Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison

3. Indians and Buffalo, 1890–1990s [Includes Image Plates]

3. Indians and Buffalo, 1890–1990s It is a singular fact, and contrary to general belief, that we owe much to the Indians for saving the buffalo from extinction. Martin Garretson, Secretary, American Bison Society (1938) In 1997, as he watched several bison leave a corral and emerge onto the prairie, much to the delight of several Native American onlookers including students from a local school, Lakota environmental scholar Jim Garrett commented: “The resurgence of the buffalo. That’s happening. But it’s happening a hundred years later.”1 His observation hearkened back to the Ghost Dance ceremony and the lamentations of Indian people across the West during the late 1880s and early 1890s to restore the earth and bring back the buffalo. However, Garrett’s statement also came with the hindsight of someone viewing the history of the past one hundred years. Ethnohistorian David Rich Lewis summarizes the origins and marginalization of Native American life in the twentieth century: The pace of change in Native American cultures and environments increased dramatically with Euro-American contact. Old World pathogens and epidemic diseases, domesticated plants and livestock, the disappearance of native flora and fauna, and changing patterns of Native resource use altered the physical and cultural landscape. Nineteenth-century removal and reservation policies reduced the continental scope of Indian lands to islands in the stream of American settlement. Reservation lands were largely unwanted or remote environments of little economic value. The Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 provided for the division of some reservations into individual holdings as part of an effort to transform Indians into idealized agrarians—yeomen farmers and farm families. Indians and Buffalo, 1890–1990s 54 In subsequent acts Congress opened Indian Territory, withdrew forests, reservoir sites, mineral and grazing lands, regulated Indian access to those areas, and even circumvented the trust period to speed the transfer of lands into non-Indian hands. These policies contributed to the alienation of more than 85 percent of Indian reservation lands—a diminishment of land, resources, and biotic diversity that relegated Indians to the political and economic periphery of American society.2 Yet, all the while, Indians tenaciously kept the bison integral to their culture. Even as Native Americans including Sabine, Walking Coyote, the Dupuises , Michel Pablo, and Charles Allard labored to save the bison and preserve its integrity on the range, the continuity of the physical Indian-buffalo relationship remained in question as Euro-American forces continued to reshape the landscape and its Native inhabitants. These bison-savers helped determine the biological survival of the bison from past annihilation. They could not, however, determine the political survival. The American government would do that. The century, from the time of the establishment of safe captive breeding herds under Native American aegis in the late nineteenth century until the proliferation in bison numbers in Indian country—largely due to pan-Indian organization through the Intertribal Bison Cooperative in the late twentieth century—marked a period in which the whims of the American government bore heavily on the ability of Native American people to persevere as the “buffalo people.”3 Students of Indian-white relations often can recite the salient points of the past century and a quarter, such as the boarding school movement, Dawes Act (1887), Indian Reorganization Act (1934), Termination Policy of the 1950s and early 1960s, and Indian Self-Determination Act (1974). The ability of Native Americans in the United States to maintain adequate influence over the plight of bison in their ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy often parallels these policies and legislative acts. Under the detrimental impact of the “Americanization” programs, which concentrated on Native youth in boarding schools and alienated Natives from communal Indian lands, Indians and their allies lost a protracted battle to keep bison ranging in Indian country.4 With the improved treatment offered by the New Deal, which reinstated respect for Native American culture and communal landholding, bison began to return to Indian country, with the blessing of a sufficient Indians and Buffalo, 1890–1990s 55 number of federal policymakers and warm encouragement from Native Americans. The arrogance of the termination period temporarily checked Native American autonomy, just as revised livestock policies impacted the range of the buffalo. Yet the activism and advocacy of the 1960s and 1970s, often led by Native Americans, improved the position of Native people before the law and also helped to intensify bison stocking programs on...