I am a National Geographic Explorer Storyteller working on a project on the Nokota Horses. I see the Nokota’s story as a love triangle;
the land, the people who love them, and the Nokota’s themselves that makes this horse breed so special and worth saving. With less than 700 Nokotas worldwide, the highly emotionally intelligent, curious, kind horses are tettering on extinction. Compare that to a million racehorses born every year and you can see how dire it is to save this breed. It is thought that these feral indigenous horses derived these adaptions from a keen ability to survive the brutal landscape of the Northern Plains and living closely among the Lakota tribes in familial herds for hundreds of years and is what sets them apart from domesticated horses. But for the Nokota to thrive and not just survive, so they can pass on their feral attributes and DNA they need to be on the Northern Plains, their ancestral land in familal herds, learning from their elders, passing knowledge down like elephants do to their young. But they have no land of their own on the plains and there is no coordinated breeding so until there is , they will be in jeopardy of vanishing
