again roam this corner of the Black Hills, the Pe’ Sla grasslands.64 But obtaining bison and renewing traditions are not always easily done, even now in the twenty-first century. Sometimes there is a will, but not a way to success. Sometimes the way that seems obvious is blocked.
The Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeastern Montana is home to the Assiniboine and Sioux peoples. Its rolling prairie straddles parts of four counties, and with more than two million acres, it is the ninth-largest reservation in the country. The Missouri River traces the southern boundary of the reservation before drifting off into North Dakota. Looking at a geographic map of the reservation, it’s not hard to see the outline of a bison created by drainages that feed into the Missouri. Though located nearly 425 miles from Yellowstone, the reservation stands ready as an incubator of sorts for bison that many groups are seeking. But, unfortunately, a series of hoops must be jumped through to obtain park bison. First, the park service needs to quarantine surplus Yellowstone bison for up to five years, on average, and test them regularly for brucellosis. If the animals are still disease free after that period, they can, in theory, be shipped to Fort Peck, where the reservation has a five-hundred-thousand-dollar quarantine facility of its own. Once bison arrive there, they must be held for another year in quarantine. The long quarantine periods are necessary because the disease can lie latent. Bison that pass through those hoops can be released onto the reservation’s bison pastures or, in theory, shipped to other destinations. That protocol works. It’s been tested. More than sixty Yellowstone bison initially were sent through the quarantine process that started in 2012. All came through without testing positive for brucellosis. And yet, Montana officials have been hesitant to approve an ongoing bison transfer program. Reservation staff are ready. They’ve developed a memorandum of understanding with Montana and federal officials to routinely test any bison they would get from Yellowstone for brucellosis. They’ve written the procedures for capturing any park bison that escape from the roughly fifty thousand acres the Assiniboine and Sioux have set aside for bison.
Montana’s political and legislative roadblocks frustrate Robbie Magnan, a barrel-chested army veteran who has grown the reservation’s bison herds to some seven hundred animals since 2000. He is not one to mince his words.
“Everyone else we talked to is on the same page, with the exception of Montana,” he replies when asked if he was optimistic the quarantine protocol would be approved. “We jumped through every hoop they wanted us to go through, and yet they create more and more.”
Federal officials seemed to add another hoop late in 2018 when they offered to send five Yellowstone bison to the reservation. The catch? They wanted reservation officials to sign off on a memorandum of understanding that they would put the animals through only the last of three steps of quarantine monitoring. Lawyers for the reservation feared that the MOU forever would be an impediment to having the quarantine facility approved to handle all phases of quarantine. The impasse might be viewed as a 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
