SACRED DIRT

OHSWEKEN SPEEDWAY FOSTERS A COMMUNITY AROUND SHORT-TRACK RACING ON CANADA'S MOST POPULATED FIRST NATIONS RESERVE.

- BRENDAN MCALEER

THE SUN IS SETTING in rural Ontario, catching the dust hanging in the air over the pits.

Activity is starting to pick up, mechanics fuss over the cars, and people cut new grooves into old tires, scuffing them up with grinders, looking for a little more traction on the dirt.

There are kids everywhere. Teenagers walk in groups, sit on wheels, hang out at the back of a trailer. Some wear race suits. Elementary schoolers rip through the paddock on quads. A toddler boy in earmuffs squeals in delight as a bear-sized uncle snatches him up in ham-sized mitts.

Ohsweken Speedway is a three-eighths-mile dirt track with action from sprint cars and stock cars of multiple classes. It sits in the upper part of Six Nations, the largest Indigenous reserve in Canada and one of many in the country. The reserve is home to members of the Iroquois Confederacy: the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples. Ohsweken Speedway owner Glenn Styres and his family are Mohawk.

This place is Field of Dreams crossed with Mad Max: Fury Road. If you build it, they will come, riding V-8-powered beasts that hammer through the nights, guzzling methanol race fuel and belching flame and thunder.

When night comes, controlled chaos begins. This, though, is the before time—the foot that kicks the anthill has yet to descend. Earlier, it was even quieter, race teams unwinding after driving from as far afield as North Carolina. Wandering through the paddock, I came upon a young woman engaged in the laid-back task of crocheting a sweater.

DIRT 101

Sprint cars are the rawest of racing spectacles—nasty, vicious, and short open-wheel racers designed asymmetrically to turn only left. Adrenaline junkie Travis Pastrana called the sprint car “the most terrifying vehicle on the planet.”