American Bison - Buffalo Field Campaign

nomadic “Plains Indian Culture” observed by European explorers
and missionaries at first contact (Duke 1991; Wedel 1959).
Native North Americans, during, and even after the Plains
Woodland tradition, lived in larger more permanent villages. They
depended on maize, bean, and gourd horticulture to name some
of the most important domesticates, with winter dependence
on deer and seasonal movements in the fall and spring to take
advantage of migrating bison herds (Wilson 1987). This pattern is
well represented ethnographically in the Middle Missouri Region.
Groups like the Siouxan-speaking Mandan and Hidatsa, and the
Caddoan-speaking Pawnee and Arikara, with the Wichita and
others, were scattered along major Prairie rivers and tributaries
like the Loup, Lower Loup, Canadian, and Washita, as far south
as Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma (Weltfish 1965). Large kill
events, such as those represented at the Head-Smashed-In site
in Alberta, generally did not occur until very late in the history
of bison hunting on the Plains, and are represented from the
Late Archaic and later periods (Byerly et al. 2005). The shift in
hunting strategies may have been a response to increasing herd
sizes, introduction of bow and arrow, and/or changes in social
organisation (Driver 1990; Reeves 1990; Walde 2006).
With increased resolution and clarity afforded by ethnohistoric
and ethnographic investigations, human-bison interactions
among historic native peoples are better described and
documented than for the late Pleistocene and Holocene.
Bison continued to be the preferred game for many native
North American cultures, especially on the Great Plains and
Prairies, providing food, clothing, shelter, and tools (Geist 1996;
Roe 1970). Sustained by bison and plant resources, many
native groups likely affected densities of other large herbivore
species (Kay et al. 2000; Martin and Szuter 1999). In addition
to significant ecological relationships, the bison was a central
element in oral tradition, rituals, dances, and ceremonies of
native peoples of the Plains (Wissler 1927), and it remains
symbolically important in the cultural traditions of many native
Tribes to this day.
The arrival of Europeans in North America, after 1492,
resulted in significant changes in human-bison interactions,
and changed the fabric of Native American life forever.
Introduced diseases such as smallpox decimated indigenous
human populations (Crosby 1986), and altered subsistence,
settlement, demography, and social organisation for many
different groups. Bison hunting by native people was seasonal
in nature. Bison were incorporated into a broad spectrum of
plant and animal procurement activities (Holder 1970; Isenberg
2000). Bison provided the economic basis for stable, resilient
land use regimes and social systems. However, effects of
Native American warfare and raiding during the historic period
disrupted and destabilised these land use and social systems.
The spread of horses into Great Plains aboriginal economies by
the 1750s, and increasing commoditisation of bison products
caused by the emergence of a European commercial market
for wildlife products by the 1820s, contributed to the near
extinction of the bison (Flores 1994; Isenberg 2000:27). Native
peoples traded bison hides for Euro-american commodities, with
the market in bison robes reaching a peak in the 1840s. Hide
hunters began to significantly participate in the market hunting of
plains bison in the 1850s, and by the 1890s had decimated the
herds. Even bones were cleaned for sale to the eastern fertilizer
market, an activity that continued to 1906 (Dary 1974).
Numerous native North American tribes manage bison on native
and tribal lands, but cultural, social and spiritual relationships
with this animal are changing. For many Native Americans
there is still a strong spiritual and symbolic connection, but
for others it is the potential commercial value of bison that
is most important. For still others, it is the pragmatic use of
bison for food, and the relationship between local control over
food production and land, food security, tribal sovereignty,
and decreasing reliance on outside sources for food and
commodities that is emerging as a topic of concern, and a
theme underlying tribal decision-making.
It is not just the relationship between Native Americans and
bison that is changing, but the role of bison in the overall
North American food system is changing as well. The North
American perspective is shifting from the view that bison are
an artifact from the past to be viewed as such in parks and
preserves, to one that sees bison as a dynamic component
of the American diet. Along with a new vision for a healthy
ecological and genetic future for the American bison, food
system researchers, food system enthusiasts, and the
biomedical research community envision a new role for bison in
the American diet. This role elevates the animal to priority over
industrially raised beef and pork, and secures for it a place as
the healthy alternative to a fatty, sugar-based diet that already
has significant health impacts in terms of increased rates of
cardiovascular disease, colorectal and other forms of cancer,
and diabetes. Free-range bison meat is higher in omega-3 fatty
acids than are grain-fed animals, perhaps even as high as wild
salmon and other cold water fish species, and it is also high
in conjugated linoleic acid, a fat-blocker and anti-carcinogen
with the potential to reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, and
obesity. The extent to which bison can be produced efficiently
and in healthy ways that do not further degrade ecosystems
and ecosystem services, and marketed as a healthy food at
an affordable price, will perhaps be the tipping points for how
important bison become in a future American food system.
Whether Native American or not, cultural values, attitudes, and
perspectives are reflected in how we think about, manage, and
handle animals in the wild, in commercial production systems,
and after butchering and processing through marketing. Bison
are perhaps unique in that we manage them both as wildlife and
American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010 11