Buffalo Restoration: "One of the Greatest Conservation Stories"

The American bison, commonly known as the American buffalo, or simply buffalo in the United States, is one of two extant species of buffalo, along with the European bison, according to the Encyclopedia of Life, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. (Photo from Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative)

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Plains tribes initiated a transformational movement to re-introduce the near-threatened wild buffalo to the American West so that the keystone species can restore the land and regain its place in the center of the lives of native peoples.

The first step has been acquiring the buffalo and, the second, acquiring the land for the herbivores to graze and roam free. It has been a long and uphill job, which has required people from varied backgrounds to listen to and understand each other's point of view. It has required patience and the building of trust.

Buffalo restoration can be reconciliation.

To native tribes, the buffalo is "our relative, the one we learn from, the one who cares for us". To cattle ranchers, buffalo instilled a fear of carrying sickness to their livestock. And, managers of national parks, which often encompass sacred lands, as well as leaders of non-profit conservation groups have had to shift a deeply embedded paradigm of the meaning of protection.

"Tribal Buffalo restoration is about healing the land and healing ourselves," according to Healing With Buffalo, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. "They are here again for our nutrition, ceremony and tradition."

The first free-roaming buffalo to be unleashed onto the North American prairie by a sovereign tribal government was in June 2023. The herd of nearly 50 "disappeared single file into timber a mile to our west. Last we saw them, they were heading toward Glacier National Park (in Montana)", according to How We Heal (Fall 2023), National Parks Conservation Association.

"I can't hardly describe the feeling that I have. I have this jittery feeling, goosebumps," said Ervin Carlson, director of the Blackfeet Nation Buffalo Program, according to At long last, the American buffalo has come home, National Geographic (July 7, 2023).

"It just feels so good to see them here finally in this place they want to be."

Buffalo once defined what it meant to be home.

For Blackfeet and Plains other tribes, buffalo imbued every aspect of life, materially and spiritually. The meat provided their most plentiful food, hides were material for lodges, bones were used for utensils and dried bladders became water vessels, according to How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land (March 24, 2024), Huffington.

For the past three decades, the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a coalition of 86 tribes in 22 states, has engaged in the movement to restore the animals, according to its website. In 2024, more than a dozen communities welcomed more than 540 buffalo back to ancestral grazing land through the initiative of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, the buffalo-management nonprofit Tanka Fund, The Nature Conservancy and other organizations, according to The Nature Conservancy (August 20, 2025).

Since 2020, such collaboration has facilitated the return of more than 2,300 buffalo from The Nature Conservancy's reserves in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma to tribal free-roaming land.

"Many people spent many years carefully planning the bison release. Wildlife biologists and Blackfeet elders. National Park Service managers and tribal traditionalists. There were constant meetings, countless and complex details."

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Leaders of the Blackfeet Nation at the buffalo release at Ninnaastukoo (Chief Mountain), near Glacier National Park, Montana (Photo by Hunter D'Antuono/Flathead Beacon)

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For years, before introducing the buffalo to free-ranging land, the InterTribal Buffalo Council shepherded about 25,000 wild bison to more than 65 herds on tribal land, according to How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land.

The number accounts for more than half of conservation bison left in North America, making native peoples the most important guardians of wild buffalo genetics. Their work is regarded as one of the greatest conservation stories of all time.

Ervin Carlson, director of the Blackfeet Nation Buffalo Program as well as president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, said to World Wildlife Magazine (Winter 2024):

"In our history, we've lost a lot of things -- our land, our language, our autonomy. The buffalo were hunted to near extinction. To us, buffalo represent our spirit. They remind us of how we once lived free, in harmony with nature. So much of our history and our culture have been taken from us. So, over the years, it's become my passion to help bring back some of what's been missing."

Much Tribal Land Used for Cattle

Reservations lack the land base which the mammals need because of a legacy of federal policies that have stolen tribal holdings for a century and a half. Much of the tribal land is managed to raise beef cattle, according to How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land.

