Native American tribes rebuild bison herds, revitalizing sacred rituals
Conservation efforts have risen over last five years
For years, meals at the summer sun dance ceremonies on the Eastern Shoshone tribe’s lands in Wyoming were missing something that was once a staple of the sacred rituals.
There was no presence of homegrown bison, an animal central to the spiritual customs and beliefs of the Shoshone and other Native Americans.
Now, meals at the annual ceremonies, which just took place this summer, feature bison meat that, for the first time in 138 years, was harvested from the tribe’s own lands. The multiday sacred ritual involves dancing, fasting, and praying, often within a sweat lodge made from natural materials.
“It’s in our DNA to have that animal around us again,” said Jason Baldes, 44, a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe who manages its herd of bison on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. “It’s kind of like bringing home your long-lost relative.”
Indigenous tribes across the United States and Canada have been rebuilding their bison herds for decades, thanks partly to transfers from government agencies and nonprofits, and have made rapid progress in the past few years.
The bison brings conservation benefits to the complex grassland ecosystems where the animals once played a crucial ecological role.
And on tribal lands, their restoration is part of a reckoning with a dark history: Bison were once nearly eliminated from the continent as part of campaigns to repress Indigenous tribes that relied on the animals for food, shelter, and spiritual practices, including the sun dance.
In the United States, “it was congressionally encouraged to eliminate the buffalo to subjugate Native Americans to reservations, starve us into submission, and then take our land,” Baldes said, using the term for the animal that he prefers.
“That’s really what happened,” he added, “so the restoration of buffalo back to our tribes and communities and reservations is part of our healing.”
Before European colonization, North America had an estimated 30 million to 60 million plains bison, one of two subspecies of the American bison. They once supported a huge range of other species, including migratory birds that feed off the insects that thrive in bison dung.
But a mass bison slaughter began in the late 1700s and moved west across the United States and into Canada, according to “The Ecological Buffalo,” a recent book by Wes Olson, a former warden in the Canadian national park system. By the late 1880s, there were only about 281 plains bison left, including 23 in Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming.
Colossal herds of bison won’t roam North America again anytime soon. Today only about 420,000 remain in commercial herds, and another 20,000 or so are in so-called conservation herds that have never bred with cattle, unlike commercial herds, according to United States government data. The conservation herd numbers have not budged since 1935, and the US Interior Department says that bison are functionally extinct on grasslands and within the “human cultures with which they coevolved.”
But Olson said the pace of conservation bison transfers to tribes has picked up over the past five or so years in Canada and the United States, aided in part by a 2014 cross-border buffalo treaty among some tribes has since grown to include others.
In one sign of momentum, the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a consortium of 80 tribes across 20 US states, transferred about 5,000 bison over the past five years, including more than 2,000 bison last year, according to Baldes.
Building up the continent’s conservation bison herd is “something that should be applauded,” said Daniel Kinka, the wildlife restoration manager at American Prairie, a nonprofit in Montana that is working to restore prairies where the animals can thrive. “And much of the credit goes to Indigenous people that are leading the way.”
In the US, tribes have been receiving conservation bison from government agencies, nonprofits, and other tribes.