Bringing Buffalo Home

Jason Baldes: When we witnessed the wildebeest migration, there was something that clicked.

Nathan Connolly: This is Jason Baldes talking about a pivotal moment for him in the late 1990s. He was in east Africa, the Serengeti, and Masai Mara plains. He was witnessing an extraordinary scene, wildebeests migrating in a herd so massive it defied the imagination.

Jason Baldes: I was driving for 80 to 100 miles on dirt roads and as far as you can see in every direction is wildebeests. We counted 30 other species or so. One day we saw 88 hyenas. It was at that moment, sitting there with my dad on the plains and having a conversation about what our own Serengeti had looked like and the realization that what we were seeing was just less than 5% of what the bison was here less than 200 years ago. So that sparked something in me.

Nathan Connolly: Jason is the Buffalo Representative for the Eastern Shoshone tribe at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He’s passionate about bringing bison back to the area where they once roamed.

Jason Baldes: The hope is that we can instill a respect for this animal. We can work on a paradigm shift of how we view these animals. The story of buffalo and Native Americans is very similar in that we’re now on remnants of our once former vast territories. Tribes are now on reservations and buffalo in parks and refuges or on private lands. So you still can’t go to anywhere in public lands and very few tribal lands to see bison managed as wildlife. There’s really a discrepancy in how these animals are treated because there’s 850,000 or so bison in the commercial meat market. Those are genetically manipulated. But there’s only 21,000 bison that exist in conservation populations, meaning they exist as wildlife or under natural-regulating factors.

Jason Baldes: So it’s important that in bison conservation, we’re leading the way towards a paradigm shift that respects these animals as wildlife. We see them all over as logos and emblems and things like that. They’re on our flags. But where do you have to go to see them?

Nathan Connolly: I spoke recently with Jason about what it means to restore and reclaim an animal the Eastern Shoshone considers sacred. I started though by asking him to take us back to the 1880s when a local missionary recorded a staggering change.

Jason Baldes: That particular set of data is from the Shoshone Episcopal missionary by the name of Reverend Roberts who spent 66 years with the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho people. He kept journals documenting the number of bison that were being taken by the tribes at that time. So in 1881, I believe the figure was around 2500 bison were taken for food, for clothing, shelter, et cetera. But by 1885, there were 19 that were taken by the tribes. After that, there were no more available.

Nathan Connolly: All this changed in 2016. That year, building off the work of his father, Jason helped usher in the arrival of 10 bison at Wind River. It was a historic moment.

Jason Baldes: The tribe had never had access to bison for food or for ceremonial purposes. So when that first hoof hit the ground in the middle of the night off of that trailer, that’s really when it hit home that they were back for us, not bison to be managed like cows, not bison that get rounded up and ear-tagged and vaccinated and treated like a cow. We wanted these buffalo to be respected in the way that they should be and that is like the other wildlife species. So this effort is unique in that these buffalo will ultimately be treated differently, and it’s part of that paradigm shift to show what can happen in terms of what buffalo management as wildlife on tribal lands and how that really can trickle over into how we see them on public lands.

Nathan Connolly: Tell me a little bit more about what seeing the bison as tribal animals, as part of the community of the Wind River Reservation, what does that mean for the folks living on that reservation and thinking about their own visions of self-determination?

Jason Baldes: The name for ourselves is Guchundeka. The Shoshone here of the Eastern Shoshone band, we call ourselves the Buffalo Eaters. But again, that buffalo has been gone from us for so long that we’ve forgotten how to live with that animal. We maintain our ceremonies and those types of things, but even those it’s only really legally been able to practice those ceremonies since the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. That’s 40 years ago. So we are still healing from some of these policies and things in the past that have resulted in a lot of this intergenerational trauma that we have in our society, in our culture.

Jason Baldes: So we have to instill a sense of pride. A way to do that has always been through this buffalo. This buffalo is a way to help us heal. It’s a way to help us reconnect. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do through an education program, to harvest the buffalo and bring our elders together with our young people to reinvigorate our languages, to learn how we use those parts of that animal, how we process that hide, and even how we utilize those parts in parts of our ceremonies. These things and cultural revitalization is critical to who we are as Shoshone people or Arapaho people or Blackfeet or Cheyenne.

Nathan Connolly: That means that there must be something special about having bison among the folks living at Wind River as opposed to those who are simply on farms or simply being raised for meat. I mean how would you describe the importance of that difference. I mean again, you mentioned earlier, it’s not about ending necessarily the farm raising of bison, but there is something different about how the Shoshone people are relating to bison.

Jason Baldes: That is part of that healing process. We did harvest two of our buffalo a couple weeks ago and it was for those purposes that I mentioned. It was to send meat to the Shoshone reunion that happened about a week ago in Lawton, Oklahoma. Feeding our people buffalo is probably one of the most important steps to relearning how to use it. It was difficult to harvest those animals because of the hard work that it’s taken to get them here. But it’s also community education. A lot of our own people don’t understand the history of what’s happened to bison, the governmental policies that resulted in their extermination, the contemporary efforts, why that’s important.

Jason Baldes: But we’re also not saying that anybody has to change their livelihood. A lot of people, especially in the cattle industry, feel threatened by bison. We have tribal farmers and ranchers that run cattle. One of the things we’ve always said is that these buffalo are in no way a threat to those cattle or that livelihood. That cow benefits that family or that individual. But these buffalo, they benefit everybody.

Nathan Connolly: For you, it really does begin with thinking about the bison as wildlife.

