Re-Bisoning the West. Kurt Repanshek

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