Re-Bisoning the West. Kurt Repanshek
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to the white culture. It was an encounter with “civilization” that soured Lame Deer on whites as a nearsighted culture that failed to appreciate the wonders and beauties the natural world offered.
Lame Deer’s affinity with the natural world gave him empathy for bison. “If brother buffalo could talk,” he said, “he would say, ‘They put me on a reservation like the Indians.’ In life and death we and the buffalo have always shared the same fate.”54
That fate was destined, directly and indirectly, by the white settlers, traders, mercantilists, and opportunists looking to make a buck however possible. Those who sold liquor, brought disease, and were determined to claim lands for themselves effectively brought down the native cultures just as they contributed to the fall of bison. The disappearance of bison, it seemed to John Fire Lame Deer, would be coupled with the disappearance of tribal cultures. “The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tepees were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy,” he said.55
The sudden loss of bison—there are estimates that bison numbers dropped from millions to hundreds in just a decade late in the nineteenth century—was crippling economically as well as physically to native cultures. Three university economists, Donna Feir and Rob Gillezeau of the University of Victoria and Maggie E. C. Jones of Queens University, described those cultures that revolved around bison as “once the richest in North America, with living standards comparable to or better than their average European contemporaries.”56 Once the bison were gone, however, these cultures became some of the poorest. The economic blow continues even today, more than a century after the Great Slaughter. Communities that depended on bison for just about everything in life—food, housing, clothing, and some medicines—had per capita income levels in 2000 that were roughly 30 percent lower than those native peoples who were not so dependent on bison. Within a generation the average heights of members of “bison-dependent nations” dropped as many as two inches due to nutritional losses. “One way to understand the effects of the decline of the bison is as one of the most dramatic devaluations of human capital in North American history,” the economists held.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the future of bison would have been assured if the great herds could have been replenished simply by driving them out of caves. It was thought that there were only about 1,110 pureblood bison in private, captive, ownership in the United States on January 1, 1908, and no more than twenty-five thought to ramble wild in Yellowstone’s interior. There were another fifty-nine bison in the park at the time, but they lived essentially as domestic livestock in a fenced pasture in the Lamar Valley.57
There was a time when bison were apex creatures on the landscape. They can regain that role, though it won’t come overnight, and it certainly won’t be easy. Cattle long have owned the open range—during a six-year period, from 1874 to 1880, Wyoming’s cattle census alone reportedly jumped from ninety thousand to more than five hundred thousand58—and while bison might offer a better economic return, turning a thousand-head cattle operation into a thousand-head bison operation comes with significant costs. But incremental steps are being taken to regain a prominent role for bison. Today, more than a century after the Great Slaughter, native peoples are working hard to reawaken and strengthen their cultural, spiritual, economic, and health connections with bison. Some tribal governments have exerted their rights to hunt bison that move out of Yellowstone; since 2006, a small handful of tribes have been given permits from the state of Montana to hunt bison outside Yellowstone borders. In 2014, the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma brought an end to a four-decade absence of bison on its reservation by accepting animals from Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt national parks.59 Three years later, the Kalispel Tribe of Washington State received three bison from Wind Cave.60 The Blackfoot Nation in Montana has grown its own herds with bison from Canada.
Helping orchestrate some of these bison transfers is the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a collective organization of more than sixty tribes whose mission is to put bison back on reservations to foster their cultural, traditional, and spiritual relationships with the animals.61 But there’s a larger effort underway: to see one million bison roaming North America in the coming decades. As with other efforts through the past century, it’s an ambitious goal, driven by the InterTribal Buffalo Council, the National Bison Association, the Canadian Bison Association, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. While achieving such a goal—roughly doubling the current number of bison on the continent—could bring recognizable economic rewards to commercial operations, tribes also see the cultural benefits they would receive from having bison to use in ceremonies and powwows, and to improve the diets of their members.62
Each year the Council works to obtain surplus bison from parks and other conservation herds for its member tribes. It has landed federal grants to underwrite a program that supplied bison to school lunch programs on reservations in South Dakota.63 But bringing bison to the table is just one element of reawakening Native American culture among tribal youth. In 2017, 2,300 acres of federal lands were set aside in the Black Hills for the Sioux to both preserve the past and look to the future. Without a connection to their cultural past, younger generations of Sioux could struggle to define what they want in their future. Land tied to their cultural history is, of course, a solid connection. As is regaining the Sioux language. And, understandably, so are the bison that once again roam this corner of the Black Hills, the Pe’ Sla grasslands.64 But obtaining bison and renewing traditions are not always easily done, even now in the twenty-first century. Sometimes there is a will, but not a way to success. Sometimes the way that seems obvious is blocked.
The Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana is home to the Assiniboine and Sioux peoples. Its rolling prairie straddles parts of four counties, and with more than two million acres, it is the ninth-largest reservation in the country. The Missouri River traces the southern boundary of the reservation before drifting off into North Dakota. Looking at a geographic map of the reservation, it’s not hard to see the outline of a bison created by drainages that feed into the Missouri. Though located nearly 425 miles from Yellowstone, the reservation stands ready as an incubator of sorts for bison that many groups are seeking. But, unfortunately, a series of hoops must be jumped through to obtain park bison. First, the park service needs to quarantine surplus Yellowstone bison for up to five years, on average, and test them regularly for brucellosis. If the animals are still disease free after that period, they can, in theory, be shipped to Fort Peck, where the reservation has a five-hundred-thousand-dollar quarantine facility of its own. Once bison arrive there, they must be held for another year in quarantine. The long quarantine periods are necessary because the disease can lie latent. Bison that pass through those hoops can be released onto the reservation’s bison pastures or, in theory, shipped to other destinations. That protocol works. It’s been tested. More than sixty Yellowstone bison initially were sent through the quarantine process that started in 2012. All came through without testing positive for brucellosis. And yet, Montana officials have been hesitant to approve an ongoing bison transfer program. Reservation staff are ready. They’ve developed a memorandum of understanding with Montana and federal officials to routinely test any bison they would get from Yellowstone for brucellosis. They’ve written the procedures for capturing any park bison that escape from the roughly fifty thousand acres the Assiniboine and Sioux have set aside for bison.
Montana’s political and legislative roadblocks frustrate Robbie Magnan, a barrel-chested army veteran who has grown the reservation’s bison herds to some seven hundred animals since 2000. He is not one to mince his words.
“Everyone else we talked to is on the same page, with the exception of Montana,” he replies when asked if he was optimistic the quarantine protocol would be approved. “We jumped through every hoop they wanted us to go through, and yet they create more and more.”
Federal officials seemed to add another hoop late in 2018 when they offered to send five Yellowstone bison to the reservation. The catch? They wanted reservation officials to sign off on a memorandum of understanding that they would put the animals through only the last of three steps of quarantine monitoring. Lawyers for the reservation feared that the MOU forever would be an impediment to having the quarantine facility approved to handle