Jason Baldes: We currently manage six of the seven [inaudible 00:35:55] species as wildlife, including the wolves and bears and other predators. So why is it that bison or buffalo is the only one that we don’t treat like that? A lot of it goes back to the conquering of the West, the notion of Manifest Destiny that the pioneers and settlers out here were on a task to remove Indians and remove buffalo. That made way for these large beef operations, many of which are in existence today.

Jason Baldes: So we’re now in an era of a time when tribes can exercise some sovereignty. We can relearn our languages. We can practice and be who we are as Shoshones or Arapahos or Lakotas in a time like we’ve never been able to before.

Nathan Connolly: Right. The herd at Wind River is now to just over 30 bison. Is there a long-term plan for growing the number of bison? Is it about introducing more population, simply natural reproduction? What’s the idea or the hope at least for how many bison the reservation can actually sustain?

Jason Baldes: The steps that need to take place are of collaboration and more partnership. We have two tribal governments on this reservation, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho, where both nations are buffalo people. If we can look at buffalo as a benefit to all of us on this reservation, then that means expanding the range into tribal land. We want to reach a threshold of 1000 animals. This is for the conservation of the species. The International Union of Conservation and Nature, IUCN, puts out a benchmark of 1000 animals for you to maintain genetic heterogeneity.

Jason Baldes: We would hope that we could expand range to an area that would facilitate the growth of our population to a harvestable level and then in a period of time, think about expanding further past that. This Wind River Reservation has more potential habitat for bison than almost any other reservation in the West. But again, wildlife management is a lot less about managing wildlife as it is about managing people because if you put the animals back in their habitat, they do just fine. It’s the people that you have to worry about.

Nathan Connolly: Is this a partisan issue at all or is this really a matter of … One other activist I spoke to, Nick Estes, described it as settler infighting, in other words that there are folks who are operating in mainstream party politics who are basically wrangling with each other over allocations and apportionments and such. It has less to do with necessarily what the tribe is trying to put forward.

Jason Baldes: That’s correct. Just a couple years ago in Montana, we defeated 13 anti-bison bills and this last legislative session, at least six anti-bison bills. There’s less of that legislation in Wyoming, but there is that infighting to fight those tribes on getting bison back on the landscape as wildlife, not even the tribes. You look at the American Prairie Reserve, and the CMR, the Charles M. Russell efforts to restore bison on large landscapes. They’re met with quite a bit of hostility. People don’t want to see it.

Nathan Connolly: So Jason, give me some sense of what the flavor is of these bills that are opposing the expansion of the bison population.

Jason Baldes: Expanding the bison population has been controversial because, well, you have a population of bison in Yellowstone that in 1902 there was 23. That park grew up essentially around those animals and the population. It kind of came to a head in 1997 where there was a tough winter. Bison were leaving the park in order to seek winter forage. Of course, inside the park bison are iconic species that are just revered. But as those animals stepped outside of that imaginary boundary, they became essentially livestock or a threat to the livestock industry because of the perceived threat of brucellosis.

Jason Baldes: Brucellosis was brought by cattle in the first place and infected the wildlife. And then states like Idaho and Montana and Wyoming established brucellosis-free status so that they could export their beef. Well, that created controversy. When those bison went to leave the park, they were shot. There’s never been a documented case of a bison giving a cow brucellosis in the wild. There is documented cases of elk giving cattle brucellosis. But elk can move freely across that boundary. What is the reasoning there? Well, it’s money. The Jackson elk herd, the sports industry that draws in people to hunt elk is a tremendous economic boost to that economy.

Jason Baldes: If elk were persecuted or treated in the similar way that bison were, that economy could crash or collapse. They don’t receive the same economic benefit from bison.

Nathan Connolly: In 2016, President Barack Obama designated the bison the official mammal of the United States. The story of the bison is a big part of American history obviously and you lay that history out extraordinarily well and compellingly. But what do we miss if we overlook that centrality, if we don’t give the bison their due?

Jason Baldes: I think back a lot about when our reservation was established. In 1863, the Shoshone Reservation was 44 million acres. That was the traditional territory of the Shoshone people. This was before the States were, but it would have been half of Wyoming, northern Colorado, and northern Utah, and eastern Idaho, and majority of Yellowstone. Only five years later in 1868, our reservation was reduced by 42 million acres. So when it comes to federal Indian law and policy, most Americans look at it like here’s the United States that gave these tribes their reservations when, in fact, it’s the other way around.

Jason Baldes: The tribes relinquished parts of the United States in that we would be able to reserve, our reservation, reserve our ways of life in perpetuity. Of course, that didn’t happen. Things like the General Allotment Act opened up reservations for homesteading, then the boarding schools that removed our children. Our spirituality was outlawed. All of these things chipped away at who we were as Native Americans. Now, I think back to what if our reservation was still 44 million acres? Would we have issues with wildland urban interface? No, we wouldn’t. Would we have issues with healthy rivers and streams, overgrazing by livestock?

Jason Baldes: I think about a lot of these things and that we continue to encroach upon these places that our ancestors had set aside for our continued use and occupancy. Those things are even today being diminished. That’s not for just Native Americans. That’s all people, because even our public lands have the potential to be auctioned off. So our democracy is being eroded away. Our access to these public lands, these places, are under threat. Those animals, those birds, those fish, they don’t have a voice. We have to be that voice for them. If we can’t see it that way, if we’re always at the top of the food chain and don’t care about what happens below us, we’re in doom.

Jason Baldes: So I think that we not only need a paradigm shift in terms of how we think about buffalo, but we need a paradigm shift in about how we think about our connection with the natural world.

Nathan Connolly: Jason Baldes is the Eastern Shoshone tribe’s Buffalo Representative. He also works for the National Wildlife Federation’s Tribal Partnerships Program as the Tribal Bison Coordinator.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought about the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 8: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.