Cut your hair. The buffalo are never coming back.

December 11, 2016 4:36 AM

One hundred years ago, the US government oversaw the slaughter of millions of buffalo in its effort to settle the West. That meant separating Indian tribes from their historic dependence on the buffalo, or bison, for food, shelter, and also for their spirituality. Indians see buffalo and all living things as sacred. Now, in cooperation with Canada, the US government has returned buffalo to the Blackfoot tribes, who say they are celebrating their long-denied sense of feeling whole again. Correspondent Lucky Severson reports from northern Montana, where Ervin Carlson, president of the Intertribal Buffalo Council says, “They’re just a part of our being, our spirituality—not only the buffalo, but all animals are very spiritual to the Indian people.”
posted by XMLicious (11 comments total)

Related: The Osage just purchased Ted Turner's bison ranch.
posted by mecran01 at 6:20 AM on December 11, 2016 [10 favorites]

The bison population went from a pre-Columian 30,000,000 (minimum) down to just over 1000 in 1889, and only 85 of those were free-ranging. One quarter were in zoos, the rest in private or government herds.

While diseases and expansion killed some, most of the slaughter happened in a mere 60 years, between 1830-1890. It's a great, if terrible, lesson on the power humans have over the environment.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:15 AM on December 11, 2016 [9 favorites]

I grew up learning that the disappearance of the buffalo was something done on purpose by the invading white settlers in order to incapacitate the Native Americans

That was indeed a factor, but not the most important. Some of the killing was done for sport (bison shot from trains by passengers), but the largest part was commerce. Buffalo hide was valuable, and millions were killed for skin, leaving the animal to rot. One railway engineer said it was possible to walk a 100 miles along the Santa Fe railroad right-of-way by stepping from one bison carcass to another.

Incidentally, we did the same thing to the passenger pigeon. It became a commercial food source in the early 19th century and was extinct by 1907 (except for Martha). Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions before the Europeans arrived.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:26 AM on December 11, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'm curious about how things are in the US. Here in Europe, vast lands are being rewilded, because younger generations are not willing to put in the effort of subsistence farming. It's a sorrowful process, and one of many factors in the rise of the far right. But it is also a recreation of balances lost and amazing landscapes. And some people are returning, to live in harmony with the land and more or less off the grid.
If something similar is happening in the US, it seems at least some tribes would be able to get more of their land back? The story about the Osage buying the Turner ranch points in that direction.
posted by mumimor at 10:25 AM on December 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm curious about how things are in the US.

In the west, there are huge tracts of federally owned land, while in the east the public land is mostly state owned - the feds took over a lot of land early in the newly opened west; while in the east, states have been buying up abandoned/low value farm land (poor or rocky soil that can't compete with the mid-west/California). Maybe one day we will see the Buffalo Commons in the west, the return of the grizzly to California, and elk on the east coast.
posted by 445supermag at 11:00 AM on December 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Some of the killing was done for sport (bison shot from trains by passengers)

So the introductory scene from Dead Man is accurate...
posted by kersplunk at 12:08 PM on December 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sorry if this is nitpicky but "Indians" comprise a huge and diverse group of communities, not all of whom would hold buffalo sacred.
posted by mikek at 4:39 PM on December 11, 2016 [7 favorites]

Sorry if this is nitpicky but "Indians" comprise a huge and diverse group of communities, not all of whom would hold buffalo sacred.

Without even reaching for my handy Wikipedia, one suspects this would be limited to Plains Indians, for starters ...
posted by oheso at 4:19 AM on December 12, 2016

Most Indigenous Native American tribes regard the bison as a sacred animal and religious symbol
posted by iotic at 4:59 AM on December 12, 2016

Huh, I had never heard of the distinction between the steppe bison and wood/mountain bison before. That's unsurprising though, since before this post I don't think I'd read much about bison since pre-internet grade school.

Here's the map from that Wikipedia article showing the species' original range, which extends much further East than I would have expected.

mikek's point is a good one, though: with dozens of independent language families and heterogeneous cultures even just within the range the animals lived in it seems almost impossible a single synoptic significance would be attached to bison everywhere historically, much less within modern indigenous communities.
posted by XMLicious at 5:48 AM on December 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Coast Salish peoples, for example, have had little connection to buffalo, but commonly hold salmon sacred.
posted by mikek at 4:26 PM on December 12, 2016 [1 favorite]