Читать книгу Re-Bisoning the West - Kurt Repanshek - Страница 11

Tatanka

Historically the buffalo had more influence on man than all other Plains animals combined. It was life, food, raiment, and shelter to the Indians. The buffalo and the Plains Indians lived together, and together passed away. The year 1876 marks practically the end of both.

—Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains

For many of us on our first, and perhaps only, visit to Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt, or other national parks or preserves with bison, that first glance of the animals in the wild can be startling and enamoring at the same time. It’s a fleeting connection with something truly wild that lives on the landscape as it has for tens of thousands of years. We ooh and ahh, take some photographs, and head down the road. End of connection.

Native Americans and bison, however, are intertwined, and always have been. Bison are iinii to the Blackfeet Nation, hotova’a or hotoaao’o to the Cheyennes, depending on the sex of the animal, and kúcu to the Utes. The Cherokee people know bison as ya-na-sa, while in the Pawnee language they are tarha, and in Navajo ayani. But regardless of what they are called, bison were, and continue to be, celebrated by these cultures. They not only gave life through their meat but they represented a linkage, a fastening with the earth and freedom that native cultures seek. Stories told by elders through the generations tell of bison coming from the underworld, from caves, caverns, and grottos winding deep into mountainsides. In South Dakota, on the western edge of the state that features the undulating pine country known as the Black Hills, you can walk right up to the narrow, rocky hillside crevice where, a Lakota creation narrative tells us, bison streamed out into the sunlight: hundreds and thousands of animals stretching across the prairie in a dark brown rising tide. These Pte-O-ya-te were “relatives, who provided humans with food, clothing, shelter, tools, medicine, and many other necessities.”⁴² The connection was further enforced by the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who taught the Lakota to be honorable, respectful, and self-disciplined.⁴³ Not only did the Buffalo People stampede from that crevice which led to making Wind Cave a national park, but the Lakota view the air that rushes out of that small hole as “the breath of life.”⁴⁴

Similar creation narratives have been handed down by native peoples across the West, telling of bison spewing forth from a cave in Texas and in the Crazy Mountains of Montana.⁴⁵ The herd that spilled out of the Crazy Mountains “spread wide and blackened the plains,” according to Crow chief Plenty Coups. “Everywhere I looked great herds of buffalo were going in every direction, and still others without number were pouring out of the hole in the ground to travel on the wide plains.”⁴⁶ Pawnee narratives also tell of spirit animals that live in caves, waiting for the time when they will be granted access to the surface.⁴⁷

The depletion of the great herds in the nineteenth century deprived native peoples of food and shelter, and was also a spiritual loss. Bison represented the universe and superseded the arrival of humans. Unlike many of the whites who came west, native peoples viewed bison with honor and dignity. Just as Lakota and other native cultures believed bison had come from the underworld, they also believed they returned to that protective dwelling place after the whites decimated the great herds. A Kiowa narrative tells of a woman who woke one morning shortly before sunrise and went to a spring to get some water. As the growing predawn light began to illuminate the wafting mists filling the valley, she saw an old bison cow walk out of the vapors. Trailing her were more bison, some old and weary, some wounded, some young calves.

“As she watched, the old buffalo cow led the last herd through the mist and toward the mountain,” goes the traditional story. “Then the mountain opened up before them, and inside of the mountain the earth was fresh and young. The sun shone brightly and the water was clear. The earth was green and the sky blue. Into this beautiful land walked the last herd of buffalo, and the mountains closed.

“The buffalo were gone.”⁴⁸

Even before President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark west in 1804 to find out exactly what he had purchased from the French via the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, bison figuratively have been going into the mountain, literally heading toward their demise. Once the horse reached the Plains with Spanish conquistadors, native peoples’ ability to travel expanded. Before the horse, dogs had pulled the travois carrying family belongings. The arrival of the horse made it possible to carry more, carry it farther, and carry it more quickly. Horses enabled these peoples to become nomads, to follow the bison on their migrations and so always have food and shelter nearby. If winter’s snows made it difficult for horses to carry warriors all the way to the bison, the hunters could dismount, don snowshoes, and drive bison into drift-clogged ravines. There the snowbound bison met their fate at the hands of hunters with their lances.⁴⁹

