The bison circled four times around the holding pen, before the lead
animals took them into the 3,400-hectare (8,500-acre) pasture, their new
home on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of South
Dakota. The thunder of 400 hooves as they crossed through the gate gave
way to the whir of cameras and ululations from the crowd, perhaps 20
people gathered to see the return of the bison. […]
Out in their new pasture, the animals loped
[…].
They seem to fit into the landscape, as if they’d always been there
[…].
It was land […] where
they had been central to the success of the Great Plains’ nations
[…].
“Bringing them home. That’s what it meant,” said Monica Terkildsen, a
member of the Oglala Lakota and WWF’s tribal liaison on the neighboring
Pine Ridge Reservation, who was at the Oct. 30 [2020] release.
[…]
At their peak […] bison grazed North America’s
Great Plains, the region that drapes the center of the continent, from
the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. They were a keystone
species in the vast ecosystem and a foundational food source
[…].
But that was before a concerted campaign, backed by the U.S. government,
to eliminate the bison in the mid- to late 1800s all but succeeded — a
genocidal swipe aimed at […] opening up the West to Euro-American expansion, farming and settlement.
By 1889, only about 1,000 bison remained, many in zoos or privately
owned herds
[…].
But with this return of the buffalo to Rosebud Reservation, home of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, proponents of the Wolakota Buffalo Range project hope to turn back that trend.
[…]
It has signed a 15-year lease for nearly 11,300 hectares (28,000 acres)
of former cattle pasture on the reservation. And in the next five years […] they hope to
grow the herd to 1,500 animals, which would make it the largest owned by a Native nation in the country […].
Other reservations […] including Pine Ridge and Fort Peck Indian
Reservation in the neighboring state of Montana, had begun to bring back
their own herds.
[…] The bison released on the Rosebud pasture in October came from Badlands
National Park in South Dakota and Th*d*re R**sevelt National Park in
North Dakota. […]
True ecosystem engineers, restive with sharp hooves, and weighing a
metric ton (2,200 pounds) or more, bison sculpted the seemingly
featureless prairie into microhabitats that supported countless birds,
mammals and reptiles. Jorgensen said that ornithologists have noted the
superlative bird diversity on Montana’s Fort Belknap Indian reservation,
which has had a herd of bison since the 1970s. The restoration of those
dynamics, beginning with the Wolakota range, is one of the goals of
returning the bison to the landscape. […]
At its core, the aim is to allow the Sicangu Oyate to find their own path
[…].
“I was really happy because to me, it meant that what we … were
communicating with them and they still recognize that communication,
that the teaching we learned from them a long time ago was still
intact,” Terkildsen said. “That, to me, was really amazing.”
[…]
“Let’s not stop with this one,” she added. “Let’s continue as tribal
nations moving forward and restoring bison back onto the lands.”
——-
Headline, images, captions, and text published by: John C. Cannon. “Hope and peace: Bison return to the Rosebud reservation.” Mongabay. 10 December 2020.