Buffalo are huge herbivores. An adult male weighs 460 to 990 kilograms (1,014 to 2,183 pounds), and an adult female weighs 360 to 540 kilograms (794 to 1,091 pounds), according to the Encyclopedia of Life, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

They need land for free roaming. But even before that, wild buffalo needed approval for transfer between tribes. There was work ahead.

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Ranchers in Montana, for example, feared that brucellosis in buffalo would spread to their cattle. Brucellosis is a bacterial disease, which induces abortions in cattle, elk and bison, according to Yellowstone National Park, National Park Service.

"While brucellosis has not had a substantial effect on wildlife populations, it poses a financial risk to ranchers because it could reduce the reproductive rate and marketability of their livestock. Billions of dollars have been spent to eradicate brucellosis from cattle in this country.

"There have been no documented cases of bison transmitting brucellosis directly to cattle."

Cattle brought brucellosis to the Yellowstone area, which is primarily in Wyoming but also Montana and Idaho, in the early 1900s and transmitted it to the wildlife populations.

Montana spent years trying to kill the wild buffalo campaign legally.

"In June 2013, the Montana Supreme Court dismissed the final challenge to the transfer of buffalo between tribes, according to the documentary, The Buffalo People (2014). Still, the struggle was not over.

The 2013 Montana legislature introduced multiple bills designated to shut down the wild buffalo programs initiated by the tribes. A rally was held in the state capital to oppose the bills. It was an opportunity to educate the public. After an 18-month delay, the Fort Belknap tribes were allowed to obtain their buffalo."

The bison at Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which is home to Assinboine and Gros Ventre tribes, had been tested regularly for seven years and certified as brucellosis-free. Nevertheless, the state of Montana, required the tribes to round up the buffalo and test them again before transfer to Fort Belknap. The buffalo were hauled to a testing facility a few miles from the testing site.

All tested negative.

Some of the bison were returned to the Fort Peck reservation. Thirty-four were trucked to their new home at Fort Belknap.

"There is a fear of disease that could pass from bison to cattle. Although it's never happened, it's genetically possible," Jonathan Proctor, of Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group founded in 1947, said in the documentary, The Return (2012).

Because of fear, more than 3,000 bison had been killed trying to leave the borders of Yellowstone National Park. Things are changing now.

Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative

Currently, the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, in Wyoming, has about 163 buffalo, according to How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land (March 24, 2024), Huffington.

"Buffalo are a keystone species -- ecosystem engineers. They're the best land managers if you allow them to do it," said Jason Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone buffalo manager and vice president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council.

Baldes' father, Dick, was a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, employed to steward wild lands on the reservation, where he was a tribal member.

"Most of the tribal wilderness area remained not surveyed and poorly managed by the time Dick Baldes took his position: his predecessor's main contribution was dumping rainbow and cutthroat trout into several backcountry glacial lakes, destroying a golden trout fishery in the process.

"Baldes' father started bringing him along on backcountry work trips when he was a young child. Living out of horse camps for up to a month at a time, Jason Baldes learned to hunt, fish and identify wild plants around the same time he learned how to read.

"He felt the absence of buffalo from an early age. On hunting and fishing trips into the Owl Creek mountains on the reservation's northern border, Dick Baldes pointed out the depressions left by wallowing bison before their extirpation in the 1880s. Occasionally, they found buffalo skulls or bones in the washouts."

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Young Blackfeet re-enacting a buffalo jump, where the animals were chased off a cliff for a big harvest (Photo by Carolina Ramirez)

"Our ceremonial belief systems aren't possible without the Buffalo present. We have to ensure our young people are grounded again in Buffalo. It's part of our self-identity," according to Healing With Buffalo, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative.

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When Baldes was 18, he and his father traveled together to the Serengeti in Tanzania, where they witnessed the start of the wildebeest migration. Jason panned around in circles, filming the tens of thousands of animals with a mounted video camera.