As went the bison, so too did the Native Americans. The prediction by William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the Union Army’s heralded Civil War generals, that the destruction of the great bison herds would directly impact Plains native peoples, proved true. It has been debated whether the US military formally set down a strategy to wipe out bison herds specifically to subjugate the Plains cultures, or whether it was a word-of-mouth strategy. Regardless, General Sherman was determined to reduce bison herds. “As long as Buffalo are up on the Republican [River], the Indians will go there,” the general wrote to his friend, General Sheridan, in 1868 from Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory. “I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffalo and consequent(ly) Indians are out (from between) the Roads we will have collisions and trouble.”⁵⁰ The army was so intent on gaining the assistance of buffalo hunters to kill bison that it gave them ammunition for free.

Sherman’s proposal was not made jokingly, notes David D. Smits. A historian focused largely on the American frontier following the Civil War, Smits’s research revealed that the upper echelon of the army “routinely sponsored and outfitted civilian hunting expeditions onto the plains.” “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s reputation and nickname was built on killing bison, and he often lived up to that repute. In the fall of 1871, he led a group of newspaper editors from New York and Chicago, businessmen, General Sheridan, and fellow soldiers into the prairie not far from present-day North Platte, Nebraska, for a hunt. They wound up slaughtering more than six hundred bison, taking only the tasty tongues and leaving the rest for scavengers.⁵¹

Robert Utley long served as chief historian for the National Park Service. One of his favorite topics, despite the many possibilities that the far-flung reach of the National Park System afforded him, was the American West, about which he wrote more than fifteen books. His examination of the frontier between 1846 and 1890 called the loss of bison a “cultural catastrophe.”⁵² It left Plains peoples with little option but to settle on reservations. Their daily lifeblood had been wiped out, and other wild game was following that path, too, as whites moved west. The meager prospects of living off the land as they had for generations left those placed on reservations with little incentive to flee. The cultural dynamics of western life had swung; nomadic peoples were doomed, settlements were growing. It’s been an ongoing story through history: the conquerors dictate to the conquered. As whites moved west, striving to tame the landscape, game was becoming harder to find and the nomadic life of many cultures was not just threatened but ended.⁵³ John Fire Lame Deer didn’t know Utley, but shared his opinion. A Lakota Sioux born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in 1906, Lame Deer struggled with finding his identity, as many young men and women of any culture commonly do. He tried his hand on the rodeo circuit as both competitor and clown, and struggled with alcohol, gambling, and chasing women. Not unlike Wovoka and Black Elk before him, when Lame Deer reached his mid-fifties he found his calling as a Sioux holy man, one who embraced his Native American upbringing and background after an early-in-life introduction 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 all phases of quarantine. The impasse might be viewed as a twenty-first-century white man’s slight of native peoples if the National Park Service at Yellowstone wasn’t so willing and even anxious to see the program succeed. Montana’s position seems illogical, even blockheaded. Why oppose a program that would send brucellosis-free bison from Yellowstone, via truck, padlocked if need be, to Fort Peck, where they would go through another five-year confinement period to double-down on their brucellosis-free status? The program would help reduce Yellowstone’s bison population to a number more in line with what Montana officials prefer, and provide an economic, cultural, and dietary boost to the Assiniboine and Sioux.

Just as John Fire Lame Deer feared many years ago, that Native Americans and bison shared the same fate at the hands of whites, today’s tribes see a lack of justice in how Yellowstone bison are being treated. Park-service staff attest to that. P. J. White, Rick L. Wallen, and David E. Hallac, park-service wildlife biologists, presented that concern in their 2015 book, Yellowstone Bison: Conserving an American Icon in Modern Society. They wrote that some Native Americans believe the stigma brucellosis has attached to Yellowstone bison is in some ways equal to the disparaging attitudes white settlers had toward native peoples. It’s a view long held by the Lakota, who see their culture and trajectory intertwined with that of bison. That belief was voiced by Oglala Sioux leader Red Cloud in 1903 when he told his followers of meeting with representatives of President Theodore Roosevelt. “We told them that the supernatural powers, Taku Wakan, had given to the Lakota the buffalo for food and clothing. We told them that where the buffalo ranged, that was our country,” he said. “We told them that the country of the buffalo was the country of the Lakota. We told them that the buffalo must have their country and the Lakota must have the buffalo.”⁶⁵

Ninety-six years later, on a dry, unseasonably mild February 7 when the temperature climbed to sixty degrees in Rapid City, South Dakota, representatives from a handful of Native American tribes set out to walk and ride (in vehicles as well as atop horses) nearly five hundred miles to Gardiner, Montana, and Yellowstone’s north entrance. The Buffalo Walk, as their mission was called, was seen as a way to show solidarity with park bison that were being gunned down as they migrated out of Yellowstone.

