Spartan Profiles: Wendy Baker
THE HEALING POWER OF HORSES
In The Horse Whisperer (1998), a little girl and her horse are severely injured in an accident, but both recuperate with the help of a mystical healer (played by Robert Redford). This story rang so true for Wendy Baker, ’77, an editor at Yahoo!, that she saw it multiple times. And it rings even truer now that she has just published The Healing Power Of Horses: Lessons From the Lakota Indians (BowTie Press, 2004), which recounts the stories of 12 Oglala Lakota Indians of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and how they are healed by horses.
“We all have tragedies in life, and the secret is to treat them as opportunities,” explains Baker, who moved to Burbank, CA, after 12 years as a book and magazine editor in New York City. “For example, a horse was the source of my problems, but a horse became the solution.”
Indeed, as recounted in her book, Wendy suffered from rheumatoid arthritis in her knees and could hardly walk when her mother gave her horseback-riding lessons. “It gave me the freedom, mobility, and self-confidence that I had lost,” recalls Wendy of her childhood in Ann Arbor. She chose MSU “to get away from home, without going too far away.”
At MSU she was greatly inspired by creative writing professor Al Drake, which led to an editorial career in New York City with DoubleDay, Harper & Row, and US and Conde Nast Traveler magazines. In 1990 she moved to California, and four years later suffered a major horseback-riding accident with three broken limbs. Again, what saved her was a horse called Mollie. “She has one eye and we’re a great fit,” says Wendy. “She is my legs and I’m her eyes.”
After her accident, she became very interested in the Oglala Lakota Indians. . “At one time the horse was absolutely central to Lakota culture,” she explains. “So I wondered, what is their relationship with horses today?” This curiosity led to the first of many trips to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where once there were three times as many horses as people, but now only 10 percent of the population have horses. Wendy interviewed these individuals and families, and learned—as she documents—that the horse, while still considered a sacred being, is now primarily used for emotional and spiritual healing.
