How a Bacterial Disease and Ranching Politics Are Complicating the Return of Wild Bison – By Lina Tran (Slate) / Nov 25, 2022
This story was originally published by Grist and has been republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You can subscribe to Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
Five miles doesn’t seem far on the vast, windblown plains of the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. There’s a high point on the dirt road leading to Danny Barcus’ ranch on the east side of the reservation, tucked within the Two Medicine River valley. When Barcus drives up there, as he did one morning in May, he can see about that far in any direction, the peaks of Glacier National Park rising in the distance.
That’s how Barcus, a member of the Blackfeet Nation himself, spotted the buffalo—nearly 200 by his estimate—where they weren’t supposed to be that spring day, their chocolate-brown humps peppering one of his grass-green wheat fields. He called his dogs, hopped in his off-road vehicle, and sped over. The buffalo had crashed through his barbed wire fence and were nibbling on the winter wheat he was growing for his cattle. Over the last year, a punishing drought had settled over the plains, and Barcus had begun to feel helpless, worrying over bills he wasn’t sure he could pay. “My savings account is the grass I saved last year,” he said. “I can’t afford to feed it to the neighbor’s buffalo.”
In this case, Barcus’ neighbor is the Blackfeet Nation, which keeps buffalo on the pasture it owns next to his property for part of the year. The Blackfeet herd is one of many across the continent, part of a growing movement to return buffalo, once nearly extinct, to tribal lands. For many Plains tribes like the Blackfeet, buffalo used to be the foundation of diet, commerce, and spiritual life. Bringing them back represents an effort to reconnect with that heritage and, in doing so, restore endangered grasslands. But managing the wild, ever-roaming animals is complicated by the fact that the land is now criss-crossed with contemporary borders between states, national parks, and reservations.
CONTINUE > https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/bison-buffalo-restoration-yellowstone-montana-ranchers.html
