Many partners that wanted to see us succeed and believed in the work that that we were doing.

And because of that, I was able to cross paths with a relative of mine.

Now I call him my brother's name is Jason Valdez.

He's the vice president of Intertribal Buffalo Council.

And in the fall of November 2022, us and our youth and the relatives working with us, we were able to fence off of property that we were on and we restored a piece of our culture for the first time in over 250 years.

One cannot tell the story of bison in this country without telling the tale of the Native Americans.

Buffalo has been a source of livelihood for Native Americans for over 10,000 years.

There are estimations that the bison population in the 17 and 1800s was between 30 and 60 million in the United States.

In the mid 1800s.

The mass destruction of the buffalo began in 1862.

Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Pacific Railway Act authorized the creation of the first Transcontinental Railroad.

Its construction accelerate it and governmentally sanctioned the mass slaughter of this majestic creature, resulting in settlers pushing further into Indian Country.

By the 1880s, fewer than 500 bison remained.

The decimation of the buffalo gave settlers short lived economic prosperity.

Conversely, the Native Americans who relied on bison endured a brutal shock that threaten their way of life, one that would be further endangered by systematic displacement from their ancestral lands.

The story of the buffalo is a history of genocide in displacement.

And yet it is equally a legacy of healing and perseverance.

One cannot tell the story of Buffalo in this country without telling the tale of the Native Americans, a positive and lasting relations What Brian and Donovan and Brian Medicine Fish and the Menominee Nation here, they've been working so hard in the same field and what we did was nothing short of amazing.

A lot of healing because our communities are very similar.

Most reservations are.

And because of that, there's so many challenges that people don't even know what we go through.

It's extremely difficult finding out who we are and being told by our colonizers who we are and not feeling that connection.

And through the buffalo, we've been able to identify that connection.

Because of that.

We're healing Buffalo today is looked at as a buffalo conservation effort but it's indigenous empowerment and our resiliency as a people.

That relationship that we have together, we can continue to exist, you know, and so it's about that and they represent so much strength and they there they're still here.

And for us, we we feel that same way and we get that strength from them to continue our work inside of our community and hope to share it with other communities across Turtle Island, Indian Country.

My name is Brian Waupoose Jr.

Junior, and I'm from the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, and I grew up on a Menominee reservation near what today is Keshena in Wisconsin.

We partnered together in the fall of 2022 in an effort to restore bison or buffalo.

Through our relationship with the Intertribal Buffalo Council and and the chiefs of grasslands and Menominee Indian tribes in Wisconsin, we were able to bring a herd of buffalo to our homelands and start the process of remembering what our relationship was.

The story is is really hard to put in words.

It's more of a spiritual connection and a spiritual movement and an effort to empower self resiliency and our young people in our community.

And the goal was teach them how to enjoy their life on the reservation where we have many challenges poverty and addiction.

You can go on down the line.

And I chose to take off, use a skill that I was able to develop over time, which is was fly fishing.

And it wasn't so much about the fishing, but it was about reconnecting to our ancestral waters and understanding our relationship with creation.

I'm Dr. Elizabeth Bach I'm the research scientist with the Nature Conservancy at the Nature Grasslands Preserve.

When the Nature Conservancy decided to reintroduce bison to the niches of grasslands preserve, we were expecting that the keystone role of the bison would become evident in the ecology.

From the responses of the plants, the animals and other species out on the prairie.

However, something that really surprised us and humbled and enriched us is the realization that these buffalo are a cultural keystone.

They are a critical part of the relationship between many indigenous nations and communities and the lands that they've been forcibly separated from.

Bison were reintroduced to the niches of grasslands preserve in 2014.

Initially, a small herd of about 20 or 30 animals was brought from a couple of different preserves that are also part of the Nature Conservancy network.

We allowed the her to to grow naturally to a size of about 100 adult animals.

We get a group of about 20 or 30 calves every year, and this is where we've wanted to keep the herd.

And so that began us on the journey of transferring animals every year so that the herd size here at niches remained in a good balance with the with the ecosystem.

And that's really where our journey began in learning more about the buffalo as a potential connection.

To to reach out to and build trust and networks with indigenous tribes.

My name is Cody Considine.

I am the stewardship director for the Buffalo Restoration Program.

I also serve as the deputy director for the Nachusa Grasslands.

We learned that the Intertribal Buffalo Council, who is a sovereign organization that represents, I think, today 82 sovereign nations to support buffalo restoration back to their communities.

We learned in 20 late, late 2019, early 2020 about their surplus buffalo program that the intertribal buffalo Council has.

And through that we learned.

That there is a high need for buffalo across Indian country that each year surplus animals from the Department of Interior and places like national Parks and Fish and wildlife refuges.

Those surplus animals weren't meeting the needs of tribes across the country and bringing buffalo back and or those numbers come into the tribes are very inconsistent.

And so upon further conversation, we decided that in 2020 here at Nachusa, we would instead of sell those animals, we would work exclusively with the intertribal Buffalo Council and transfer those animals, you know, to nations through TBC.

Many partners that wanted to see us succeed and believed in the work that that we were doing and because of that, I was able to cross paths with a relative of mine.