“Now our Buffalo brothers are being mercilessly slaughtered close to extinction and need our help,” said Everett Poor Thunder in rallying for the cause. “To give our help we must walk, and through this walk of unity and solidarity will come a healing blessing for those involved.”⁶⁶ It was an arduous pilgrimage, at times into the brunt of blizzard-like conditions, that united fifteen Native American tribes together in protest over the bison’s plight.

The journey culminated with a ceremonial dance out of the long-ago past to venerate both warriors and bison. The Sun Dance has been called the preeminent religious ceremony of Plains tribes. Historically, it tested the stamina of warriors as they made a personal sacrifice through self-mutilation, marked the summer solstice, a time of renewal, and reconnected the people to the earth. The Lakota people revered the ritual as a physical sacrifice to summon population growth among their people and the bison.

The Buffalo Dance is a precursor to the main Sun Dance. Done as a lure for bison, warriors scrape at the ground with their feet, to imitate bison. Central to the Sun Dance is the piercing of a warrior’s chest or back muscles for placement of bones or sticks. Cords would be attached to these items and then tied either to a Sun Dance pole or a bison skull.

On February 27, 1999, Gary Silk of the Standing Rock Sioux performed this key segment of the dance near the Roosevelt Arch at Yellowstone’s north entrance. Slits were cut into his back, and then wooden sticks were threaded through them. To each stick, a cord that had been tied to a buffalo skull was attached. As painful as it was for Silk, it brought to life a vision he had had. “I kept having these dreams that this buffalo was laying there … I don’t know if he was dying, or shot … but he was trying to get up. So in this dream I had, I hooked [myself] up to him and tried to pick him up.”⁶⁷ Silk then circled those who had made the walk, dragging the skulls behind him, stopping briefly at each compass point to sing a prayer. After seven such circles, he stopped so his young daughter could sit on the two buffalo skulls. Silk took hold of the tail of a horse that was brought to him. A sharp slap on the horse’s rump sent it, and Silk, bolting forward, the momentum pulling the sticks from his back.

During Yellowstone’s fiery summer of 1988, I tagged along with a park archaeologist when she went out to mark the forest locations of ancient wickiups still standing, though in a state of collapse. These temporary shelters, constructed by leaning long saplings together in tepee fashion, were thought to have been used by Sheep Eater, or Tukudeka, communities. The Tukudeka people made Yellowstone more of a permanent home than the other native peoples that passed through hunting or to collect obsidian at Obsidian Cliff in the northwestern section of the park. If forest fires that summer consumed the wickiup remains, at least the park would be able to locate where they had stood by the metal stakes this woman drove into the soil.

Down through the centuries, more than two dozen native cultures have established some connection with the Yellowstone landscape, either as a place to hunt or gather obsidian, or as a landscape their trails passed through. Crow, Blackfeet, Shoshone, Flathead, Nez Perce, and other Plains tribes were given use of the lands by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Seventeen years later, another treaty, also reached at Fort Laramie in southeastern Wyoming, revoked many of the provisions of the earlier treaty. The Bannock communities that resided west of the park routinely traveled through the area to reach hunting grounds to the northeast of Yellowstone. Most of these passages went without incident. But in 1878, a band of Bannock warriors fled through the park, intent on reaching Canada where they would join up with Lakota leader Sitting Bull. During their passage they surprised a surveying team and absconded with some stock and supplies. In early September, a military party that was providing protection for visitors on vacation encountered the warriors to the east of the park and killed eleven. Another thirty-one were captured, along with about two hundred horses and mules. While some Bannock and Shoshone bands still hunted in the southern areas of the park in the mid-1890s, by 1895 the native peoples that had long utilized the landscape now embraced by the park for hunting and gathering had been forced onto reservations.

