Buffalo have returned home to tribe’s native land
First herd is back with Lipan Apache band east of S.A.
The Lipan Apache welcoming ceremony begins with blessings and ends with buffalo stew. Attendees form a semicircle around a white tipi — built moments earlier — and hold burning bundles of sage. Sitting to the side, four Lipan Apache elders and one younger member sing traditional songs while playing homemade drums. In the field nearby, nine bison, often referred to as buffalo, graze peacefully.
The ceremony is for the buffalo.
After being absent for more than a century, the first herd has returned to the native land of the Texas band of Lipan Apache. The area — in Waelder, a little over an hour east of San Antonio — is home to 77 acres of grassland owned by Lipan Apache member Lucille Contreras. She is the founder and CEO of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, an organization dedicated to reconnecting the Lipan Apache, Texas Indigenous communities and buffalo.
With help from the Tanka Fund, a native-led nonprofit based in South Dakota, and the Nature Conservancy in Texas, five buffalo from a conservancy ranch in Colorado were transferred to Contreras and the project in November. They joined four others on the property. There are now eight cows and one bull.
At the ceremony, held Nov. 29, Contreras stood by the tipi to speak with people attending — tribal members and nonmembers. Her long skirt bore images of buffalo.
“I wanted to do an offering here and a small ceremony to give thanks and pray for the safety and security of the buffalo,” Contreras said, “for them to always feel safe here and to know that they are home. Thank you all for helping us regain our kinship with each other as native people in Texas, as well as the opportunity to care for our relatives, the buffalo, in our own traditional homelands.”
Later, buffalo stew was
served. The drummers put down their instruments for a moment to eat. Contreras walked around to ensure everyone was fed. A bowl of buffalo stew was placed by the tipi as an offering.
“We just carry on the culture the best that we can with what was passed onto us,” said Richard Gonzalez, a Lipan Apache elder. “It was all that was done before us, any of us here, that gives us all strength.”
A relationship with buffalo
To the Lipan Apache, the American bison are considered relatives. More than 100 years ago, the tribe and the buffalo lived in the southern Plains, moving through Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. The buffalo were essential to the tribe, providing food, clothing and medicine.
But from 1825 to 1850, as more settlers arrived, bison hunters killed as many as 25,000 buffalo every year. After this, the U.S. government led a mass hunting effort, removing buffalo to cripple Indigenous communities. By the late 1800s, Yellowstone National Park had the only remaining wild herd in the U.S.
Since then, buffalo populations have recovered slowly. There are several bison herds in Texas, including in San Angelo and Caprock Canyons State Parks. Still, the Lipan Apache tribe has not had a herd since before the animal nearly became extinct.
The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project wants to change that.
The organization aims to provide a space where tribal people can reconnect with the buffalo — physically and culturally — on traditionally Indigenous lands. It’s a place to raise and care for the buffalo and to offer cultural food to native people whose ancestors ate buffalo meat. As in the past, every part of the buffalo will be used, including the meat, hide and skull.
“We’re not ranchers in your Western European sense,” Contreras said. “We’re caretakers of our relatives, and we take care of them as they’ll take care of us.”
Before any of the new buffalo joined Contreras in Texas, she hosted a harvesting ceremony in May with a buffalo that was donated for the occasion as an initial homecoming for her family, other Lipan Apache members and the buffalo that would come later. The harvest produced an entire bison’s worth of meat.
The bull arrived at Contreras’ land first to get familiar with the property for two months. Three more buffalo — all female — arrived later, all from a ranch in Carrizo Springs southwest of San Antonio called Thunderheart Bison.
Contreras did not expect more buffalo for a while, but out of the blue she received a call from the Nature Conservancy and the Tanka Fund, asking whether she wanted five female buffalo from the Medano Zapata herd in Colorado, an area operated by the Nature Conservancy.
The Nature Conservancy is the second-largest private holder of buffalo, next to CNN founder Ted Turner, said Suzanne Scott, the conservancy’s Texas state director. The organization, which has about 6,000 buffalo at 12 sites, typically sells excess buffalo and uses the proceeds to further conservation.
“But then we realized that we could reintroduce these sacred animals back to their Indigenous lands,” she said.
The only catch was that the transfer had to happen in a few days. The Nature Conservancy, the Tanka Fund — which supported the move — and Contreras had to work fast. Fortunately, a buffalo transporter in Texas was able to jump on the assignment quickly.
In a week, the five new buffalo belonged to a member of the Lipan Apache tribe on its traditional land.
“We were a bit worried there’d be fighting when the new group arrived,” said Jennifer Malaterre of the Tanka Fund. “But they all got along so well. They’ve all connected into a new family.”
Looking ahead
Before the ceremony, several attendees go to the gate to look at the buffalo, most of which are lounging in the grass, taking in the sunny day. All eight cows are pregnant; some were pregnant when they arrived, and the others were impregnated by the bull afterward.
Once the soon-to-be-born calves grow, the Lipan Apache will have to decide whether to keep them all and what to do with the ones they keep, Contreras said. The optimal land-to-animal ratio for a herd is 10 acres per buffalo; the ratio for the Lipan Apache herd is 9 acres per buffalo.
“I might try to get more land, if possible,” Contreras said, “to expand the herd, and then be able to bring more people from the tribe to learn how to caretake. Bison are pretty simple, though. All you need is water, grass and a fence.”
Buffalo provide a leaner, healthier substitute for most other meat. Buffalo also are better for the environment than regular cattle. Bison mostly eat grasses and often avoid other plants, leaving some areas ungrazed, which supports pasture biodiversity. The same goes with recently burned areas — where bison like to eat the new grass, keeping the area diverse in various plant species.
Bison patterns of trampling and trailing also keep the prairie ecosystem lush and diverse, and buffalo feces and urine are great sources of nutrients for plant and animal life.
The environmental effect is also a mission for the organization: to learn and promote soil health and regenerative practices, meaning the buffalo could bring back the natural grasses over time and restore the area. It’s a goal that meshes with everything the organization is working toward: to establish food sovereignty and reconnect the Texas tribe to the buffalo after so long.
“Bison are really the inherent indigenous stewards of the land,” Contreras said.