For the past three decades, the InterTribal Buffalo Council has worked to reconnect Indigenous people with bison, reviving traditions and healing communities.
henever Wayne Frederick watches the American bison roaming around the sprawling South Dakota prairies of the Rosebud Indian Reservation, he sees a piece of himself. The 43-year-old Rosebud Sioux member and tribal council representative was born into the family tradition of bison herd management and has since dedicated nearly 37 years of his life to the hooved beasts.
“In times of question or hardship, I was lucky that I had those animals most of my life to ground me,” Frederick told Civil Eats. “If people were able to see this more often, you’d really respect life a lot more and where we came from.”
His father, Tom Frederick, who once worked as director of the tribe’s Department of Natural Resources and Game, Fish, and Parks, had always dreamed of bringing the buffalo back to Rosebud. It eventually became a reality in 1980, when the U.S. Department of the Interior approved his request to acquire 25 buffalo as surplus property from the Wind Cave National Park’s historic herd in the Southern Black Hills. Forty-two years later, the Rosebud herd has grown to 300 under the department’s watch, and Wayne Frederick had a chance to manage it from 2011 to 2014.
Frederick helped start another small herd with his father in 1999 at the Sinte Gleska University, a tribal public land-grant university located on the reservation, alongside university President Lionel Bordeaux. It began with 13 bison, each symbolizing a traditional moon of their calendar year, that arrived from Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska. By 2001, the herd had increased to 100 buffalo from the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado.
Both tribally owned and operated herds, and others like them, are especially significant, as the beloved buffalo have been brought back from the brink of extinction since the dawn of the 20th century. Historical figures indicate that 30 to 60 million once wandered North America at their peak. But due to the rise of transcontinental railroads, unregulated hide hunting, drought, and the U.S. Army’s eradication of some northern herds, the total population dwindled drastically to only 325 wild buffalo by 1884.
“We see ourselves. They’re a resilient animal, just as we are resilient people,” said Troy Heinert, a Rosebud Sioux member and Democratic minority leader in the South Dakota Senate. “We’ve still been able to maintain our identity, and that is extremely important to us. When you’re handling those animals, they recognize that.”
“There are ceremonies and songs that may not have been performed or sung for decades. But when we bring those buffalo back, that tradition is revived. There’s no greater feeling than that.”
Civil Eats
In November, Heinert, 49, became executive director at the InterTribal Buffalo Council (ITBC), which originated in 1992 as the InterTribal Bison Cooperative. This year, ITBC celebrates three decades of buffalo stewardship after transporting 20,000 animals to 55 tribal herds owned and operated by 76 member Nations. More than half of them were transferred from national parks, wildlife refuges, nature preserves, and private owners through the federal surplus property program—the same process that Frederick utilized in 1980.
The process of repopulating Indian Country has been a healing experience, especially for communities that lost contact with the buffalo for generations.
“There are ceremonies and songs that may not have been performed or sung for decades. But when we bring those buffalo back, that tradition is revived,” Heinert said. “There’s no greater feeling than that.”
The connections that have been built among member tribes are also noteworthy. Each time an eagle feather is tied to the council’s ceremonial staff, it symbolizes the welcoming of a new federally recognized tribe. Heinert says this annual tradition “serves as a reminder that all decisions to be made need to reflect the Nations and people we serve.”
Yet despite this sense of collective triumph, the ITBC and its members still struggle to grow their herds and protect their way of life. As the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers reclassifying the animal and requiring more inspections, some tribal members worry that the shift could inadvertently undercut their autonomy over bison for agricultural and cultural purposes.
Preserving Genetic Stock—in Yellowstone and Beyond
Yellowstone National Park’s revitalized population of more than 5,000 bison are widely considered to be the most sacred since they’re “the last of the free roaming wild buffalo that are genetically as close to the buffalo that provided for our ancestors,” Heinert said.
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