This piece was originally posted on Deceleration, a nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis responding to our shared ecological, political, and cultural crises.
This ‘keystone species’ can play a role in healing broken relationships—with nature and between people.
Throughout North America, buffalo have traditionally played a major role in not only ecosystems but also in cultural systems or lifeways. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that among the eight resolutions put forth at the 12th World Wilderness Congress (WILD12)—the first hosted by a tribal authority—one focused on buffalo as both a biological keystone and a cultural touchstone.
The week-long congress, held this week in the Black Hills of South Dakota, or Hé Sapa in Lakota, has maintained a broad focus on centering Indigenous peoples, their knowledge systems and lifeways, in land restoration work. Resolution 2, “Through the Eyes of Buffalo: A Strategic Platform to Restore All Natural World Relationships,” crystallizes a single example of this notion exceptionally well.
Noting that “Indigenous-led conservation and regeneration are critical to meeting the challenges of biodiversity and climate crises and healing relational fault lines,” the resolution posits that “[b]y embracing and supporting Indigenous-led bison conservation, we can restore our relationship with nature and each other, drawing on the wisdom of the past, present forces, and a bold vision for a just and equitable future.”
The document then details specific steps and calls for collaboration between governments, tribal councils, and the public at large to achieve “one million wild bison on 100 million acres by 2050 and to further expand their numbers and range during the last half of the century.”
The resolution further explains this focus on buffalo, stating that “[b]uffalo can help us define and elevate an entirely new, Indigenous-led model to guide the next era of North American conservation.”
A National Parks Service employee talks about the ranging buffalo at Wild Cave National Park in the Black Hills on Wednesday. Photo: Greg Harman.
The logic behind this claim is twofold. On the one hand, buffalo, as a keystone species, are known to have strong positive effects on the ecosystems they inhabit, from encouraging species diversity through their grazing patterns to increasing nitrogen content in the soil with their urine. On the other hand, foregrounding Indigenous stewardship of the land and animals can help us, socially and structurally, build pathways, relationships, and mindsets that open up new opportunities for holistic solutions to our ecological problems.
Bigger than Buffalo
Deceleration spoke with William Snow (Goodstoney Nakoda / Yuma Quechan), acting director of consulting for Stoney Tribal Administration in Alberta, Canada, and Tatewin Means (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, Oglala Lakota and Inhanktonwan), executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation in South Dakota. Both of them worked on the resolution in various capacities, on the basis of their involvement in leading buffalo restoration efforts.
Explaining some of the deeper epistemological distinctions between Indigenous and Western conservation paradigms, Snow said:
“One of the differences is that in a [Western] scientific view, knowledge is site-specific and broken into distinct categories. But in traditional knowledge, in the holistic view, we look at all the interactions without breaking things down into isolation.”
In a way that is tough to achieve within the confines of our language, given its grounding in the Western conceptual dualism of nature/culture, Snow suggests that separating bison, the natural world, and humans in our approach reflects the mindset that has led to the very problems we look to solve.
In Stoney Lakota tradition, Snow explained, bison are “a living example of giving back more than you take.” This approach, learning from nature as opposed to dictating hierarchical arrangements to it, is often missing even in the most well-intentioned Western conservationist circles.
Tatewin Means, executive director of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation
Means, for her part, sees the need for a mindset shift as dire.
“As a human race, if we don’t start to think in this way and create this broader movement, then we won’t survive,” she said.
“Indigenous people see animals that people call ‘wild’ or ‘wilderness’ as relatives,” she explained, noting that she is not sure how to even feel about terms like “wild” and “wilderness,” words that, to people “that were called savages” by colonizers, now feel “almost like an accusation: this needs to be tamed or controlled.”
“If you see this animal like your grandma, how would you treat it versus just something in the wild?” she asked.
In a WILD12 talk on Tuesday, Chance Weston, Food Sovereignty Director with Thunder Valley, perfectly framed the dichotomy between colonial and Indigenous understandings of the land in land conservation with two simple questions:
“Are we asking the land or are we commanding it? Are we working with it like a relative?”
Most Western notions of food sovereignty and environmental justice simply cannot accommodate this kind of holistic, animistic, gratitude-grounded, and collaborative perspective. This is why Indigenous leadership is crucial.
The biggest hurdle to larger, continental restoration projects like the ones called for by Resolution 2 is, in Means’ estimation, Western property law, rooted in colonial understandings of land as a commodity or thing to be owned.
“Those systems can’t exist if we are going to be here in seven generations,” she said, arguing that instead we must “put forward an alternative system of governance” centered on restoring reciprocal relational balance to the Earth in a truly holistic sense.
“People just have to get comfortable getting behind and uplifting Indigenous-led efforts,” she said.
When the buffalo return, the community returns
Meanwhile, in central Texas, more than 1,000 miles away from Hé Sapa, the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project (TTBP) is finding out first hand the power of centering buffalo.
Founded in 2021 by Lucille Contreras, the TTBP has established and grown a regenerative herd of buffalo and, with it, a community centered on a return to the buffalo ways. As one of the easternmost and southernmost bands of Plains Apache peoples, the Lipan Apache (of which Contreras is a member) have had a long and deeply significant relationship to the buffalo, as have other regional Indigenous groups.
Lucille Contreras, Founder and CEO of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project
Contreras spent years away from her Texas homeland learning about buffalo caretaking from the Lakota in Porcupine, South Dakota, and she wanted to take the experience back home to fellow Texas Indigenous lineal descendants “because they have been so disconnected from each other as relatives and from the land as a relative and from the buffalo as a relative.”
In 2021, shortly after moving onto her 77 acres outside of Waelder, Texas, purchased with a USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Loan, Contreras hosted a ceremony for all Lipan Apache descendants from Texas and beyond. She was floored when 150 people showed up, some from as far as California.
“What it showed me,” she says of her first attempt to bring the people to the buffalo and thereby to each other, “is the hunger that our people have to reconnect with each other in a way that is equitable.”
Since then, her herd, which started with nine buffalo, has grown to around 20, and her organization has continued hosting ceremonial events, leading youth programs focused on land stewardship and bison culture, and educating about the benefits of buffalo on the land and as a food source.
One of the most compelling new projects from TTBP is a regenerative agriculture curriculum that also teaches the history of Texas Indigenous lineal descendants. Such programs can start teaching a more holistic view of humans in the natural world to students before they have been entirely corrupted by the colonial, short-sighted views that are often reinforced in schools—whose first and often most enduring lesson is that Indigenous peoples and their lifeways are a thing of the past.
It is Contreras’s hope that through this project she can continue to bring buffalo back to the land they once so abundantly inhabited and, by doing so, to bring Lipan Apache and other Texas Indigenous lineal descendants back into communion with their relatives—human and otherwise.
