Bison’s relocation to Native lands revives a spiritual bond

BULL HOLLOW, Okla. (AP) — Bison nearly vanished from the Great Plains. Decades later, there’s a nationwide resurgence of Indigenous tribes seeking to reconnect with the humpbacked, shaggy-haired animals that occupy a crucial place in centuries-old tradition and belief. Since 1992 the federally chartered InterTribal Buffalo Council has helped relocate surplus bison. The come locations such as Badlands, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Parks to 82 member tribes in 20 states. Collectively, they are managing over 20,000 of the animals on their lands. One prominent Native leader says the goal is “to restore buffalo back to Indian country for that cultural and spiritual connection that Indigenous people have with the buffalo.”

BULL HOLLOW, Okla. (AP) — Ryan Mackey quietly sang a sacred Cherokee verse as he pulled a handful of tobacco out of a zip-close bag. Reaching over a barbed wire fence, he scattered the leaves onto the pasture where a growing herd of bison — popularly known as American buffalo — grazed in northeastern Oklahoma.

The offering represented a reverent act of thanksgiving, the 45-year-old explained, and a desire to forge a divine connection with the animals, his ancestors and the Creator.

“When tobacco is used in the right way, it’s almost like a contract is made between you and the spirit — the spirit of our Creator, the spirit of these bison,” Mackey said as a strong wind rumbled across the grassy field. “Everything, they say, has a spiritual aspect. Just like this wind, we can feel it in our hands, but we can’t see it.”

Decades after the last bison vanished from their tribal lands, the Cherokee Nation is part of a nationwide resurgence of Indigenous people seeking to reconnect with the humpbacked, shaggy-haired animals that occupy a crucial place in centuries-old tradition and belief.

Since 1992 the federally chartered InterTribal Buffalo Council has helped relocate surplus bison from locations such as Badlands National Park in South Dakota, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona to 82 member tribes in 20 states.

“Collectively those tribes manage over 20,000 buffalo on tribal lands,” said Troy Heinert, a Rosebud Sioux Tribe member who serves as executive director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, based in Rapid City, South Dakota. “Our goal and mission is to restore buffalo back to Indian country for that cultural and spiritual connection that Indigenous people have with the buffalo.”

Centuries ago, an estimated 30 million to 60 million bison roamed the vast Great Plains of North America, from Canada to Texas. But by 1900, European settlers had driven the species to near extinction, hunting them en masse for their prized skins and often leaving the carcasses to rot on the prairie.

“It’s important to recognize the history that Native people had with buffalo and how buffalo were nearly decimated. … Now with the resurgence of the buffalo, often led by Native nations, we’re seeing that spiritual and cultural awakening as well that comes with it,” said Heinert, who is a South Dakota state senator.

Historically, Indigenous people hunted and used every part of the bison: for food, clothing, shelter, tools and ceremonial purposes. They did not regard the bison as a mere commodity, however, but rather as beings closely linked to people.

“Many tribes viewed them as a relative,” Heinert said. “You’ll find that in the ceremonies and language and songs.”

Rosalyn LaPier, an Indigenous writer and scholar who grew up on the Blackfeet Nation’s reservation in Montana, said there are different mythological origin stories for bison among the various peoples of the Great Plains.

“Depending on what Indigenous group you’re talking to, the bison originated in the supernatural realm and ended up on Earth for humans to use,” said LaPier, an environmental historian and ethnobotanist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “And there’s usually some sort of story of how humans were taught to hunt bison and kill bison and harvest them.”

Her Blackfeet tribe, for example, believes there are three realms: the sky world, the below world — that is, Earth — and the underwater world. Tribal lore, LaPier says, holds that the Blackfeet were vegetarians until an orphaned bison slipped out of the underwater world in human form and was taken in by two caring humans. As a result, the underwater bison’s divine leader allowed more to come to Earth to be hunted and eaten.

In Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation, one of the largest Native American tribes with 437,000 registered members, had a few bison on its land in the 1970s. But they disappeared.

