Restoring Buffalo to the Dakota Plains::

Cultural Revival

One of the by-products of buffalo restoration has been a restoration of cultural pride and dignity to the Lakota. If the destiny of the buffalo is linked with the destiny of the people, it follows that buffalo today act as a medium through which healing can take place, both on an individual and a tribal level. When the buffalo were wiped out and taken away from the Lakotas' daily experience, the impact on cultural esteem and practices was immense. The physical void left behind also left a cultural void which in turn led to confusion. Though the spiritual connection with the buffalo was maintained through the efforts of spiritual practitioners, it is

"the real, physical presence which pulls it all together and makes it whole. And you can see that happening amongst the individual themselves - it makes them whole, basically. Where they're lacking in something now, they've got something that they're missing, and they can feel good and it brings all that… all those things I talked about: pride, dignity, self-esteem, self-worth. And then they feel like, 'Boy, now I'm whole again, I can go out and I can do these things!' But it just starts them thinking from a whole different perspective, from a cultural standpoint, of their own culture" (1998).

"Because you see those things starting to take place again, and re-shape and form. And then you see the people, the impact it has on them, the things they start to talk about, the things that it brings to the surface, where they start thinking and doing this healing process. And with that comes hope, and with that hope comes all these other things. So it's really exciting" (1998).

The buffalo "gives them something to think about, to hope about, to dream about; something to involve the kids, or the old people; something that they can call their own, again" a Lakota woman exclaimed to me (1998).

The social structure of the Lakota was modeled on the buffalo herd, I was told. The buffalo have their own society and today traditional culture can be regained through observing and modeling the buffalo again:

"When I'm talking about a society, what I mean is there's leaders and there's followers, there's husbands and there's wives, there's grandmas and there's grandpas, there's spiritual leaders and then there's just regular people - all in the bison society. […] By our simple observation, Indians have picked up that how to do ceremonies, from them. And how to treat your family. You go sit on a hill and you watch buffalo and you watch that mother treat her little one, the way she will as a mother. […] Oftentimes I hear people say, 'Oh the buffalo are just like us! Look, the mother's watching the little ones!' That's baloney! We have patterned our societal behaviour after what we observed in theirs" (1998).

This Lakota activist and educator talked about the herds' "social mores" and "social values". He described how the Lakota learned how to look after one another in a specific way through patient and prolonged observation of the buffalo. The winters in the Plains region are severe: the snow and wind mix comes down horizontally and the wind chill factor brings the temperatures well below freezing. During these times, it was observed that the buffalo bulls would face the blizzard head on and form a 'V'. Behind this shelter the cows would form another 'V' and behind this the calves would play. It has also been observed that during rest the bulls often form a circular perimeter around the cows and calves as protection against predators. Such behaviour served as a model for Lakota social behaviour. The key is observation:

"[I] always encourage people, mostly youngsters that I work with, like at the YMCA - I always encourage them: 'If you want to learn to live a good life, if you want to learn how to behave in this world, then do find a good hill top [at the buffalo pasture] and sit and watch.' And I don't mean watch for ten minutes. I don't mean watch for an hour. I mean sit there all day! It might be boring - sounds boring - but sit there and really look! Most people look but they don't see. But they don't understand what real, pure, hardcore observation is really like" (1998).

The reintroduction of buffalo to tribal lands has created the opportunities once again to observe and learn. Some Plains tribes are taking this very seriously: a few years ago the Fort Belknap tribe in Montana made it a mandatory requirement of their substance abuse treatment program to send patients to the buffalo pasture as part of the rehabilitation process. It was required that the patient stay there, in a tipi, and watch the buffalo for a stipulated period of time - usually a week or two. One woman, who was sent there, came away saying that never before had she known how to be a mother until she had watched the way in which a buffalo cow and her calf interacted in the pasture. A buffalo activist remarks:

"[I]n my mind, when we say we're commercialising buffalo or we're making a profit on the buffalo - our terminology doesn't limit profits to being a dollar. Isn't that an accumulated profit to that woman, that she became a better person, specifically a better mother to her own children because she had that experience? Now that's an experience that's so precious that no amount of money could buy that for her. And no amount of money selling all your buffalo in the world will not provide that for your people. Only that intricate, personal, interconnected experience will do that for that woman" (1998).

It was not just social behaviour that was learned from observing and interacting with the buffalo. One woman described the various medicines that were discovered through watching buffalo. She gave me the example of the purple coneflower that is now well-known all over the United States for its curative properties. In the past, the Lakota and other tribes observed that whenever a buffalo was sick it would seek out and ingest a purple coneflower, and thus discovered its healing properties for themselves.

Observation is part of a larger educational process whose focus is buffalo restoration. Tribal schools and youth groups, for example, regularly take students on field trips to the buffalo pastures at Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge reservations. Some schools, such as Takini School in Cherry Creek, on the Cheyenne River reservation, have their own small herds. Though I found little evidence of it in the schools I visited, the aim of those involved in restoration is to integrate buffalo into the school curriculum. The object is to use classes on buffalo as a means of teaching the children how the Lakota structured their social and cultural lives before the reservation period and how they can live in an ecologically-sustainable way today. Such topics could be introduced through studying such things as hunting, ceremony and uses of the different parts of the animal. One participant said:

"[D]evelop the curriculum where you […] study sociology, and you study the sociology of the bison. How these societies treat each other, how they react, and learn from that. The other thing is like in math you can learn many things, like the counting of the buffalo, the scientific documentation of other species there, figuring how much land it takes to do this, how much grams of grass they would need to eat… things like that. That's math! That you can use the bison to teach the children math. Something that might captivate them so they say, 'Yeah, I want to figure that out!' Something of more interest than just numbers on a page. Things like that" (1998).

In such a way, a culturally-collective view of life could be encouraged in children and so encourage their self-esteem and cultural pride.

The InterTribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC) have taken steps towards the integration of buffalo education into tribal schools by developing a 'bison box'. Made of buffalo hide and fur, the box contains traditional Indian items made from buffalo by-products. The box is taken around to different schools and children are allowed to handle the products and ask questions. They learn that a buffalo's bladder was used as a water container, that a horn may have been used as a water dipper or ladle, that the sinew was used as thread. In such a way the children learn the traditional and contemporary importance of the buffalo to the Indian people. The Cooperative is also currently developing an elementary and secondary education curriculum concerning the North American bison and its relation to Indian cultures.

Some tribal colleges have recently developed their own bison management programs which not only seek to teach traditional values, but to integrate these into modern management techniques so that buffalo are maintained and managed in culturally-appropriate ways. The programs at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, on the Pine Ridge reservation, and at the Cheyenne River Community College in Eagle Butte, on the Cheyenne River reservation, are steadily attracting a growing number of Lakota students to their bison management programs. Such programs also focus on prairie reclamation and sustainable technologies.

Tribal colleges have also banded into a coalition whose aim is to establish tribal college bison herds. The first tribal college herd will probably be established on the Standing Rock reservation. The hope is that this particular herd will serve as a resource for scientific research: to study, among other things, their behavioural patterns and their environmental activities and needs.

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