.”
Yellowtail, Patterson, Nomee and Johnson signed the memorandum, each agreeing to uphold their organization’s end of the deal. According to the memorandum, the racetrack should be complete by June 2022, just in time for rodeo season.
After the signing, organizers ushered everyone outside the community center, to the racetrack.
“Anybody that’s brought a horse,” Yellowtail said as people filed out, “saddle up.”
Ultimately, two expert riders, Randy Red Wolf and Darren Charges Strong, tested the track in front of the excited onlookers, although, per Indian relay custom, Charges Strong rode without a saddle. They rode Barkeeper, a lean russet horse with a dark mane and tail, and gracefully navigated the track’s turns.
As they stood beside the track’s newly turned sod, Richard and Kristi Old Coyote, who were present at the signing and involved in the Wyola racing scene, said this racetrack had been a dream of generations of Wyola residents, a dream made real by a new generation of local leaders.
Coty Good Luck, a legendary local horse trainer and Barkeeper’s owner, agreed. The track, she said, would infuse Wyola with new economic growth, and she felt proud she would finally be able to stable and train her horses in her hometown, in the land of the Mighty Few.
“It brings comfort to me,” Good Luck said, “to know that dreams are being realized for our community and for our tribe.”
"gather" - Google News
October 23, 2021 at 05:15PM
https://ift.tt/3Eba4he
Organizers gather to sign agreement to build racetrack in Wyola - The Sheridan Press
"gather" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Sqdbwp
https://ift.tt/2Yjhqxs
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Organizers gather to sign agreement to build racetrack in Wyola - The Sheridan Press"
Post a Comment