buffalo restoration on Wind River

In the heart of central Wyoming’s 2.2 million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation, home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribal nations, a dozen buffalo Wild animals lazily graze on the green and yellow grass.

Fog swirls over rock faces, patches of sagebrush meadow begin to resemble bogs, and rain soaks into jackets. But Xavier Michael-Young, 22, a member of Florida’s Seminole tribe, looks at the buffalo, also known as bison, and says he has nowhere he’d rather be.

“The buffalo is the coolest animal ever. They have been my favorite since I was a child. Now, being able to work with them every day is a gift that I am always grateful to have,” said Michael-Young, smiling from ear to ear. “I see myself in all the people who come here and want to get closer to the buffalo.”

Michael-Young is away from home and serves as administrative and financial coordinator for the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative (WRTBI). Like Michael-Young’s inter-tribal partnership with the Wind River Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Nations, WRTBI is part of the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council, a consortium of more than 80 tribes dedicated to herd recovery of bison on tribal lands across the United States. .

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The passion and urgency behind buffalo restoration stems from the animal’s history, its role in American ecosystems, and its cultural significance to Native Americans. Historically, bison numbered more than 60 million, with a range that extended to the Carolinas, northern Mexico, and parts of Canada. Systematic slaughter by European settlers, encouraged by the federal government and used as a means of warfare against the American Indians, reduced the buffalo population to a few hundred by the turn of the 20th century, according to the Smithsonian Institute.

Tribes across the continent traditionally used buffalo parts for everything from clothing to cooking vessels to glue, and they are central to the rituals and ceremonies of the Eastern Shoshone, Northern Arapaho, and many other tribes. Bison meat contains less fat, calories and cholesterol than beef, and its restoration is part of a broader return to indigenous food systems and a move away from processed foods.

Patti Baldes, a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe of the northern Paiute and director of the Wind River Native Advocacy Center, says the importance of bringing back the buffalo cannot be overstated because of the animal’s vital role in food systems and indigenous culture.

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“It is a being present in all our lives since birth. We talk about them, pray to them, with ceremonies and songs, but we never really had them. We got them back in 2016, and it had been about 131 years since any buffalo were recorded in the reserve when they returned,” Baldes said.

Such an ambitious project has a dizzying number of moving parts: installing miles of fencing, negotiating the purchase of land, growing hay, monitoring migration patterns, sourcing buffalo with wild genes (many buffalo remaining were raised with livestock), then transport them. from across the country, grant writing, and more.

The Initiative also focuses on the non-human impacts of bison restoration. Albert Mason, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, is a graduate student at the University of Wyoming and is working with WRTBI to study the ecological benefits of bison restoration on lands impacted by large-scale livestock grazing.

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