The Buffalo Hunt

June 10, 2016 8:12 PM

The American bison once faced extinction – now they’re being culled. Native American photographer Joe Whittle attends a hunt held by tribal members

Montana’s Off-the-Grid Bison Scavengers - Buffalo Bridge
The Gleaners (Deslided)

Frequently Asked Questions: Bison Management
Why are wild buffalo inhabiting Yellowstone National Park being slaughtered?

posted by the man of twists and turns (10 comments total)

Buffalo, which once numbered in the 10s of millions in North America, were hunted to near extinction, less than 1000, in the 1800s.

Thanks to breeding efforts with captive Buffalo (including in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where buffalo can still be seen), the species was brought back and now there are 100s of thousands throughout North America.
posted by eye of newt at 12:39 AM on June 11, 2016

Where did all those bison go? These pictures might provide some clues...
posted by Harald74 at 1:15 AM on June 11, 2016

One of the main reasons buffalo were slaughtered en masse was to bring Indian nations to their knees and it worked. The book Empire Of The Summer Moon talks about this (excellent book about the Comanche nation, if you haven't read it I highly recommend it.) The buffalo herds were so numerous that the tribes on the Plains were almost never put of sight of buffalo. That's kind of mind boggling to me when you consider how rare it is to see them in the wild now.
posted by azpenguin at 4:06 AM on June 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'd seen photos of the Tribal hunts before and know people who have gone on the hunts, and there is a bigger story about how those hunts are just one component of a pattern of asserting and restoring treaty rights that is going on across the region. The buffalo hunt is culturally important and is taken very seriously, even though the actual number of buffalo hunted is low.

But the Buffalo Bridge thing is new to me, and kind of a strange phenomenon. I wonder if, as tribes in the northwest become more powerful politically as well as more prosperous, having whites hanging on and scavenging around the edges of tribal communities will become an actual thing, or if the symbolism of the buffalo is what is driving this.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:23 AM on June 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I completely fail to understand that buffalo bridge thing. So, they're white folks that hang around the native American hunt? Because why?
posted by wilful at 5:44 AM on June 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

In his book "1491", Charles C. Mann suggests that the enormous buffalo herds of the great plains were the result of the Native American practice of burning off thousands of acres of ground cover to permit farming or hunting. He and others have pointed out that buffalo herds of that size would not exist in a naturally regulated environment, and are, in fact, totally a result of pre-Columbian human intervention. The same, it is said, goes for those huge flocks of passenger pigeons that we used to embrace as a symbol of reigning nature. Bizarrely large flocks of birds like that are also a signal of an ecosystem thrown out of whack by human activity. Here is "1491" boiled down to a good article in The Atlantic.
posted by Modest House at 6:17 AM on June 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

So, they're white folks that hang around the native American hunt? Because why?

Because buffalo meat is a very desirous thing and non-tribal members have little opportunity to hunt them.
Likewise, when PBS put on the reality show in Montana - Frontier House - they knew that actual settlers would have suplimented their diet with hunting. Since current laws would not allow this, they arranged for a deer to be supplied by a local tribe member (who does not need to follow state laws).
I live a half mile from a traditional fishing area, fishing platforms are still erected to allow fishing by natives. If I go to the right parking lot at the right time, I can buy some of those fish out of a cooler in a car (it's legal).
posted by 445supermag at 6:19 AM on June 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

James F. Cooper in one of his novels notes that the Indians would kill the buffalo and eat and use all of it for their needs, but that the white man would kill and eat only the top part, a part that was tastier than the rest, and thus, as in fishing (using dynamite) was bringing about a potential environmental disaster. He was an early writer thus in noting how we were destroying Nature. I have wondered if the purposeful killing of the buffalo, by whites, as noted in a comment above, was another form of genocide, as starvation in the Nazi controlled ghettos, surely was.
posted by Postroad at 9:59 AM on June 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

He was an early writer thus in noting how we were destroying Nature.

Of course as noted above, "Nature" usually boils down to "What the previously human altered environment looked like."
posted by happyroach at 11:04 AM on June 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

This is a 99% invisible episode called "wild ones" that has an neat part about bison extinction.

It's kind of a prose-y sort of performance over some live music. It's very pretty, and the part about the museum curator and the american buffalo has always stuck with me.
posted by euphoria066 at 1:00 PM on June 12, 2016