Visitors every year to the evening show at the Calgary Stampede already know how exciting the North American Indian Relay Championships can be, as competitors race for status, cash, and pride.

But the stories of the athletes and their horses aren’t always evident from GMC Stadium.

Horse Warriors, a new documentary series for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) from Neil Grahn (Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, Queen of the Oil Patch) and Dominique Keller (Rodeo Nation, Love: The Last Chapter) explores the Indigenous relay races as competitors travel to venues as large as the Stampede, to small ones in the United States.

“It’s truly one of the most exciting sports in the world. Go see it live, because you have no understanding of the chaos that is about to unfold before your eyes,” said Grahn.

But save getting tickets for next July, Calgarians will get a chance to preview those stories on the big screen at CUFF.Docs, with episodes one, seven, eight, and 13 shown ahead of their broadcast on APTN.

“I think what is the true driver for our show is, this is a sport that truly emanates from the Indigenous people of the plains of Turtle Island. It’s their sport. That heartbeat and that drive, for me, gives it an extra depth and feeling. There’s a great quality to it because of that,” said Grahn.

“When a team really gets it together, there’s so much that goes into the working to make that happen. There’s so much practice, and there’s so much communication between the humans and the horses. So for me, a lot of what we’re after with Horse Warriors is really what happens between people and the horses.”

True story, not reality TV version of Indigenous relay races on screen

He said that, unlike typical reality television documentary series, Horse Warriors is a true capture of what life is like for a season for Indigenous relay race competitors.

“We get out with them in the spring, when they’re first getting the horses back into shape after they’ve been fattening up over the winter, and follow with them through their year. Where their ups are, that’s where our ups are, where their downs are that’s where the show’s downs are,” Grahn said.

“We don’t really have an A to Z narrative, because we truly are tracking with them. It ain’t no reality show.”

That means there is a beauty in capturing the sport itself as it happened, Grahn said.

“So much of a surprise is a growing awareness of just how beautiful it is when it works, when a horse comes in and they jump off it and they just jump on the other one and the other horse is ready and goes. The surprise is how beautiful that motion is,” he said.

“As I’ve said, it’s like NASCAR only if the cars could just turn and run you over randomly.”

Getting to show episodes from the documentary series at CUFF.Docs was a rare and appreciated thing, he said.

“A couple of our episodes, one of them features Stampede with its big, huge crowds. The other one has an overnight trip to a small race in the States, and it kind of gets right into the road and just the ‘doing it, just because we love it,’ versus the spectacle of the Stampede,” said Grahn.

“I think that’ll be really fun for the viewers at CUFF to kind of see the differences of where they race.”

Horse Warriors plays at CUFF.Docs on Nov. 23, starting at noon. Tickets are available at www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/cuff-docs/2024/horse-warriors-episodic-series.

For more information on the series, see www.aptn.ca/media-centre/shows/horse-warriors.