"That was pretty incredible. But more unfathomable to me was that it was less than 5 percent of the buffalo that were here less than 200 years ago. When I returned home, I had a newfound appreciation for buffalo, for my home, for my community, where I'm from. And I thought if I were to focus my education on this, it might open some doors for buffalo restoration."

When he returned home, the InterTribal Buffalo Initiative, which had been founded in 1992, had gained steam in 1997, when Montana officials slaughtered hundreds of buffalo outside Yellowstone National Park, the restoration movement's most important source population.

Baldes systematically is buying up private land which the Wind River Tribal Buffalo lost more than a century ago, with the goal of making it tribal land. The sole condition is that the parcels are designated as wildlife habitat for buffalo. He is using money from the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, a non-profit organization he founded in 2024.

From 45 Million to 2.2 Million Acres

The reservation is a tiny fraction of its former self, carved up by the same processes which left the overwhelming majority of tribal holdings "checkboarded" with private lands held by outsiders, according to How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land.

The Eastern Shoshone's original reservation, set out in the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1863, spanned nearly 45 million acres (18,210,854 hectares) across an expanse, which included parts of today's Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.

Five years later, the second Fort Bridger Treaty shrank the reservation to 2.75 million acres (1,112,886 million hectares) and moved it to its current location along the Wind River Valley in Wyoming.

In 1874, the tribe lost another third of that land with the Brunot Cession, which gave the southern part of the reservation to white settlers who discovered gold there. Four years later, the U.S. Army brought the Northern Arapaho, historic enemies of the Eastern Shoshone, onto Wind River Indian Reservation as a temporary arrangement. Today, the two tribes still share the reservation.

In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, imposing a land-tenure system called allotment. Modeled on the Homestead Act, the law doled out plots of 160 acres (65 hectares) for farmers and double that for ranchers from tribal land. After exhausting the supply of tribal allottees, the law opened up tribal land to white homesteaders. Many allottees would go on to sell their holdings under duress, turning them into privatized "fee lands". The nationwide tribal land base dwindled by about two-thirds due to allotment.

Compared to 45 million acres (18,210,854 hectares) of the original reservation in 1863, the Wind River Indian Reservation now contains 2.2 million acres (890,308 hectares), according to An Introduction to the Wind River Indian Reservation, History, Jackson Hole.

Baldes' Land Strategy

Baldes' land nonprofit emerged out of a years-old strategy. Seven years ago, Eastern Shoshone buffalo pastures were allowed to mushroom from a 300-acre (121-hectare) pen to more than 2,000 acres (809 hectares) today, according to How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land (March 24, 2024), Huffington.

"This summer (2024), Baldes scored his biggest win yet, when the reservation's two business councils jointly voted to retire a 17,000-acre (6,880 hectare) tract of tribal land from cattle grazing and turn it into wildlife habitat for bison."

Once fenced, the new land will join the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho's wild buffalo herds for the first time, placing the Wind River Indian Reservation's buffalo enclosure among the largest on tribal land.

"Our goal is the same as Jason's: Get as much land as possible for our buffalo," said Dennis O'Neill, who manages the Northern Arapaho tribe's buffalo enclosure.

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Buffalo Chase in Winter, Indians on Snowshoes (1832-1833) by George Caitlin (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.)

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Buffalo Meat

Baldes has been managing the reservation's buffalo herd since 2016. However, it was only in August 2023 that the annual sun dance ritual of several days would include buffalo meat, the first time in 139 years. The Eastern Shoshone's untranslated name, Gweechoondeka, means buffalo eaters.

When a buffalo is killed, none of its parts go to waste. Baldes left its esophagus and pair of lungs on the land as a gift to the coyotes.

"The meat, leaner than beef with a healthier balance of omega-3 fatty acids, promises to help assuage the high rates of diabetes which have plagued Wind River since the introduction of processed foods."

in 2016, the Blackfeet Nation implemented an agricultural resource management plan, the first in the nation to be built around cultural practices, and with the greater goal of establishing food sovereignty and tribal self-determination, reported The Guardian (October 23, 2025).