It wasn’t until 40 years later that the tribe’s contemporary herd was begun, when a large cattle trailer — driven by Heinert — arrived in fall 2014 with 38 bison from Badlands National Park. It was greeted by emotional songs and prayers from tribe’s people.

“I can still remember the dew that was on the grass and the songs of the birds that were in the trees. … I could feel the hope and the pride in the Cherokee people that day,” Heinert said.

Since then, births and additional bison transplants from various locations have boosted the population to about 215. The herd roams a 500-acre (2-square kilometer) pasture in Bull Hollow, an unincorporated area of Delaware County about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Tulsa, near the small town of Kenwood.

For now, the Cherokee are not harvesting the animals, whose bulls can weigh up to 2,000 pounds (900 kilograms) and stand 6 feet tall (nearly 2 meters), as leaders focus on growing the herd. But bison, a lean protein, could serve in the future as a food source for Cherokee schools and nutrition centers, said Bryan Warner, the tribe’s deputy principal chief.

“Our hope is really not just for food sovereignty’s sake but to really reconnect our citizens back in a spiritual way,” said Warner, a member of a United Methodist church.

That reconnection in turn leads to discussions about other fauna, he added, from rabbits and turtles to quail and doves.

“All these different animals — it puts you more in tune with nature,” he said as bison sauntered through a nearby pond. “And then essentially it puts you more in tune with yourself, because we all come from the same dirt that these animals are formed from — from our Creator.”

Originally from the southeastern United States, the Cherokee were forced to relocate to present-day Oklahoma in 1838 after gold was discovered in their ancestral lands. The 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) removal, known as the Trail of Tears, claimed nearly 4,000 lives through sickness and harsh travel conditions.

While bison are more associated with Great Plains tribes than those with roots on the East Coast, the newly arrived Cherokee had connections with a slightly smaller subspecies, according to Mackey. The animals on the tribe’s lands today are not direct descendants, he explained, but close cousins with which the tribe is able to have a spiritual bond.

“We don’t speak the same language as the bison,” Mackey said. “But when you sit with them and spend time with them, relationships can be built on … other means than just language alone: sharing experiences, sharing that same space and just having a feeling of respect. Your body language changes when you have respect for someone or something.”

Mackey grew up with Pentecostal roots on his father’s side and Baptist on his mother’s. He still occasionally attends church, but finds more meaning in Cherokee ceremonial practices.

“Even if (tribal members) are raised in church or in synagogue or wherever they choose to worship, their elders are Cherokee elders,” he said. “And this idea of relationship and respect and guardianship — with the land, with the Earth, with all those things that reside on it — it’s passed down. It still pervades our identity as Cherokee people.”

That’s why he believes the bison’s return to Cherokee lands is so important.

“The bison aren’t just meat,” he said. “They represent abundance and health and strength.”

NOVEMBER 21, 2022:

BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. (AP) — Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada are leading efforts to restore bison across North America more than a century after European settlers drove the species to near extinction. Tribes now have a collective 20,000 bison and that’s been growing steadily along with a desire among many Native Americans to reclaim stewardship of an animal their predecessors lived alongside and depended upon for millennia. The long-term dream for many is to return bison, also known as buffalo, on a scale rivaling the tens of millions that once roamed the continent in thundering herds that shaped the landscape itself.

BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. (AP) — Perched atop a fence at Badlands National Park, Troy Heinert peered from beneath his wide-brimmed hat into a corral where 100 wild bison awaited transfer to the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

Descendants of bison that once roamed North America’s Great Plains by the tens of millions, the animals would soon thunder up a chute, take a truck ride across South Dakota and join one of many burgeoning herds Heinert has helped reestablish on Native American lands.

Heinert nodded in satisfaction to a park service employee as the animals stomped their hooves and kicked up dust in the cold wind. He took a brief call from Iowa about another herd being transferred to tribes in Minnesota and Oklahoma, then spoke with a fellow trucker about yet more bison destined for Wisconsin.

