For years, meals at the summer sun dance ceremonies on the lands of the Wyoming Eastern Shoshone tribe lacked something that was once a staple of sacred rituals.
There was no presence of homegrown bison, an animal central to the spiritual customs and beliefs of the Shoshone and other Native Americans.
Now, meals at the annual ceremonies, which just started this summer, will feature buffalo meat harvested from the tribe’s own land for the first time in 138 years. The multi-day sacred ritual consists of dancing, fasting and praying, often in a sweat lodge made of natural materials.
“It’s in our DNA to have that animal around us again,” said Jason Baldes, 44, a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe who manages his herd of bison on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. “It’s like bringing home your long-lost relative.”
Indigenous tribes in the United States and Canada have been rebuilding their bison herds for decades, thanks in part to transfers from government agencies and non-profit organizations, and have made rapid progress in recent years.
The bison offers conservation benefits for the complex grassland ecosystems where the animals once played a crucial ecological role.
And on tribal lands, their recovery is part of a reckoning with a dark history: bison were once nearly eliminated from the continent as part of campaigns to suppress indigenous tribes that depended on the animals for food, shelter and spiritual practices, including the sun dance. . .
In the United States, “Congress was encouraged to take out the buffalo to put Indians on reservations, starve us into submission, and then take our land,” Mr. Baldes said, using the term for the animal that he prefers.
“That’s really what happened,” he added, “so the recovery of buffalo back to our tribes and communities and reserves is part of our healing.”
Before European colonization, North America had an estimated 30 to 60 million bison, one of two subspecies of the American bison. They once supported a huge range of other species, including migratory birds that feed on the insects that thrive in bison dung.
But a massive bison slaughter began in the late 18th century and moved west across the United States and into Canada, according to “The Ecological Buffalo,” a recent book by Wes Olson, a former warden in Canada’s national park system. By the late 1880s, only about 281 bison remained, including 23 in Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming.
Colossal herds of bison won’t be roaming North America again any time soon. Today, only about 420,000 remain in commercial herds, and another 20,000 or so in so-called conservation herds that have never raised livestock, unlike commercial herds, according to U.S. government data. The number of protected herds has not declined since 1935, and the U.S. Department of the Interior says bison are functionally extinct on grasslands and within the “human cultures with which they co-evolved.”
But Mr Olson said the rate of conservation bison transfer to Native American tribes has increased in Canada and the United States over the past five years, aided in part by a 2014 cross-border buffalo treaty between some tribes. include others.
In a sign of momentum, the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a consortium of 80 tribes in 20 U.S. states, has turned over about 5,000 bison over the past five years, including more than 2,000 last year, according to Mr. Baldes.
Building the continent’s bison herd is “something to be applauded,” said Daniel Kinka, wildlife restoration manager at American Prairie, a Montana nonprofit that works to restore prairies where the animals can thrive. “And a lot of the credit goes to the indigenous people who are leading the way.”
In the United States, tribes have received bison from government agencies, non-profit organizations, and other tribes. Mr Baldes said a bison conservation order in March from Home Secretary Deb Haaland, including $25 million to help restore native bison, would help promote such efforts.
In some cases, bison meat harvested from Native American lands is sold or donated, such as during the coronavirus pandemic on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation.
For the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, live bison are part of a program that teaches Native youth about the animal, said the organization’s founder, Lucille Contreras of the Lipan Apache Tribe.
Ms. Contreras, 56, said she started the nonprofit in part as a way to address her tribe’s persecution in the 19th century, and as a means for tribes to reconnect with each other.
“We’ve needed this cure in Texas for so many years,” said Ms. Contreras, who also manages 15 donated bison on 77 acres in her tribe’s homeland.
In Oklahoma, the Yuchi Tribe is starting to rebuild its bison herd from scratch this year, thanks to a recent donation from the City of Denver. The hope is that the animals will help restore cultural and spiritual ties between the animal and the tribe that were severed in the 1830s, when the Yuchi people were forcibly relocated to present-day Oklahoma from the southeastern United States. said Richard Grounds, a member of the tribe.
Grounds said the Yuchi identify with the bison’s plight in part because they, too, faced extinction and survived.
“Our people were kicked out, but we brought our ceremonial fires,” he said. “We’ve been singing the buffalo dance song every summer solstice for the past 200 years.”
Sun dances were banned by the United States government in the 19th century, forcing some tribes in the Great Plains to abandon the ritual or practice it in secret. But the government began to reverse its policy in the 1930s, and a 1978 federal law guaranteed tribes the right to practice religious rituals and ceremonies.
Now the recovery of tribal bison is giving the ritual a new lease of life. Mr Baldes said the Eastern Shoshone’s three sun dances on the Wind River Reservation this summer will feature locally harvested bison for the first time since 1885 – a major development for a people known to other Shoshone bands as the “buffalo eaters” .
For the Eastern Shoshone, the ritual is rooted in legend in which a member of the tribe had a vision of bison, said James L. Trosper, 61, who leads one of the summer’s three sun dances. The sweat lodge where the healing ritual takes place also features a buffalo head hanging from its roughly 50-foot (15 m) tall poplar wood center pole, which the tribe believes is a conduit for their creator’s spiritual power.
Mr. Trosper, whose great-grandfather taught him how to run the sun dance, said that when the current buffalo head retires, the Eastern Shoshone people plan to replace it with one from their own country.
“If it were made from a buffalo from here, it would mean so much more to us,” he said. “For me, the power and the medicine would be stronger.”