Through various programs, the Blackfeet have been studying ways to pair western science with traditional beliefs and practices to examine how ancestral knowledge could offer solutions.

Back at Wind River, reacquiring the land makes a healthier diet possible, reported How a Dream to Bring Back Wild Buffalo Is Slowly Decolonizing Tribal Land.

"Doing so at zero cost to cash-strapped tribal governments with a minimum of political conflict in a region dominated by cattle ranching is pretty much unheard of, but Baldes has managed to do just that. Some neighbors, eager to help, are waiting to sell their properties until the nonprofit can come up with the money."

"'We're not in a giant rush," said neighbor George Hellyer. 'We really don't want to be in the middle of something that's actually working.'"

Baldes is only getting started, rearranging the tangle of private and tribal land.

"I want to see thousands of buffalo and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of acres protected for wildlife. What we do here on the reservation could set precedent for what buffalo restoration can look like."

How has the return of the buffalo affected him?

"I really had to dig deep in my own healing. Buffalo and the return of ceremony in my community has been the foundation for my healing. Finding purpose in life that is about compassion and empathy," Baldes said in Healing With Buffalo, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative.

Keystone Species

A keystone species is a species of plant or animal which produces a major impact on its ecosystem and is considered essential to maintaining optimum ecosystem health.

Many plant and animal species in Wind River and the North American high plains depend on Buffalo for survival, according to North American Buffalo, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. The Buffalo hold them together -- providing fertilizer, spreading native seeds, aerating soil with their hooves, and creating habitat for other small animals. Buffalo wallows (compacted depressions in the ground created by Buffalo rolling on their backs) also hold rainwater during heavy downpours, where plants and insects can thrive.

Species which rely on the Buffalo include magpies; long-billed curlew; prairie dogs; pronghorn Antelope; mountain plover; burrowing owl; ferruginous hawks; cowbird, and many more.

According to We're just getting started': from Alberta to Montana, Blackfeet guardians hope to bring back the buffalo jump, The Narwhal (December 5, 2024):

"When birds line their nests with tufts of buffalo fur, their hatchlings have a higher likelihood of making it out of the nest alive. Ground squirrels use their fur for their nests as well. Buffalo wallows -- picture an unusually tall and narrow Honda Fit (or Jazz minivan) rolling in the mud -- create moist habitats which are preferred by insects and amphibians like frogs and salamanders.

"The trails buffalo make through the landscape are used by other species, including humans, because of their efficiency in connecting points of land through difficult terrain. Species richness as a whole has been found to increase after buffalo are reintroduced. For these reasons and countless more, buffalo are considered a 'keystone species', one whose presence -- or absence -- fundamentally alters the entire ecosystem of the prairies."

Bring Them Home

Lily Gladstone, executive director of the documentary, Bring Them Home (2024), was raised on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana. She received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who survived the Osage Indian murders, in the film, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). In a video interview, she said to Huffpost:

"This has been our home for millennia. For almost that entire time, we've lived with and alongside buffalo, who we call iinnii. But more than a century ago, both of us were the targets of genocide. Iinnii are really at the center of everything for us, and we live in the center of them.

"Our lodges are made of iinnii. So, buffalo, I would say, is ancestral wisdom that almost every Plains Indian kid, not just Blackfeet, hears at some point growing up. We are buffalo people. And a lot of times, when we're facing hardship, one teaching that we're given, one bit of comfort that we're given in hard times is to be like buffalo in that buffalo face a blizzard.

"Buffalo are one of the only animals that can calve in the dead of winter. When a storm is coming, buffalo don't just tip over. They face it. They turn into it head on. When it's blowing the hardest, they face it head on. And then, they break the snow, and they get through it. They keep moving. So, it's one thing that we're taught, and I believe that that worldview has, in a lot of ways, worked its way into the very fabric of our identity. It has been the thing that has kept us going through these generations of very concerted, very systematic efforts to eradicate American Indian communities, to eradicate our tribal nations."

