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Reviewed by:
  • Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison
  • Deborah Popper (bio)
Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison by Ken ZontekThe University of Nebraska Press, 2007

Bison numbers in North America have risen from a late-nineteenth century low to five hundred thousand, with much of the increase in the last two decades. In the same two decades, the literature on bison has grown. Interesting works include historian Andrew Isenberg's The Destruction of the Bison, Mary Ann Franke's To Save the Wild Buffalo on the Yellowstone herd, Valerius Geist's Buffalo Nation, Dale Lott's American Bison, and Ruth Rudner's A Chorus of Buffalo. Native Americans have figured in all of their treatments, but Ken Zontek centers Buffalo Nation on their underresearched and underappreciated role in bison renewal. Taken from his history dissertation at the University of Idaho, the book provides a good introduction to key figures and institutions, their projects and their interactions and negotiations with the U.S. and Canadian governments.

The first chapter sweeps from the Pleistocene epoch to the nineteenth century. It sums up the archaeological and historical literature of the coevolution of bison and Native [End Page 158] Americans. As climate, landscapes, and lifeways changed, they remained interrelated. This section frames the book; it is his response to academic questioning of Native American hunting's responsibility for megafauna extinctions and reduction in bison numbers. Zontek summarizes the debates and concludes with vindication, whatever the distant past. Alongside decline of the nineteenth century, with invasion of the Great Plains by Euro-American settlement, confinement of Native peoples and depredation of bison were the beginning steps for bison revitalization and Native Americans led them. The chapter ends: "By 1890, Native Americans had caught bison calves and had successfully established protected bison herds that would guarantee survival of the species and spread its progeny across North America for generations to come" (28).

The second chapter recounts the nineteenth-century efforts. Zontek includes Hornaday, Goodnight, and Buffalo Jones, but he is more interested in Samuel Walking Coyote and Sabine, Michel Pablo, Charles Allard, the Dupuises, and Scotty Philip and Sarah Larribee. He sets out the family relationships, often noting wives' significant role. He details captive breeding programs and transfers of herds. Throughout the book he discusses both Canadian and U.S. herds, often recording the numbers and who got what from whom. The following chapter covers the next hundred years, from the 1890s to the 1990s. He finds that in the U.S., Indian and bison conditions tracked consistently with each shift in government policy. The Dawes Act (1887), the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), and the Indian Self-Determination Act (1974) directly altered Indian people's control over their lives, land, and self-government. Any decrease in autonomy hurt the bison equally; any improvement fed bison health as well. Ultimately, the 1970s set the stage for bison revival as more assertive tribal people began to demand and to organize. Canadian experience, on the other hand, tracked less consistently. In both cases, the key question is land for bison. In most of the twentieth century, few tribes were able to maintain herds on reservations because of land alienation acts. Any growth meant finding homes on federal lands, in parks and wildlife preserves. The Canadian government early established the Wood Bison and Elk Island National Parks. These then were the destination of bison from, for example, Michel Pablo's herd, animals that the U.S. government rejected. U.S. parks and preserves also acquired and developed herds.

The next chapter is devoted to the InterTribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC), the central institution for bison restoration in the United States. An umbrella organization of over fifty tribes, it formed in 1991 and has served as advocate and representative of tribal bison restoration. It provides technical assistance and has promoted the development of training programs in tribal colleges. It has played a central role in negotiations with federal, state, and local governments. It has mediated distribution of surplus animals on public lands, helping herds grow on numbers of reservations, and it has ensured the distribution of bison meat as well to elders and in school lunch...

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