[18] - Buffalo
When the buffalo went away (and how it might return)
Keywords: Bison, Buffalo, Buffalo fat in coffee, Buffalo Berry, Buffalo Plum, Pemmican, Bear grease in sweat lodges, Liquorice Root, Jude Berries, Chokecherry, Artemisia Frigida = Prairie Sage, Agates, Petrified Woods, Beaver Fat
Patti with an eye is a force of nature. There is no other way to describe her. She takes over from her husband Jason after he finishes our introduction to the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative at their headquarters near Morton in the Wind River Reservation. We are still stood in a circle, the Swiss anthropologists and international research participants, and we are all facing Patti. We can sense she is a woman of action and we are enraptured by her energy. She is a code-switcher and a shape- shifter and casually feeds us nuggets of wisdom such as:
“Not everything beautiful is pretty” (when talking about death)
“We want to honour masculinity, so toxic doesn’t have to go in front of it”
“I value honest communication instead of rude politeness”
She tells us to follow her by car and so begins a bumpy ride to the edge of a cliff. She stops us and gets us all to overlook the valley. She tells us, from where we just came from to the butte over there to the white house over there, this is our land, this is the buffalo’s land. With an audacious smile she says, “we always said to ourselves, if we can just make it to the White House”... And there they are.
The return of the buffalo is momentous. For us, to understand just how momentous this is, we need to go deeper in history. Even at the park, even at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, we are told that the population of the buffalo plummeted down to 300 animals at one point. We are supposed to admire the conservation efforts and the recovery of the population today. Look how many bison are grazing peacefully in Lamar valley! What we are not told is how the white man’s appearance with its accompanying possessiveness, bloodlust and genocidal mania was responsible for the near erasure of these grand animals.
I read Pretty-Shield’s life story as recounted in 1930 to Frank B. Linderman, an American anthropologist. Then, she is in her early 70s. She was a Crow medicine woman and grew up on the plains of what is now Montana and Wyoming. She recalls:
“The happiest days of my life were spent following the buffalo herds over our beautiful country. [...] There was always so many, many buffalo. Plenty of good fat meat for everybody.”
“Ahh, my heart fell down when I began to see dead buffalo scattered all over our beautiful country, killed and skinned, and left to rot by white men, many, many hundreds of buffalo. The first I saw of this was in the Judith basin. The whole country there smelled of rotting meat. Even the flowers could not put down the bad smell. Our hearts were like stones. Yet, nobody believed, even then, that the white man could kill all the buffalo. Since the beginning of things there had always been so many! [...] and yet, the white man did this, even when he did not want the meat.”
“We believed for a long time that the buffalo would again come to us; but they did not. We grew hungry and sick and afraid, all in one. Not believing their own eyes, our hunters rode very far looking for buffalo, so far away that even if they had found a herd, we could not have reached it in half a moon.”
“And then the white men began to fence the plains so that we could not travel; and anyhow, there was little good in traveling, nothing to travel for. We began to stay in one place, and grow lazy, and sicker all the time. Our men had fought hard against our enemies, holding them back from our beautiful country by their bravery; but now, with everything else going wrong, we began to be whipped by weak foolishness.”
“We were given a reservation, a fine one, long ago. We had many many horses, and even cattle that the Government had given us. We might have managed to get along if the White Chief in Washington had not leased our lands to white stockmen. These men, some of them, shot down our horses on our own lands, because they wanted all the grass for themselves.”
“I do not hate anybody, not even the white man. I have never let myself hate the white man, because I knew that this would only make things worse for me. But he changed everything for us, did many bad deeds before we got used to him.”[1]
All throughout Pretty-Shield’s account of life on the plains and before the reservations, she emphasises that the reason her people moved was to be with the buffalo. The herds determined the rhythm of her people. They would pack up camp and set it up again and pack up camp and set it up again. The buffalo was why they travelled. When they had the buffalo, they had food, they were healthy, they were happy and there was singing.
With the white man’s killing and the white man’s fences and the white man’s segregation came life on the reservations. This happened not only to the Crow. At the Wind River Reservation, the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes were enclosed in the same territory, in the hope that these historical enemies would finish each other off so the white man would not have to.
Animosity is still an issue at times. Patti says there is generational trauma, parents have suffered and passed it on to their children who became parents who suffered and passed it on to their children. Patti is Arapaho and Jason is Shoshone, and they are married and are not trying to go back.