Now I call him my brother's name is Jason Valdez.

He's the Vice president of Intertribal Buffalo Council.

And in the fall of November 2022, US, us and our youth and the relatives working with us, we were able to fence off of property that we were on and we restored a piece of our culture for the first time in over 250 years.

This upcoming harvest is on.

I really want to credit my brother for the work that he's doing inside of our community and his goal and vision to ensure that we view Buffalo as a relative and not a livestock or, you know, any kind of way of that takes away from the significance and the cultural significance of that role to.

I'm very thankful for the tribe and their support.

Donovan has done a great job at when you say community harvest it's exactly what are what you would think of when you think of community harvest the soil, what inspires us and keeps us moving.

And we want to do the next impossible thing is the benefits that we are seeing in our youth and the work that we're doing, how it's giving them transferable life skills in a way that helps them navigate their lives as a good human being, instilling purpose in them.

So one of the greatest teachings that I got was from all uncle of mine, he said, A nephew, to have anything in this world, you have to give it first, you know.

And so through that selflessness and sacrifice and giving both your time and energy, it really helps them flower into beautiful human beings and ultimately, that's what feeds our spirit to continue and carry on this work.

Yeah.

Bob Morrissey, professor of history at University of Illinois.

You got to When you start to talk about bison hunting in the eastern prairie region, you have to first of all acknowledge that this is a different kind of bison hunting than what we got to have in our head.

As the typical mode of bison hunting in North American indigenous history.

Most importantly, this is not equestrian bison hunting.

There are no horses, right.

This is before these native groups had access to horses or adopted them in any serious number.

So this is actually pedestrian bison hunting that the Illinois speakers and the other eastern prairie speakers or sorry, the other eastern prairie Indians were conducting here.

The bison hunting was just a big team, a team effort that is large groups of people would go out into the field.

Oftentimes they would use different techniques, like, for instance, if it was the end of the season in the fall, they would set fire to the dried prairie grasses in order to create an obstacle so that the bison couldn't escape.

And then they would form, you know, flanks and they'd start running slowly at first to start to corral that big herd.

And here in the eastern prairie, we're not talking about 10,000 bison in a single herd, but we are talking about a few hundred at times.

And so how do you get those animals efficiently into a space where they can be killed and not only killed, but killed in a place where then they would actually be useful?

Because as you can imagine, you know, killing a 2,000 pound bison bull out in the middle of nowhere, you're not going to be able to do much with that animal.

The tallgrass prairie ecosystem is really dependent on factors often called disturbance, factors like regular fire on the landscape and grazing from large herbivores like bison.

Indigenous people have been using fire on this landscape for centuries, even millennia.

And the talk history co-evolved with that disturbance.

This assemblage of plants and animals that we see here are here because they are happy to tolerate fires with regular intervals.

Similarly, that it's an assemblage of plants and animals that can tolerate grazing either in short term or long term from large animals like bison.

As a result, the management to restore and protect tallgrass prairie habitat relies on replicating and reinstating these ecological factors.

These landscape factors and prescribed fire has always been a really important tool at increasing of grasslands since the beginning of the project in the mid 1980s.

Fire really helps us keep invasive species at bay.

It gets space for native plants and animals that thrive in these habitats.

One of the reasons why an eco tone is important biologically or a transition zone is important biologically is because frequently in those spaces where, say a grassland and a forest come together or a wetland and a grassland come together, there's oftentimes a an uptick in biodiversity that is those those edges are places where ecologists even talk about it as an edge effect.

It's a it's a sharp uptick in in not only diversity, but you might even say in kind of opportunity, right?

So that is a bigger variety of species, oftentimes animal species.

So if you're a hunter, you want to go to that edge location because there's likely going to be some game there.

There's going to be some opportunity.

Over the course of the 1516 hundreds moved east in north America, there was a climate shift that sort of pushed them east as far as the large herds of bison kind of ever went, probably in North American history.

And that created a huge opportunity for people who are already living in this rich, So this rich ecological zone with, you know, wetlands and and forests of different types and grasslands of of different types.

And once the bison arrived, now they had even more opportunity.

A lot of us who live in the state of Illinois don't much remember that because the landscape has been so radically transformed and so much of the reality of what made this place so special in those days, especially that diversity and that that broad biome scale transition between the grasslands and the woodlands with bison as such a key component of that that ecological transition zone, that's all been erased.

It's all been disappeared by, you know, the amazing transformation that settler agriculture represents in the Midwest.

The change of colonization, the ways that things came in to our ancestral lands kind of forced the buffalo, we would say is peshkiw forced them more, more west.

And so today, when you when you think about buffalo or bison, they aren't really think that they were in the state of Wisconsin.

You know and so even our word peshkiw it added to our community some of our language speakers that they identify it is is is a cow.

And so you could tell that the confusion of how we were translating our relationship to that relative, that's the battle that that that we're facing right now is is trying to help shift that.

Whole persona of where I'm going.

My name is Donovan Waupoose.

I'm from the Menominee Indian Reservation in Keshena, Wisconsin.

