Stoney Nakoda welcome back bison
At the Indian Grounds, below Cascade Mountain, members of the Stoney Nakoda First Nation held a special ceremony Thursday to welcome bison back to Banff National Park.
The ceremony, part of Banff Indian Days, focused on the spiritual and cultural significance of the bison, traditionally known as buffalo.
“With the ceremony, we are asking the spirit of the buffalo to consider coming back to its original territory,” said Hank Snow, a councillor with the Wesley band.
Plains bison roamed freely in the area along the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies for thousands of years, until they were nearly wiped out by hunting in the mid-1800s.
Officials with Banff National Park are planning to reintroduce about 12 to 15 bison to a paddock by January 2017, before they are released into a 425-square-kilometre, partially fenced backcountry area called the Panther Valley on the eastern edge of the park.
Some ranchers and landowners remain concerned about the plan, but it has received support from conservationists and First Nations.
Prior to the return of the bison next year, Snow said the Stoney Nakoda wanted to welcome them back to their traditional territory.
“This belongs to them,” he said. “It doesn’t belong to the park, it doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to the buffalo. We’re telling them, ‘Please come back and we’ll try to work with you,’ just like we told the parks, ‘We’ll try to work with you and make you comfortable.’”
No one from Parks Canada was at the ceremony, but several people who have been involved with bringing bison back to Banff National Park were in attendance.
“The thing I heard that I thought was really important was when one person said, ‘When the buffalo were brought back 20 years ago in Jasper, they left,’” said Harvey Locke, a longtime Banff resident who’s worked on the bison reintroduction for 20 years. “He said it was because we didn’t prepare the way for them. He said, ‘Hopefully this time we will prepare the way for them and it will work and they will stay.’”
Snow said they believe the buffalo will keep leaving if the national park does not honour them.
“To them, it’s an animal, but that’s not what it is,” he said. “That’s how the whole world survived at one time. The whole world survived on that animal. It was king.
“It roamed everywhere and was happy to provide for people.”
Banff Indian Days, which is being held at the Indian Grounds across from Rocky Mountain Resort in Banff, runs until Sunday.
It’s open to the public on Saturday with children’s games, a traditional feast and a pow wow.