Reservation is supposed to mean both
1. “the action of reserving something”
3. “an area of land set aside for occupation by indigenous people, especially in the US”
But Patti tells us how early in the 20th century, the reservation was opened up for white homesteading. Plots of land across the reservation sold and appropriated, burning holes into the fabric like a cigarette would in a tablecloth. The farms are allocated almost 95 percent of the wind river’s water. The towns, such as Riverton, to this day have a reputation for being racist towards Indians.
The buffalo need space to roam, they don’t need fences. She tells us of the Initiative’s demanding effort to mend the fabric, to piece back together a continuous strip of land big enough for the buffalo to live. They bought back patch by patch, despite an initial lack of funding, despite resistance from white farmers. She tells us, nodding across the road, there’s still people who oppose and keep their fences high. They fundraise tirelessly to reclaim the rights and deeds to the land that was once theirs, taken from them, reserved for them and then sold off again. They now have a mighty sponsor in the Bezos Family Foundation. Mark Bezos himself is scouting land for the buffalo.
Next, Patti takes us across more uneven territory, the dirt swirling up into the air around us. She had told us about an orphaned calf that they had been nursing. We see it waiting impatiently for Patti. She tells us it’s loyal and returns to the same spot for feeding. In gangly manner it runs towards her as she strides across the high grass in her long skirt holding a 3-gallon bottle full of goat milk. They engage in a little twirl before the calf docks and drinks in large gulps.
The nursing of the calf is symbolic for the initiative. It is a moment of intimate connection with the past, the now and the future. I recall Jason’s words about the Initiative’s goals. For him, the return of the buffalo is about spiritual, cultural, ecological and dietary sustainability.
The Initiative is about advocating for rematriation [2], for a reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth. The land gives to you, and you give back to it. Patti adds to this later, after she is done nursing the calf, and she says, it has nothing to do with ownership, but with giving land back to the land itself.
It is about the youth, too. The Initiative is creating a long-lasting legacy not only through education of the local community, but also through inter-reservation exchanges. Youths come from across the vast territory where the buffalo went away from, so that they might contribute to it coming back all over. This is as much cultural education as it is an ecological one.
And it is about community revitalisation. It is not just about creating community by rallying for a common cause. It is also literally about restoring vitality in a community battered by health issues. Patti tells us that almost 90% of all Wind River Reservation inhabitants suffer from nutrition induced diabetes and a high number suffer from obesity. Nursing the buffalo is nursing each other back to health. The Initiative provides buffalo meet, fresh, dried, pounded, and distributes it in the reservation. They know of the nutritional benefit of the buffalo and want to share it with everyone.
Patti tells us of the decade long struggle over food sovereignty, how foodways were lost after the buffalo went away and how rations were imposed on the reservation. “Assimilation worked”, she says with great resignation but not without hope.
For years, people have been trying to bring back indigenous plant and environmental knowledge that had been under such duress. She takes us on her own journey of learning and tells us about the buffalo berry. She never understood why the trees were called buffalo berry because for the longest time, there was no buffalo. But when the buffalo returned, it showed her why the bush was named so. She says, you know, the buffalo dig ditches around the trees and bushes! And only through these ditches can you get close to the bush, it's dense, it has prickles and thorns, and through these ditches, you can put hides underneath the bush, and when the first frost passes you shake the tree and pull all the berries out on the hide.
“The gardens are coming”, she tells us with resilience in her eyes and explains to us that community gardens are slowly spreading across the reservation. She adds, “growing plants is one thing, knowing how to cook them is next.”
We get in the car one more time and drive behind Patti in a little convoy like we had done twice before. She takes us to see the herd. We approach it timidly, regardless of knowing our safety in the car. A couple of huge bulls are stood stoically away from the other animals, perhaps in self-imposed solitary confinement, perhaps dismissed by the others.
As we sit in the car, photographing, filming and simply observing these majestic animals up close, we think about another nugget of wisdom Patti told us. “There’s buffalo families and there’s cattle families, and let me tell you, the way they treat the animals is how they treat their women.” Even though they mostly get eaten in both scenarios, the way they are allowed to live their lives, the space they are given, the freedom they are granted, differ starkly. And with that, thinking about the position of the buffalo, the attitude towards them living on the land and the land itself, it makes sense for Patti to say, “buffalos are a human story, not just a native story.”
1 Linderman F. B. 1932. Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows. New York: Harper Perennial. Pp. 167-169
2 Rematriation, containing mater (genitive matris) “mother” stands in opposition to repatriation, "restore to one's own country," 1610s, from Late Latin repatriatus, past participle of repatriare "return to one's country," from re- "back" (see re-) + patria "native land" (see patriot), from pater (genitive patros) "father", because it is not giving back to the fatherland but to Mother Earth.
