Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison

Introduction

Introduction Over the past century and a quarter, a phenomenal story of cultural perseverance has unraveled in Indian Country, as Native Americans have sought to preserve the bison as an extension of preserving themselves and their culture.1 Many variables, including questions over the very survival of some tribes, were formed in Native America as a result of the dislocation of the past half millennium. However, one constant for a significant number of Indian people has been the desire for a landscape where the buffalo can roam. In the roaming of the bison, dreams could also then materialize for Native people to retain their cultural autonomy. This book attempts to tell the story of Native Americans working to save bison to keep alive the possibilities bestowed on them as residents in the North American landscape. In a fashion perhaps quite peculiar to many Euro-Americans, prominent Native leaders in the bison restoration movement provided a milestone event when, in the early 1990s, using a traditional ceremony, the leaders “asked” the bison if they wanted to return.2 The leaders received an affirmative answer , validating their efforts past, present, and future. The story of the Native American restoration of the buffalo nation warrants telling.3 More importantly, the story requires a Native voice. Hence, this author drove fifteen thousand miles through Indian Country, from New Mexico in the south to the Northwest Territories in the north and from Washington in the west to South Dakota in the east. Dozens of interviews with Native North Americans and observations of Indian people interacting with bison emerged from these travels. The common threads in this research remained the bison and the land, which provided a rich environment both for the Native American discourse and the reflection offered here. The results of the fieldwork and archival labor spawned one journal article, a master’s thesis, and a doctoral dissertation that evolved into the present work.4 Introduction xiv Several key topics of discourse emerge from the story of Native American bison restoration. Broad categorization of these salient features separates them into cultural, ecological, contemporary, and comparative considerations . Evaluating the story through the cultural, or ethnohistorical, lens leads to several conclusions. In analyzing these summations, we must understand that Native Americans developed diverse, vibrant cultures that defy stereotype. However, the relationship Natives developed with bison offers one homogenizing aspect of North American indigenous culture: wherever buffalo roamed, they impacted Native Americans, who sought to interact with bison as much as possible. Arguably, Native Americans established a virtually unprecedented human-animal relationship with the bison, in which buffalo country became Indian Country.5 It’s difficult to think of another group of humans who have become so intertwined with a wild animal species that it pervaded their culture. Bison permeate virtually everything material for Native Americans as well as the spiritual, as exemplified by many of the plains groups and to a lesser extent groups located farther from the heart of the bison landscape. Moreover, Native people did not lose their physical relationship with the bison after the demise of the great herds. They retained access to smaller groups, or later captive herds, even after their alienation from their lands, which culminated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Native Americans never lost a spiritual relationship with their kindred mammal. Unsurprisingly for many students of Native American culture, the last steward of bison prior to the loss of physical contact was a woman, Sarah (Laribee) Philip.6 In fact, she is just one of several women who have played key roles in bison restoration from the establishment of captive herds in the 1870s and 1880s to the activism for free-ranging bison in contemporary society. Additionally, close inspection of Native bison restoration reveals noneconomic, culturally substantive reasons for bringing back the bison, rather than the rationalist economic motivations often seen in mainstream Euro-American society. The concern with bringing back the bison without a primary focus on economic benefit reveals an ecological side to Native bison recovery. Native Americans always sought a landscape that offered a habitat for bison. Indians fought to protect their home. In many areas, these homelands provided range for bison; hence, they fought to protect the bison homeland. Evidence that Native people entered into treaty negotiations to alter the landscape fails to materialize, especially with respect to the plains. Prior to Euro-American hegemony...