Kelby Vera, Senior Huffpost reporter interjected:

"The film lays out something that I don't think non-natives are so aware of, that the extermination of buffalo was a deliberate tool of genocide. It wasn't a consequence of expansion."

Lily Gladstone responded:

"Any empirical sort of campaign has been led by divide and conquer. That includes dividing,

not just people from themselves, their culture. And for us, in our case, dividing us from buffalo."

Millions of Native Americans and Buffalo

As colonizers moved west, millions of buffalo were killed and brought to the brink of extinction. Millions more native peoples were murdered, displaced and forced to assimilate, reported At long last, the American buffalo Has Come Home, National Geographic (July 7, 2023).

When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000, according to Holocaust Museum, Houston.

Native Americans were subjected to many different forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying the community. In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease. There were several wars, and violence was encouraged; for example, European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed. In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern United States to Oklahoma. In the 20th century, civil rights violations were common, and discrimination continues to this day.

By the end of the 19th century, only 300 buffalo were left in the wild, reported Smithsonian Magazine (July 17, 2012) and native populations dropped to fewer than 300,000, according to Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present, David Michael Smith, University of Houston-Downtown.

Honoring the Buffalo

In 2016, the American bison became the United States' first national mammal, according to the National Park Service.

"After four years of outreach to Congress and the White House by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the InterTribal Buffalo Council, National Bison Association and 60-plus Vote Bison Coalition members, the National Bison Legacy Act was signed on May 9, 2016, officially making the bison our national mammal. This historic event represents a true comeback story, embedded with history, culture and conservation.

"To honor such an iconic and resilient species, Congress passed the National Bison Legacy Act on April 28, 2016, making the bison a U.S. symbol of unity, resilience, and healthy landscapes and communities."

Reconciliation and Renaissance

Carter Roberts, president of World Wildlife Fund in the United States, asked Ervin Carlson, president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council and director of the Blackfeet Nation Buffalo Program, about the importance of trust among partners in the restoration movement in World Wildlife Magazine (Winter 2024):

"When you were talking to our staff earlier, you said something about how to move from distrust to trust."

"Distrust has, unfortunately, been a big part of our history, especially with the U.S. government. So many things were taken from us -- land, health, education, sovereignty, livelihoods, traditions. A lot of treaties were never honored.

"Sometimes, I can feel right away who wants to work with us in a good way, and who is just there for themselves so they can say, 'Well, here I am doing these good things.' You have to have that trust to make things work. If there's no trust, it just won't work. Sometimes you have to build that trust, but it takes a long time. So, to have it right from the beginning is a good thing."

"Was the trust there from the beginning in our work together?"

"I have to be real honest. Maybe not at the beginning, at least not with everyone. But there's people within your organization who have learned, people I feel that trust with now. I'm always going to be leery of things at first. But I feel more comfortable today than I did yesterday."

"We're a work in progress toward a shared cause."

"I will tell you, I felt that trust from the beginning with you."

"I felt the same way. There are people, when you meet them, who don't say anything except what they think and what they feel. And that's how you are. It's important for your voice to be heard. Not for me to tell people what you said, but for you to say it yourself."

"Thank you. We want to tell our own story. That's the way it should be."

Restoring native species to their native habitats is rare indeed, let alone restoring sacred animals to sacred lands, according to How We Heal (Fall 2023), National Parks Conservation Association.

"In this age of extinction, the currents of 'progress' flow strongly in one direction. But Ninnaastukoo (Chief Mountain) is an exception to the rule. The Blackfeet iinniiwa release is that rarest of gifts -- a two-way tide that carries us into the future while simultaneously returning what was lost in the past, laying the groundwork for both reconciliation and renaissance."