Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
RE-BISONING THE WEST
Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape
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As a young man, Black Elk traveled for a while as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, though he would later return to the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming to describe for whites the traditions of the Lakota. In 1932, with his son acting as translator, Black Elk related his life story to a biographer. During hours of interviews, Black Elk explained the Lakota’s reverence for bison. “The buffalo represents the people and the universe and should always be treated with respect, for was he not here before the two-legged peoples, and is he not generous in that he gives us our home and our food?” he asked rhetorically. “The buffalo is wise in many things, and, thus, we should learn from him and should always be as a relative with him.”14
But human predators, primarily those with white skin, didn’t always share that respect. Hunters hired by the railroads to provide meat for the gritty crews building the Transcontinental Railroad, military personnel working to deprive the native peoples of their foremost sustenance, and buffalo hunters making a living by selling bison robes and hides decimated the species in the nineteenth century, pushing it toward extinction. So great and widespread were the killing fields that a Paiute medicine man, Wovoka, near the end of the century instructed his people to perform a once-forgotten dance that he maintained would drive the whites from the landscape.
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