By nightfall, the last of the American buffalo shipped from Badlands were being unloaded at the Rosebud reservation, where Heinert lives. The next day, he was on the road back to Badlands to load 200 bison for another tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux.

Most bison in North America are in commercial herds, treated no differently than cattle.

“Buffalo, they walk in two worlds,” Heinert said. ”Are they commercial or are they wildlife? From the tribal perspective, we’ve always deemed them as wildlife, or to take it a step further, as a relative.”

Some 82 tribes across the U.S. — from New York to Alaska — now have more than 20,000 bison in 65 herds — and that’s been growing in recent years along with the desire among Native Americans to reclaim stewardship of an animal their ancestors lived alongside and depended upon for millennia.

European settlers destroyed that balance when they slaughtered the great herds. Bison almost went extinct until conservationists including Teddy Roosevelt intervened to reestablish a small number of herds largely on federal lands. Native Americans were sometimes excluded from those early efforts carried out by conservation groups.

Such groups more recently partnered with tribes, and some are now stepping aside. The long-term dream for some Native Americans: return bison on a scale rivaling herds that roamed the continent in numbers that shaped the landscape itself.

Heinert, 50, a South Dakota state senator and director of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, views his job in practical terms: Get bison to tribes that want them, whether two animals or 200. He helps them rekindle long-neglected cultural connections, increase food security, reclaim sovereignty and improve land management. This fall, Heinert’s group has moved 2,041 bison to 22 tribes in 10 states.

“All of these tribes relied on them at some point, whether that was for food or shelter or ceremonies. The stories that come from those tribes are unique to those tribes,” he said. “Those tribes are trying to go back to that, reestablishing that connection that was once there and was once very strong.”

HERDS SLAUGHTERED

Bison for centuries set rhythms of life for the Lakota Sioux and many other nomadic tribes that followed their annual migrations. Hides for clothing and teepees, bones for tools and weapons, horns for ladles, hair for rope — a steady supply of bison was fundamental.

At so-called “buffalo jumps,” herds would be run off cliffs, then butchered over days and weeks. Archaeologists have found immense volumes of bones buried at some sites, suggesting processing on a major scale.

European settlers and firearms brought a new level of industry to the enterprise as hunters, U.S. troops and tourists shot bison and a growing commercial market used their parts in machinery, fertilizer and clothing. By 1889, few bison remained: 10 animals in central Montana, 20 each in central Colorado and southern Wyoming, 200 in Yellowstone National Park, some 550 in northern Alberta and about 250 in zoos and private herds.

Piles of buffalo skulls seen in haunting photos from that era illustrate an ecological and cultural disaster.

“We wanted to populate the western half of the United States because there were so many people in the East,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet member, said in an interview. “They wanted all of the Indians dead so they could take their land away.”

The thinking at the time, she added, was “‘if we kill off the buffalo, the Indians will die. They won’t have anything to eat.’”

HARVESTING A BULL

The day after the bison transfer from the Badlands, Heinert’s son T.J. sprawled flat on the ground, his rifle scope fixed on a large bull bison at the Wolakota Buffalo Range. The tribal enterprise in just two years has restored about 1,000 bison to 28,000 acres (11,300 hectares) of rolling, scrub-covered hills near the Nebraska-South Dakota border.

Pausing to pull a cactus paddle from the back of his hand, Heinert looked back through the scope. The 28-year-old had been talking all morning about the need for a perfect shot and the difficulty in 40-mile (64-kilometer) an hour winds. The first bullet went into the animal’s ear, but it lumbered away a couple hundred yards to join a larger group of bison, with the hunter following in an all-terrain vehicle.

Two more shots, then after the animal finally went down, Heinert drove up close and put the rifle behind its ear for a final shot that stopped its thrashing. “Definitely not how it’s supposed to go,” Heinert kept repeating, disappointed it wasn’t an instant kill. “But we got him down. That’s all that matters at this point.”

