Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

5. Healing the Wounds of History: Buffalo Commons Pastoralism in Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole and King’s Truth and Bright Water

5 Healing the Wounds of History Buffalo Commons Pastoralism in Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole and King’s Truth and Bright Water Here was the heart of my buffalo blues. Even if buffalo someday returned, the same forces that brought them to near extinction would refuse to treat them like the Great Plains Eucharist that they are. —Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, 2001 It is often said that change always happens; the question is: who determines the direction of the change? —Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 1999 Redeeming the Great Plains In 1987, Frank and Deborah Popper, a Rutgers-based couple, published their Buffalo Commons proposal as a response to what they saw as a reemerging crisis on the Great Plains that involved massive depopulation from rural counties and continued ecological devastation brought on by the cumulative effects of centuries of drought, overgrazing, and over-irrigating. Their proposal called for the transformation of a large portion of the Great Plains, particularly those counties most in distress, into a federally owned andmanagedparkwheretheprairiescouldberestoredandthebuffalocould roam again.1 Bringing back the native grassland and buffalo would mean returning the bioregion to its preconquest state, representing what Anne  172ҍ healing the wounds of history Matthews calls “a massive act of ecological restoration that boldly reverses three centuries of American settlement and land-use history” (14). The public reaction on the Plains to the Poppers’ proposal has been mixed. On the one hand, it has incited fear, anger, and denial, particularly from farmers and ranchers most bound to the traditions that the proposal seekstooverturn;ontheotherhand,thePoppers’ideaalsogeneratedexcitement and renewed hope for the future of the bioregion. Although it has not unfoldedexactlyasthePoppersoriginallyenvisioned,theBuffaloCommons idea has come to fruition in a number of ways, including a mosaic of private andpublicenterprises:buffaloranchingoperationsarebecomingmorecommon ; many tribes are bringing back the buffalo to reservation lands; and grassland preservation efforts have been initiated by the U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as by agencies like the Nature Conservancy and the Great Plains Restoration Council.2 The most important outcome of the mixed and often heated response to the Buffalo Commons proposal for the purposes of this study has been the formulation of a compact and functional regional metaphor. In “The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as Method,” which was published twelve years after their original proposal, the Poppers discuss the value of the Buffalo Commons as a “literary device, a metaphor that would resolve the narrative conflicts—past, present, and, most important, future—of the Great Plains” (“Metaphor as Method”). The Buffalo Commons metaphor is layered and can therefore be appropriated by both supporters and opponents as a way to enter into the discourse about the sweeping changes taking place within the region. The Buffalo Commons metaphor thus provides a way to arbitrate the agglomeration of economic, historical, cultural, and ecological forces that have given shape to the region’s identity as it addresses the multivalent value of the Plains biocultural landscape within the context of the economic development of the region. I am interested in how this complex regional metaphor becomes codified in contemporary fictional narratives about the Great Plains, how these narratives contribute to a form of postpastoral discourse tied to the Buffalo Commons mythology, and how the more salient features of the Buffalo Commons idea have entered directly and indirectly into the literary discourse concerning the region. In particular, I will analyze two recent novels that integrate this Buffalo Commons mythology into their narratives about the bioregion: Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) and Thomas healing the wounds of historyҏ 173 King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999). Both of these writers incorporate the return of the buffalo as a central trope in their narratives, moving the metaphor beyond the realm of cultural geography and regional planning and employing it as the centerpiece of a revised mythology of the Plains. The Buffalo Commons as Metaphor and Myth To better understand how the Buffalo Commons metaphor functions in Proulx’s and King’s novels, it is important to examine the paradoxes implicit in the buffalo’s status as a symbol of the North American West. These paradoxes arise from the animal’s tragic history and its association since the early nineteenth century with the disappearing grassland wilderness. The connection between the buffalo and wildness is a constant theme in the earliest Euroamerican descriptions of the Plains. Many of the first...