And and I'm our Buffalo caretaker and visionary of our Buffalo project, the Menominee Buffalo Initiative was created and just in its self in the title the Menominee Buffalo you know so that it is showing to our people that it's it's their buffalo and so how our efforts are at the Menominee Buffalo initiative is trying to let them be as free as possible that we can let them be without telling them how to be, without telling them where to go, without telling them how to how to be buffalo.

You know, we want to let them be able to roam free and is as best as possible.

Yes, we have to have exterior fencing just because of what we live in the time that we are in today.

But, you know, trying to let them live free is going to help with their emotional balance, with their mental balance, with their spiritual, letting them roam free is a goal of ours that we want to see for them.

Because to me, I look at them.

And is there a relation, you know, to to my own life?

We are like, you know, just like them.

We were diminished in size, just like them.

We were put in these invisible fences called reservations.

Our Menominee Buffalo Initiative is striving to revive, revitalize and awaken our indigenous DNA inside that has been putting to sleep by a colonization.

We are awaken those things and you can see it here during a community harvest.

And so we were very fortunate enough to have made relationships with the to the to use the grasslands.

Those those members there at TNC.

You know, I can't explain enough or share exact words in detail of my love and my appreciation I have for them, you know, to to take part in the buffalo, a buffalo hunt that our people long ago have done.

It was very beautiful.

And we appreciate them and thank them for for giving us that experience.

Cody Considine, he's the one that got us together.

He was at a presentation that me and my wife did, and it's it's so relieving to know that there are communities like here in Menominee that they are striving for the same thing.

The Nachusa, the Nature Conservancy is a very special relationship because a lot of communities need this, they need support, they need help.

And in order to do that, we have to have access to these things that we were taken away from and organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Tucson, I can tell that they're they're a flagship, that people are looking at what they're doing.

And even up here in Menominee with the medicine fish community here, they're really working hard to figure this out.

And that relationship has been one of the utmost it's it's is the keystone that we need in order to figure things out together.

The only way we're going to figure out in this world that we need to work together.

You know, growing up, I've always been curious what it means to be a man, what it means to be a man in my community, we grew up with mainstream society.

That mainstream society tells us that men need to be strong, they need to be tough, they need to be hard.

What we're finding out that's not even true.

And what we got to do is we got to show our young men that it's okay to be gentle.

It's okay, okay to take well, take care of one another.

And what I witnessed are this young men watching us be vulnerable because of that.

They're going to go forward seeing that men are capable of love and capable of taking care of one another.

If I never seen that growing up, the.

Way that we use this as a tool to encourage our young people to enjoy their life on on the reservation, I think the the systems that are in place today prevent us from doing things that relate to us the most as Indian people.

And so they're through medicine.

First, their approach was to use all of creation to help us in our in our understanding, our reconnection to our relationship to the land.

And now we decided to work with the youth inside of our community because the youth are to a way to ensure that the future can can change, you know.

And so, you know, we we started off just taking kids camping and trying to catch a few fish.

And you fast forward two and a half years later, we we restored buffalo and are moving into the areas of conservation in a holistic way that empowers our community towards conservation and earth coherence.

Pleasure fishing played a big part of my life.

You're helping me.

And now, once I think we're going to be here barely a year later, restoring the buffalo to our land.

And I thank Jason for for helping us out and giving us this opportunity to take take part in the way the Buffaloes are.

On my beautiful reservation.

Chief, Oshkosh was the last one to form a buffalo ceremony.

He had the last one to have a headpiece.

That's pretty cool to learn about, because around here we really know that buffalo over here, you know, we always thought it was like a Yellowstone kind of thing.

I personally never thought the fly fishing would turn into, you know, all that's going on with the buffalo and everything, like, like this feast that we're having Monday.

It's it's pretty amazing to think that a fly fishing group helped restore the buffalo in a community.

The is hurting and needs them so that's my thoughts on it.

Medicine fish really has impacted my life a lot and it really helped me through some tough times that I was going through.

So it just it really helped me a lot and I really appreciate it for it.

Since then, it's been a huge impact on my life and your from that day.

I'm right.

I mean, help me.

And this, like my brother is next to me too.

So I'm an ecologist.

I was trained in a very Western science approach and I came into this job very much thinking about these ecological interactions and how the bison shaped plant and animal communities.

And over the past five years that I've worked here at niches of grasslands, the bison as a cultural keystone species has really been a wonderful surprise, perhaps an embarrassing that it is.

It was a surprise.

But these buffalo mean so much to the indigenous habitats of Illinois.

And I it's it's part of the numerous ways that colonialism separated indigenous peoples from their homelands, from their way of life and from their cultures.

So ever since the process of, you know, the restoration of of Buffalo, I've been on a learning journey myself, my brother and I and you know, my other brother that had helped begin this work and rediscovering our Menominee relationship ceremonial practices and dances and songs that have been gone for for so long.

We we have we've had early European contact in the state of Wisconsin, a sharing of information so that our worlds can understand each other from the indigenous perspective and the non-Indian perspective that we can have some sort of synergy in this effort to protect and preserve what we have left and help heal.

Mother Earth