A century later, many Native Americans are working to renew their connections to the park’s landscape, its flora, and its fauna. They are focused particularly on bison because of the animals’ manifestation of power and strength as well as their spiritual connection to native peoples. That relationship was formally recognized by the InterTribal Bison Council in 2014 through a treaty “of cooperation, renewal and restoration” signed by eight tribes (others have signed on in the ensuing years). One section of the treaty reads:

it is the collective intention of WE, the undersigned NATIONS, to welcome BUFFALO to once again live among us as CREATOR intended by doing everything within our means so WE and BUFFALO will once again live together to nurture each other culturally and spiritually. It is our collective intention to recognize BUFFALO as a wild free-ranging animal and as an important part of the ecological system; to provide a safe space and environment across our historic homelands, on both sides of the United States and the Canadian border, so together WE can have our brother, the BUFFALO, lead us in nurturing our land, plants and other animals to once again realize THE BUFFALO WAYS for our future generations.

The treaty is working in Wyoming, bringing bison back to a landscape that last saw them in 1885. That year marked the last time the Eastern Shoshone were allowed to hunt bison on their land, the Wind River Indian Reservation. Twenty-two years before, in 1863, the federal government had promised the Eastern Shoshone a landscape of 44.6 million acres that touched parts of Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado for their homeland. In 1868, the government greatly reduced that to 2.7 million acres under the second treaty of Fort Bridger. Bison still were prolific on that landscape; in 1881, Shoshone hunters took thousands of bison. But in 1885, just ten were counted on the reservation.

Today, the bison population is going in the opposite direction. Jason Baldes has been working side by side with the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho peoples to place bison on the west-central Wyoming reservation. Growing up as a member of the Eastern Shoshone people, Baldes and his father, Dick, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, spent countless days in the saddle exploring the Wind River Range that towers over the reservation’s western border. After graduating high school, Jason navigated a series of community colleges and universities searching for the right fit for his Native American background. He finally found it at Montana State University, where he obtained both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in land resources and environmental sciences. Driving his interest in that field was a desire to see bison returned to the reservation. It was a thought that burrowed into his mind in 1997 when he and his father traveled to East Africa and witnessed a massive wildebeest migration. The idea wasn’t simply to see bison as part of the reservation’s landscape, but as a cultural, ecological, and nutritional fixture. What he calls “life’s commissary.”⁶⁸

Baldes worked to develop the draft management plan for bringing bison back to the reservation with the goal of establishing a genetically pure, disease-free herd that would be managed as wildlife under the Shoshone and Arapahoe Tribal Game Code. Working with the National Wildlife Federation and the Eastern Shoshone’s Boy-Zhan Bi-Den (Shoshone for “buffalo return”) effort, Baldes saw the regeneration of a reservation herd in 2016 when ten bison from the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa were freed. Another ten, from the National Bison Range in Montana, arrived in 2017. Both arrivals were momentous occasions, but the 2017 transplant was an afterthought in light of the birth early that year of the first bison calf on the reservation in 130 years. That calf’s arrival was a significant event for the two tribes that have shared the reservation since 1878. Three more calves were born in 2018. The reservation herd is still small, fewer than two dozen animals early in 2019, but the hope is that eventually the Eastern Shoshone will once again be able to rely on bison for both cultural and dietary needs. Though other native cultures with bison also supplement revenues by selling bison meat and robes, Baldes views the animals more holistically, more reverently.

“If we have the cultural appreciation for this buffalo, why would we want to treat it as a monetary commodity?” he told me. “It’s more important than that for me. Of course, economic development is a huge issue and tribes need access to capital, but for me, we have the opportunity to treat buffalo as wildlife with the greatest respect potentially available of any reservation. The cultural benefit for having buffalo and having access to them for sustenance, that’s more important than the monetary gains of marketing the meat.”

With 2.2 million acres on the reservation, acreage in the form of prairie as well as forest and mountains soaring to thirteen thousand feet, the plan is to grow the bison herd to one thousand or more and let it wander across four hundred thousand acres. Baldes would like to see reservation bison return to the nearby Wind River Mountains to the west and even the Owl Creek Mountains to the north. It’s a vision of sustainability, both ecologically as well as for the health of Eastern Shoshone members. The average life expectancy of tribal members is just forty-nine, more than a quarter-century less than that of Wyoming’s general population. Infant mortality, at nearly fifteen out of one thousand births, is more than double of that experienced by white Wyoming residents. As bison meat is higher in protein and lower in cholesterol than beef, making it a mealtime mainstay could help combat type 2 diabetes on the reservation. But there are other problems on the reservation that Baldes believes bison can help cure. High youth suicide rates, high school dropout rates, and unemployment rates.

