Roughly coeval with Blackie the Brumby is Mary Elwyn Patchett’s series focusing on Brumby the Wild White Stallion (1958-1964). “Brumby,” the title character, is the product of a chance mating between a brumby mare and a mysterious “silver Pegasus of a horse” who comes among her herd “like some god claiming a brief mortality” and then mysteriously disappears.[10] Brumby and the other foals produced during this interlude are white, refined, and superior in grace and intelligence—unlike the ugly-headed and coarse stallion the “Pegasus” displaces. These unusually fine brumbies become the focus for Joey, a boy who dreams of breeding them to create a race of superior horses beginning with “a foal that would carry the matchless blood of his sire, Brumby to be called Florian.”[11] This idea of breeding and blood that threads through the series addresses the mystery of Brumby’s sire via a network of references to his probable identity as an Arabian. Early on, there is a discussion about “pure” Arabian stock “which holds to its size and characteristics wherever it is bred.”[12] By the end of the series, Brumby himself is described as having “all the marks of purebred Arabs.” If the imprecise but insistent insinuations of Brumby’s origin align him with the discourse of blood and breeding, moreover, the projected name of his foal, “Florian,” makes a symbolic connection between this superior line of brumbies and the Lipizzaner from whose story Joey takes the name. This connection becomes (improbably) real in the final two books of the series, when Florian and an escaped Lipizzaner mare produce a filly who is the physical image of her cultured lipizzan mother but who demonstrates the instinct and physical toughness of her brumby sire.

Taken together such stories recruit fantasies about breed as a strategy for improvement to nationally-inflected discourse about brumby horses and Australian humans. If these representations of horses reshaped notions of human identity, moreover, they also popularized a new view of brumbies. Long regarded as a nuisance to ranchers, brumbies were reimagined as a breed via the focus on origins and quality in mid-twentieth century children’s literature. Where fiction intimates breeding through coded references to purebred horses such as the Arabian and the Thoroughbred that stand in for settler origins, emergent Brumby registries have framed claims about the quality and heritage of the horses’ blood and origins by connecting them to Australian settler history.

In the case of the Australian Brumby Alliance (an umbrella organization for brumby registries and protective groups), the Brumby itself is positioned as a point of origin for other Australian breeds: “Historically,” it claims, “the Brumby was valued for its endurance, strength, reliability and all round agility, and many of the old bloodlines evolved into what we now know as the Waler or the Australian Stock horse.”[13] Though factually incorrect, this mode of storying constructs and mobilizes origin fables to align the Brumby with purebred products of selective breeding, alongside claims to environmental adaptation.  The motto of the Australian Brumby Horse Registry, for example, is “harnessing the strength of natural selection.”[14]

While such themes appear across the network of brumby registries, there are also regionally focused groups that draw on modern technologies of purebred identity such as genealogy and DNA to assert the special status of some herds. Among these, the Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association (which differentiates the feral horses in Guy Fawkes National Park from ‘brumbies’ generally) takes as its mission the preservation of “the unique qualities these horses are famous for—their authentic heritage value and genetic superiority.”[15] As with the Australian Stock Horse and Waler associations, the GFHHA maintains a stud book and requires DNA testing to register a horse. Central to such distinctions are the sort of impassioned claims for special status and purity that rage elsewhere in the world of established purebreds: where registries fragment over competing stories about “true” origins and which horses do and do not belong, and which strains are the most pure.

Equally a matter of story, I’ll conclude by suggesting, is the story of breed itself—an identity construct that emerged alongside a suite of practices and forms of representation to perform the cultural work of reorganizing nature into categories that made it more profitable, portable, and exploitable. What I’ve been discussing is a way of storying breed that has evolved to the serve the colonizing and globalizing ends of western modernity, but this story is not the only possible version. Indeed, the idea of breed is more capacious than we might imagine, taking in possibilities of interspecies relationship that have been occluded through persistent colonial appropriation and redeployment of the classificatory discourse central to western European modernity.

In many Indigenous cultures there is no word for breed and horses have not been understood as objects, commodities, or avatars that work to manage the conflicts associated with human formations of identity.  Among the Lakota peoples of the Great Plains, for example, “the horse is attributed its own ‘Nation’ status” and “is comprised of whatever species, subspecies, type or breed that it has been and will be.”[16] Central to this view of is the agency of the Horse Nation to mate, interact within and across species, and live according the order of its own distinct culture. Historically, Lakota knowledge keepers explain, “Šungwakaŋ—‘the Horse Nation’—was neither controlled behind fences nor forced into breeding. Rather, the Lakota peoples strove to cultivate their environment and adapt their lifeways to ensure that Šungwakaŋ could live aligned with its natural systems. Within this nation-to-nation alliance, the horse enhanced the abilities of the Lakota with regard to hunting, mobility, healing, and more” (Taylor et al).[17]

The Lakota worldview of mutual interdependence and respect expressed in the indigenous concept of nationhood suggests how the cultures of different species are co-productive. In this and another contexts, such views of identity are also connected to ecological outcomes. In the Chilcotin region of western Canada, for example, Qayus horses exist alongside and in harmony with both the Xeni Gwet’in people and other species nations. As wildlife biologist Wayne McCrory concludes after decades of study and consultation, these Qayus are not associated with the decimation of fragile environments usually ascribed to wild horse populations because they are fully integrated into the ecosystem. The quality, distinctiveness, and health of these horses is not a by-product of human selection, McCrory demonstrates, but rather an outcome of ecological balance.[18]

Such stories—in which terms such as “nation” capture a profoundly different view of collective interspecies relationship than the concept of “nationalism” that sits alongside breed as a category under the conditions of western European modernity—can prompt us to think outside the box of breed’s existing stories. Indeed, by taking seriously the full range of western and indigenous worldviews we can story identity in ways that allow us to see the world in new ways.