BUFFALO DREAMS

Coinciding with widespread extermination of bison, tribes such as the Lakota were robbed of land through broken treaties that by 1889 whittled down the “Great Sioux Reservation” established in 1851 to several much smaller ones across the Dakotas. Without bison, tribal members relied on government “beef stations” that distributed meat from cattle ranches.

The program was a boon for white ranchers. Today, Cherry County, Nebraska — along Rosebud reservation’s southern border — boasts more cattle than any other U.S. county.

Removing fences that crisscross ranches there and opening them to bison is unlikely, but Rosebud Sioux are intent on expanding the reservation’s herds as a reliable food source.

Others have grander visions: The Blackfeet of Montana and tribes in Alberta want to establish a “transboundary herd” ranging over the Canada border near Glacier National Park. Other tribes propose a “buffalo commons” on federal lands in central Montana where the region’s tribes could harvest animals.

“What would it look like to have 30 million buffalo in North America again?” said Cristina Mormorunni, a Métis Indian who’s worked with the Blackfeet to restore bison.

With so many people, houses and fences now, Haaland said there’s no going back completely. But her agency has emerged as a primary bison source, transferring more than 20,000 to tribes and tribal organizations over 20 years, typically to thin government-controlled herds so they don’t outgrow their land.

“It’s wonderful tribes are working together on something as important as bison, that were almost lost,” Haaland said.

Transfers sometimes draw objections from cattle ranchers who worry bison carry disease and compete for grass. Such fears long inhibited efforts to transfer Yellowstone National Park bison.

Interior officials work with state officials make sure relocated bison meet local veterinary health requirements. But they generally don’t vaccinate the animals and handle them as little as possible.

Bison demand from the tribes is growing, and Haaland said transfers will continue. That includes up to 1,000 being trucked this year from Badlands, Grand Canyon National Park and several national wildlife refuges. Others come from conservation groups and tribes that share surplus bison.

“WAY OF LIFE”

Back at Wolakota range, Daniel Eagle Road approached the bison shot by T.J. Heinert. Eagle Road rested a hand on the animal’s head. Heinert got out some chewing tobacco, tucked some behind his lip and passed the tin to Eagle Road who did the same. Heinert sprinkled tobacco along the bison’s back and prayed.

Chains fastened around the front and hind legs, the half-ton animal was hoisted onto a flatbed truck for the bouncy ride to ranch headquarters. About 20 adults and children gathered as the bison was lowered onto a tarp, then listened solemnly to tribal elder Duane Hollow Horn Bear.

“This relative gave of itself to us, for our livelihood, our way or life,” Horn Bear said.

Soon the tarp was covered with bloody footprints from people butchering the animal. They quartered it, sawing through bone, then sliced meat from the legs, rump, and the animal’s huge hump. Children, some only 6, were given knives to cut away skin and fat.

The adults took turns dipping pieces of kidney in the animal’s gall bladder bile. “Like salsa,” someone called out as others laughed.

The stomach was washed out for use in soup. The pelt was scraped and spread on a railing to dry. The skull was cleaned and the tongue, a delicacy, cut out.

Then came an assembly line of slicing, grinding and packaging of meat distributed to families through a food program run by the tribal agency that operates the ranch. The work lasted into the night.

A first for many, the harvest illustrates a challenge for the Rosebud Sioux and other tribes: few people have butchering skills and cultural knowledge to establish a personal connection with bison.

Katrina Fuller, who helped guide the butchering, dreams of training others so the reservation’s 20 communities can come to Wolakota for their own harvest. “Maybe not now, but in my lifetime,” she said. “That’s what I want for everyone.”

Horn Bear, 73, said when he was very young his grandparents told him creation stories revolving around bison. But then he was forcibly enrolled in an Indian boarding school — government-backed institutions where tribal traditions were stamped out with beatings and other cruelties. The bison were already gone, and the schools sought to erase the stories of them too.

Standing on the blood-spattered tarp, Horn Bear said the harvest brings back what was almost totally taken away — his people’s culture, economy, social fabric.

“It’s like coming home to a way of life,” he said.