Restoring Buffalo to the Dakota Plains::

Spiritual Revitalisation

The traditional belief in the ancestral relationship between the buffalo and the Lakota is still being expressed in Lakota Country. One participant, for example, described to me the emergence of the buffalo from the spiritual realm and the evolution of the Lakota from the buffalo. The buffalo then became another source of life for the Lakota (other than spiritual) in the form of food. The buffalo sacrificed themselves so that the Lakota could have life: "The buffalo stands for life," he said (1998). Another Oglala man told me that the buffalo were the Lakotas' helpers, helping the people sustain life - "that's one of the reasons why the buffalo is very sacred" (1998). The concept of buffalo as life-giver is a central component to contemporary Lakota thought, and was expressed by one woman as thus:

"The buffalo was our lifeblood - Lakota culture's lifeblood. We are them, they are us. According to our Lakota legend, we used to be the buffalo people. We came out of Wind Cave. […] That's how we were created. We were the buffalo at one time and we came up" (1998).

This spiritual and biological kinship affiliation of the Lakota and buffalo serves, today, as the springboard for all buffalo-Lakota relations and restoration efforts. Restoration enables the individual and the community to have direct, physical access to the powerful animal; to directly experience the life-sustaining, wakan power inherent in the animal again:

"If you go out and you experience these buffaloes, just go out and be around them and be able to watch them and observe them, then you start to begin to understand why they mean so much to Indian people. And the more time you spend with them, the more that becomes apparent. Because they have such a powerful presence, and they're that kind of animal. That sense of power from within them just emanates from them. And you can't help but feel it. […] [The] buffalo being a very powerful part of this part of the environment - that's where that spiritual relationship comes from - that connection, that relationship" (Lakota activist, 1998).

But restoration not only has direct effects of enabling people to experience that wakan connection, but secondary spiritual outcomes too. One woman, an activist, for example, told me that having buffalo physically present on tribal land again has enabled Lakota children to witness and participate in age-old ceremonies associated with the animal, such as a ceremonial kill where the buffalo is killed and butchered in particular ways to provide nutritional and spiritual sustenance to the people. Such participation also allows elders and spiritual leaders to explain the significance of the buffalo to the children and the different uses of parts of the animal if butchering is involved. And it allows the old stories to be told (1998). Just before I arrived in South Dakota in December 1997, Wounded Knee School in Kyle, on the Pine Ridge reservation, had a ceremonial buffalo kill for its students. When I asked an educator there why that had taken place, he said:

"That was just to re-teach the kids. Everybody nowadays, we're so disconnected from our food that we don't understand our proper relationship to food anymore. We don't pray with it, we don't respect it, we... these harvesters... America has a thanksgiving, they call it, once a year - whenever Lakota people plan on something, whenever they did anything, any undertaking that was of any importance, they had a thanksgiving for it when they were done. So it might be to go into battle, or it might be to start a family, it might be to go to college, or it might be to go to Vietnam - some great undertaking, they always had a thanksgiving for that. So whenever we did that our prayer life, our songs are closely related to our food, so the buffalo's an integral part of that, so we want to re-teach that to the kids, teach them the different parts of the... how to butcher the animal and what the uses of it are for, and so we instill that to the kids […]" (1998).

This educator then showed me the architectural design of the school, which was recently completed:

"This school here is in the buffalo shape. This [the Principal's office] is the buffalo head, and then the buffalo's rib-cage goes down the hallway, and it turns and comes back this way, and so metaphorically this school stands for before… the buffalo used to provide everything for us and now education will provide your everything, education will get you a shirt, education will provide your shoes" (1998).

One of the benefits of restoring buffalo to tribal lands is the increase in buffalo by-products that can be used for ceremony. The buffalo skull, for example, still plays an integral role in ritual, especially at the Sundance where dancers may drag as many as five skulls around the arbor from their backs. At virtually every ceremony I attended, the buffalo skull formed the centerpiece at the altar. A spiritual practitioner from the Rosebud reservation, described the contemporary relevance of the ceremonial skull and in so doing, revealed the continuity between past and present practices:

"One of the things that's real important about the buffalo is that in front of the Sweat lodge, or at the Sundance, you see a buffalo skull, and sometimes at a Yuwipi you see a buffalo skull, because we know the buffalo is the guardian of those ceremonies, and so we want its spirit there - so therefore the skull's there so that it's like a house, or a receptacle for that spirit to enter and be physically with us through the course of the ceremony. In that context the buffalo is like an elder brother to us in the ceremonies, or an elder relative. He's physically there. The dimensions basically collapse when you're in a ceremony - so there's no differentiation between the spiritual, physical because now they become one. But the presence now becomes more pronounced. We count on that. Whether you can actually feel it there or not, doesn't really matter, because we count on the truth of that" (1998).

Likewise, the tatanka or pte are still called up in prayer during every ceremony. Several people related to me their ceremonial experiences of the buffalo. A female spiritual practitioner, in her thirties, from Cheyenne River reservation, described the following:

"I remember we were in a ceremony in Denver, Colorado when I was like eleven. And my mother - you could hear the buffalo's paws or hooves on the floor - you could hear them chuk chuk chuk. You could just hear it, you know, and feel all the energy, and something was pushing on her legs, I remember, and she was - I was holding on to her, it was pretty scary because it was all in pitch black - and it kept pushing […] and so she reached down to see what it was, she thought maybe somebody was passing something to her, and she grabbed a horn, and she believes it was a buffalo horn, it was, like it was nudging up against her. […] [A]nd I remember her telling that after and seeing all of the elderly people there and different people nodding their heads. [How did it make you feel?] Just excited! I remember like, "Really?!" I couldn't believe it, but then I knew, I knew, there was somewhere in my heart that I knew that that was all possible. And that's how I grew up, always believing that that was a possibility, that we could see in through all those things, and it was very powerful" (1998).

Buffalo Dreaming societies still exist today and Buffalo Dancers play important roles in the Sundance. One spiritual practitioner I met dances as one at the International Sundance at Green Grass. He told me he is a Buffalo Dancer because he had a vision about it. We talked several times about the wakan power inherent in the buffalo, and once he related a memory he had of his father-in-law, another spiritual practitioner, telling him how important the buffalo is - that whenever a Lakota hunter was out hunting and saw a buffalo he would don a buffalo mask and become like the buffalo inside and out and approach it in this manner. The Buffalo Dancer also carries the power of the buffalo within him when he dances ritually.

At the end of the day, simply having the buffalo present and close by helps the people spiritually - "Just to know that they're there. That they have access to go out to the buffalo pasture and sit there and watch the buffalo. It might help them spiritually", said one woman (1998). She hoped that the return of the buffalo to tribal lands will trigger in the people a return to the ancient ability of inter-species communication. Earlier generations had this ability, she explained, because of the spiritual connection that exists between all things.

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