Three days is all it took. In early July 2026, the US Forest Service used helicopters to remove hundreds of wild horses near Mono Lake from land they'd roamed for generations. Some died in the process. The surviving horses, the Forest Service says, are destined for adoption. In truth, many will live out their lives in holding pens far from their range, and some will end up at slaughterhouses across the border.

I was invited into this story by my friend Ronda Kauk, one of the last Kutzadika'a — the fly-eater people — whose territory has always been Mono Lake. Their identity is being erased quietly: denied federal recognition, members drift to other tribes to survive. Perhaps fifty remain. The horses face the same erasure as her people — one by open violence, the other by a bureaucracy that only listens when you exist on paper.

For Ronda, the horses are personal too. Before her mother died, it was among these creatures that they formed their deepest bond. Losing them means losing that, again.

I photographed what remained: the foals, the families, the tenderness between Ronda's people and the herd — and the aftermath: the pit, the bloody hay, ground flattened by tires. The tribe has fought this roundup, asking only to help manage the herd gently.

My own family was hunted across Europe by the Nazis, driven from a place and told we were never meant to remain. That is the thread I follow here: a people, and the horses they refuse to let vanish without witness.