The Relationship between Indigenous Communities, Oblate Missionaries, and Horses in the Nineteenth-Century North West

“Our horses, exhausted, died a little while later.” Father Léon Doucet, OMI, wrote these words in his journal on July 13, 1873 while describing the end of a trip in the lands today known as Alberta, Canada. Through Doucet’s 1868 to 1890 journal and other Oblate records, this paper explores the relationship between Indigenous communities, horses, and Oblate missionaries in the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century North West. Many Indigenous communities on the Prairies respected and valued their horses. This included the Blackfoot, Métis, Plains Cree, and Stoney Nakoda communities among whom Doucet worked. In contrast, many Oblates, as evidenced by Doucet, did not understand or adequately care for their horses. Slowly, along with learning Indigenous languages, the Oblates learned local horse cultures as part of their attempts to acculturate themselves and to attract Catholic converts.