Taos mother-daughter duo places at South Korean horseback archery world championship

TAOS — A steady beat of horse hooves roiled the dust late Friday afternoon at Wumaniti Earth Native Sanctuary, where Gemma DiFerdinando and her 11-year-old daughter, Venah, practiced the ancient art of mounted archery.

Wearing long silken robes known as deels in Mongolia, they rode low in their saddles around a ring of PVC piping, loosing arrows that hissed one after another into targets at the center of the course.

“Nice shot, but fix your posture, Venah,” Gemma DiFerdinando gently chided her daughter, whose last shot had landed just outside the bullseye.

On the next round, the 11-year-old trailed her mother again at a gallop atop her horse, Heart, this time hitting the target dead on, the sharp tip of the bolt driving home with a wooden thud.

DiFerdinando started this small ranch just outside the town of Taos in 2006 and eventually founded a nonprofit there to provide equine therapy to veterans and people dealing with mental health crises. She also uses it as a homebase for an apothecary business she operates.

Above all, she sees her home as a place to preserve and practice some of the ancient cultural traditions she’s encountered in her global travels.

Since the pandemic, she has focused more on raising her daughter and practicing a sport that finds its roots in Iron Age combat.

Venah Ferdinando attends Taos Day School at Taos Pueblo. She has been around horses since she was an infant and started learning to ride when she was 3.

“There’s so much you can learn from a horse, so I started taking her with me around the world,” her mother said. “We’ve done a lot of [horse] rescuing and have accumulated about 25 of our own.”

Last month, the mother-daughter duo competed at the ninth annual Daegaya International Horseback Archery & Driving Championship in Boryeong-si, a coastal city in the South Chungcheong Province of South Korea.

From a field of 75 competitors hailing from eight countries, DiFerdinando placed second overall in the adult division of the competition, while her daughter placed fifth among the youth horseback archers.

“We pretty much just landed there, and we had one day to pick a horse,” DiFerdinando said. “Then it was three days of competition.”

Back in Taos, afternoons spent practicing the art of mounted combat might look unusual from the outside, but to DiFerdinando and her daughter, it’s a way to relate to each other, connect with nature and build bonds with the horses they rescue.

To date, DiFerdinando has been to 14 countries, many of them for horseback archery competitions. She received a bronze medal last November at the eighth annual Korea Masangmuye Championship of Horseback Martial Arts.

She wears her love for ancient cultures and Indigenous traditions unapologetically on her sleeve. She leans hard into the mystical, having discovered her love for equine work in Taos in 2002 when she took psychedelic mushrooms and caught some wild horses on a friend’s ranch on Taos mesa.

“I ended up communicating with them with just energy,” she said with a laugh. “I’m connected to nature, and that’s a big part of this, too.”

She’s planning to host a live workshop, “The Inner Sovereignty Challenge,” for three days in December before she and her daughter begin preparing for the World Nomad Games next August through early September.

DiFerdinando said they practice weekly, in part, because even the sport-ified version of horseback archery can be dangerous.

On Thursday, for example, Venah DiFerdinando fell off of her horse when it unexpectedly left the track. The experience underscored one of the lessons of the sport — learning to get back in the saddle after a rough ride.

The fall shook her up, but she was back at it again on Friday.

After dismounting, she stood inside the track, rubbing Heart’s nose.

“I just love the way they can be,” she said. “I love running a horse. It’s so much fun.”