other Plains tribes were given use of the lands by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Seventeen years later, another treaty, also reached at Fort Laramie in southeastern Wyoming, revoked many of the provisions of the earlier treaty. The Bannock communities that resided west of the park routinely traveled through the area to reach hunting grounds to the northeast of Yellowstone. Most of these passages went without incident. But in 1878, a band of Bannock warriors fled through the park, intent on reaching Canada where they would join up with Lakota leader Sitting Bull. During their passage they surprised a surveying team and absconded with some stock and supplies. In early September, a military party that was providing protection for visitors on vacation encountered the warriors to the east of the park and killed eleven. Another thirty-one were captured, along with about two hundred horses and mules. While some Bannock and Shoshone bands still hunted in the southern areas of the park in the mid-1890s, by 1895 the native peoples that had long utilized the landscape now embraced by the park for hunting and gathering had been forced onto reservations.
A century later, many Native Americans are working to renew their connections to the park’s landscape, its flora, and its fauna. They are focused particularly on bison because of the animals’ manifestation of power and strength as well as their spiritual connection to native peoples. That relationship was formally recognized by the InterTribal Bison Council in 2014 through a treaty “of cooperation, renewal and restoration” signed by eight tribes (others have signed on in the ensuing years). One section of the treaty reads:
it is the collective intention of WE, the undersigned NATIONS, to welcome BUFFALO to once again live among us as CREATOR intended by doing everything within our means so WE and BUFFALO will once again live together to nurture each other culturally and spiritually. It is our collective intention to recognize BUFFALO as a wild free-ranging animal and as an important part of the ecological system; to provide a safe space and environment across our historic homelands, on both sides of the United States and the Canadian border, so together WE can have our brother, the BUFFALO, lead us in nurturing our land, plants and other animals to once again realize THE BUFFALO WAYS for our future generations.
The treaty is working in Wyoming, bringing bison back to a landscape that last saw them in 1885. That year marked the last time the Eastern Shoshone were allowed to hunt bison on their land, the Wind River Indian Reservation. Twenty-two years before, in 1863, the federal government had promised the Eastern Shoshone a landscape of 44.6 million acres that touched parts of Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado for their homeland. In 1868, the government greatly reduced that to 2.7 million acres under the second treaty of Fort Bridger. Bison still were prolific on that landscape; in 1881, Shoshone hunters took thousands of bison. But in 1885, just ten were counted on the reservation.
Today, the bison population is going in the opposite direction. Jason Baldes has been working side by side with the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho peoples to place bison on the west-central Wyoming reservation. Growing up as a member of the Eastern Shoshone people, Baldes and his father, Dick, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, spent countless days in the saddle exploring the Wind River Range that towers over the reservation’s western border. After graduating high school, Jason navigated a series of community colleges and universities searching for the right fit for his Native American background. He finally found it at Montana State University, where he obtained both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in land resources and environmental sciences. Driving his interest in that field was a desire to see bison returned to the reservation. It was a thought that burrowed into his mind in 1997 when he and his father traveled to East Africa and witnessed a massive wildebeest migration. The idea wasn’t simply to see bison as part of the reservation’s landscape, but as a cultural, ecological, and nutritional fixture. What he calls “life’s commissary.”68
Baldes worked to develop the draft management plan for bringing bison back to the reservation with the goal of establishing a genetically pure, disease-free herd that would be managed as wildlife under the Shoshone and Arapahoe Tribal Game Code. Working with the National Wildlife Federation and the Eastern Shoshone’s Boy-Zhan Bi-Den (Shoshone for “buffalo return”) effort, Baldes saw the regeneration of a reservation herd in 2016 when ten bison from the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa were freed. Another ten, from the National Bison Range in Montana, arrived in 2017. Both arrivals were momentous occasions, but the 2017 transplant was an afterthought in light of the birth early that year of the first bison calf on the reservation in 130 years. That calf’s arrival was a significant event for the two tribes that have shared the reservation since 1878. Three more calves were born in 2018. The reservation herd is still small, fewer than two dozen animals early in 2019, but the hope is that eventually the Eastern Shoshone will once again be able to rely on bison for both cultural and dietary needs. Though other native cultures with bison also supplement revenues by selling bison meat and robes, Baldes views the animals more holistically, more reverently.
“If we have the cultural appreciation for this buffalo, why would we want to treat it as a monetary commodity?” he told me. “It’s more important than that for me. Of course, economic development is a huge issue and tribes need access to capital, but for me, we have the opportunity to treat buffalo as wildlife with the greatest respect potentially available of any reservation. The cultural benefit for having buffalo and having access to them for sustenance, that’s more important than the monetary gains of marketing the meat.”
With 2.2 million acres on the reservation, acreage in the form of prairie as well as forest and mountains soaring to thirteen thousand feet, the plan is to grow the bison herd to one thousand or more and let it wander across four hundred thousand acres. Baldes would like to see reservation bison return to the nearby Wind River Mountains to the west and even the Owl Creek Mountains to the north. It’s a vision of sustainability, both ecologically as well as for the health of Eastern Shoshone members. The average life expectancy of tribal members is just forty-nine, more than a quarter-century less than that of Wyoming’s general population. Infant mortality, at nearly fifteen out of one thousand births, is more than double of that experienced by white Wyoming residents. As bison meat is higher in protein and lower in cholesterol than beef, making it a mealtime mainstay could help combat type 2 diabetes on the reservation. But there are other problems on the reservation that Baldes believes bison can help cure. High youth suicide rates, high school dropout rates, and unemployment rates.
“We have a lot of social problems that affect us. Buffalo is always seen as a way to help us heal from some of these atrocities of the past,” he told me. “We’re doing everything we can to create opportunities for our young people, who will become our leaders. And so whether it’s language, whether it’s substance abuse, health, we’re doing everything we can socially to improve the lives of people on the reservation. Buffalo are integral to that, because it’s not just an animal to us. It’s kin. Every tribal member knows innately how important this animal was to our ancestors. We likely wouldn’t be here if not for the buffalo, and so it’s central to our ceremonies, the Sun Dance, the sweat ceremonies.”
The same can be said at Fort Peck, where the integration of bison back into daily life involves programs for schoolchildren that connect them with the traditional, as well as modern-day, role of the animals. More than 1,500 children have participated. If state and federal authorities ever approve the quarantine protocol that Yellowstone officials developed and which in early 2018 gained the National Park Service’s final go-ahead to put into operation, more tribes could see bison back on their lands. The Fort Peck quarantine facility, the first in North America operated by a tribal government, could once again be holding bison to complete the infection-monitoring period. Other sources of brucellosis-free bison include Elk Island National Park in Canada and, according to National Park Service officials, Wind Cave National Park. But the purity and historic content of genes from Yellowstone bison, their rich diversity that would benefit herds that lack those genes, make the park’s bison highly sought. But Montana officials don’t seem interested in seeing Yellowstone bison leave the park and cross their state to Fort Peck. They worry for the well-being of their livestock, even though there have been no documented cases of bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle. The problem, Robbie
