12/10/2026
Today I’m setting one of my favorite words down for a minute.
Sovereignty.
I use it every day. It’s in our method. It’s in our tagline. It’s in how we gather as equestrian women.
Today I want to honor where that word truly lives.
For Indigenous nations, sovereignty isn’t a mindset or a feeling you journal your way into. It is the living, ancestral right to govern yourselves. To speak your own languages. To raise your children in your own ways. To tend your own land.
It has been carried, defended and reclaimed generation after generation.
It still is.
The land I live on in the Catskills is the homeland of the Esopus, Munsee-speaking Lenape people. Their words are still written across these hills ~ Ashokan, Shandaken, Wawarsing, Esopus.
They are not a chapter in a history book.
Their descendants live today in the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin, and in the Munsee-Delaware Nation and the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown in Ontario.
Which brings me north.
To my Canadian mare herd ~ Happy Thanksgiving.
May your tables be full, your people close and your horses healthy.
Gratitude for the harvest is a beautiful thing.
Gratitude for the land, and for the first peoples who have always known how to care for it, makes it whole.
And for those of us who love horses ~ long before any of us found our way to a barn, many Indigenous nations knew the horse as kin.
Relative, not property.
So today, a quiet question to carry with you:
Whose land does your horse graze on?
Do you know their name?
Learning a name is a small thing.
But it’s where every real relationship begins.
With a horse. With a person. With the land beneath our feet.
Today, may we remember the ones who were here first ~ and are still here.
With gratitude and respect,
Jenna & Royal