Ravenna Cowboy Finds His Place In Rodeo

Posted Thursday, June 25, 2009

Youth Will Compete at High School Finals Rodeo This Weekend

RAVENNA, NEBR. (June 23, 2009) – Growing up in a small town in Nebraska when you’re a different color from everybody else isn’t an easy thing to do. But Aman Miller from Ravenna has found his niche.

The 16 year old is a cowboy. Not your typical white skinned cowboy, but a cowboy from India.

Now he’s a calf roper, team roper, and cutter in the Nebraska State High School Rodeo Association.

He was adopted by Tren and Linda Miller at the age of 22 months, after being left as an infant on the steps of an orphanage in India, wrapped in a blanket with a little card, a rose drawn on it and his name and the word “mother” written in Sanskrit.

Aman caught the rodeo bug from his kindergarten teacher, whose husband was a bull rider. The teacher had the kids learn about rodeo as part of a multi-cultural activity, and at about the same time, Aman got hooked on the movie “Eight Seconds”, about a bull rider named Lane Frost. He wore out two VHS tapes watching the movie.

Aman started out wanting to be a bull rider like his movie idol, Frost, but after he rode a steer at the Wilsonville rodeo, got thrown in the air and stepped on, Aman changed his mind. “I decided I wanted to live to be older than I was at the time.”

So he switched his attention to the roping and cutting events, where a cowboy rides a broke horse and ropes calves or steers or cuts cattle out of a herd.

Aman competed in 4-H and junior rodeos, honing his mostly self-taught skills from pointers given by other rodeo moms and dads and at a rodeo Bible camp.

Then as a freshman, he participated in high school rodeo, and that’s where his acceptance fully came. The rodeo kids were color blind, and were very accepting, Linda says.

And now he’s competing this weekend at the Nebraska State High School Finals Rodeo in Hastings. He’ll compete in the cutting on June 25 and 26, with hopes of being one of the best ten to qualify for the nation-wide high school finals rodeo.

Rodeo has been good to Aman. It’s given him newfound friendships. The rodeo kids “love me,” he says. “We get along. Ever since I started rodeoing, they’ve accepted me and like me. I have a lot of friends there.”

His mom jokes about the white faces at rodeos. “He’s the only one who’s not blond haired, blue eyed and freckle faced.” And Aman can joke about his ethnicity, too. “The kids will ask him what he’s going to do this weekend,” Linda says, “and he’ll joke, ‘I think I’ll work on my tan.’”

Aman dreams of running a ranch when he graduates from school, and competing in rodeo on the weekends. But for now, there’s a dark skinned boy with a cowboy hat on his head, following his dreams in the rodeo arena.