“We have a lot of social problems that affect us. Buffalo is always seen as a way to help us heal from some of these atrocities of the past,” he told me. “We’re doing everything we can to create opportunities for our young people, who will become our leaders. And so whether it’s language, whether it’s substance abuse, health, we’re doing everything we can socially to improve the lives of people on the reservation. Buffalo are integral to that, because it’s not just an animal to us. It’s kin. Every tribal member knows innately how important this animal was to our ancestors. We likely wouldn’t be here if not for the buffalo, and so it’s central to our ceremonies, the Sun Dance, the sweat ceremonies.”

The same can be said at Fort Peck, where the integration of bison back into daily life involves programs for schoolchildren that connect them with the traditional, as well as modern-day, role of the animals. More than 1,500 children have participated. If state and federal authorities ever approve the quarantine protocol that Yellowstone officials developed and which in early 2018 gained the National Park Service’s final go-ahead to put into operation, more tribes could see bison back on their lands. The Fort Peck quarantine facility, the first in North America operated by a tribal government, could once again be holding bison to complete the infection-monitoring period. Other sources of brucellosis-free bison include Elk Island National Park in Canada and, according to National Park Service officials, Wind Cave National Park. But the purity and historic content of genes from Yellowstone bison, their rich diversity that would benefit herds that lack those genes, make the park’s bison highly sought. But Montana officials don’t seem interested in seeing Yellowstone bison leave the park and cross their state to Fort Peck. They worry for the well-being of their livestock, even though there have been no documented cases of bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle. The problem, Robbie Magnan told me, is that Montana officials are “basically anti-buffalo.” The cattle industry’s grip on the state’s livestock and wildlife interests is too strong. He’s convinced that Montana officials “don’t want to see buffalo on the landscape. And they use brucellosis as a scapegoat. They make it sound like it’s so contagious it’s almost like yellow fever.”

A National Academies of Science report released early in 2017 supports Magnan’s contention. A genetic mapping of brucellosis in northwestern Wyoming and into Montana traces the disease’s spread to elk, not bison. The scientists found that while there has been no conclusive transmission of brucellosis from bison to cattle in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem since 1998, “direct contact of elk with cattle is more prevalent than contact of cattle with bison. As a result, the risk of transmission from elk to cattle may be increasing.”⁶⁹

“Montana makes me laugh because they make [bison brucellosis] sound so bad,” Magnan told me. “If it was really that bad you would prohibit the movement of elk. But they don’t. [Elk hunting] is such a big industry, they leave it alone.”

The maligning of Yellowstone bison goes further when you consider that Montana does a poor job monitoring cattle in the greater Yellowstone area for brucellosis. Magnan cited an audit into how the state Livestock and Fish, Wildlife and Parks departments oversee the disease. Those studies documented that nearly 40 percent of the cattle shipped from ranches near Yellowstone was not tested for brucellosis. “The state really failed bad on it, but yet they can predict to us that it’s not safe for us to bring buffalo up here,” Magnan said with a sigh.

Perhaps in recognition of the National Academy of Sciences’ report, Montana officials are quick to point out that a two-thousand-pound bison standing in the middle of a road in the middle of the night can be a pretty deadly object. Bison don’t immediately flee from an approaching vehicle like elk or deer. A resulting collision can be deadly for both motorist and bison. Of course, a black Angus bull in the middle of the road can be just as deadly. Another issue is that bison usually go where they want to, and eat what they find. Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit wildlife conservation organization, along with some other conservation groups has created a compensation program for property owners who can prove bison damaged their property, whether it’s a mailbox they pushed over or a field they wallowed in. If landscaping is damaged, gardens rototilled by hungry bison, or trees damaged by an animal looking for a scratching post, these conservation groups would step up with as much as one thousand dollars per landowner to compensate for the damage. It’s one small way to buy some tolerance for free-range bison.