White Buffalo Calf Missing? – Lakota Times

YELLOWSTONE, MT — Once every 22.75 years, a white bison calf is born somewhere in North America. That’s just an average. Between 1933 and 1994, there were no known white bison births. Last month, a white bison calf was born in the Montana section of Yellowstone National Park in the Lamar Valley on June 4, the first since 2012. Photos were taken, but the bison has been missing since then, and park officials say it’s most likely dead, since one in five bison are lost within weeks of birth. It’s also possible the bison was abducted, though park officials wouldn’t speculate.

A white bison is not an albino. Albino bison are much more common and are often confused with white bison. A white bison is what biologists call leucistic, because the calf has dark eyes and hooves, only the fur is white, much like the white bison woman was described when she transformed from a beautiful young girl into a bison.

The Lakota held a ceremony earlier this week to celebrate the calf’s birth and named it Wakan Gli. Arvol Looking Horse, keeper of the sacred pipe, said that “Mother Earth is sick and has a fever,” and that the birth of a white buffalo has a dual meaning. It could signify the second coming of the White Buffalo Woman, or Looking Horse said it could be a warning, urging us to do more to protect the Earth.

There were about 500 people at the ceremony, the size of a traditional tiospaye, and other tribes in attendance included the Coleville Tribes of Washington state, the Northern Arapahoe of Wyoming and the Shoshone-Bannock of Idaho.

A long time ago, and it is not known exactly when, the Lakota believe that two young hunters met a beautiful maiden. One of them tried to seduce her, but she turned him into a pile of bones. She returned with the other hunter to the tiospaye, where she transformed herself into a young white buffalo, spoke to them about sacred ceremonies, and promised to return. Since then, and despite all the historical tragedy and trauma, the Lakota have strived to maintain and honor this sacred teaching.

Looking Horse told those gathered at the ceremony: “It’s up to each and every one of you to make this happen for the future of our children. We need to come together and bring back that good energy.”

Park guide Jordan Creech and Erin Braaten are two people who saw the calf at birth and took a picture of it. They were part of a grizzly bear photography tour and not only was their timing perfect to witness the calf’s arrival, but they also had the cameras to take the pictures. Unfortunately, since then, Braaten has been unable to find any sign of the calf.

When the white buffalo arrived in ancient times, the Lakota did not have horses, and to the extent that they hunted buffalo, they did so on foot. It is likely that at this time the Lakota subsisted primarily on agriculture, and that horse-based buffalo hunting did not begin until after they crossed the Missouri into the West River country, over three hundred years ago.

Bison themselves have a much older heritage. They evolved on another continent, in Europe or Asia, and crossed east across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska nearly 200,000 years ago. Since that time, they have evolved many species of bison, including the gigantic Bison latifrons, but all of these sister species have died out, until the only surviving bison is the bison species we know today. Meanwhile, in their native Europe or Asia, bison were not thriving and were reduced to pocket populations in isolated forests or marshes.

Montana limits the number of bison to about 6,000, but local ranchers want to reduce it even further because they say the bison are wandering out of the park and destroying pastures and crops. It is unclear whether the white bison accompanied its mother out of the park, but there is always a slight possibility that the bison is still alive but has escaped detection given the size and harshness of this part of Montana.

(James Giago Davies is a registered member of the OST. Contact him at [email protected])