The Return of the Buffalo — Ecological and Cultural Restoration
The restoration of bison herds to Indigenous lands across the Great Plains represents the physical embodiment of the teaching that what is lost can be recovered — and that ecological and cultural healing are inseparable.
By 1889, fewer than 1,000 bison remained alive in North America — down from sixty million. Today, through conservation and Indigenous-led restoration efforts, approximately 500,000 bison exist, with numbers growing in Indigenous managed herds. The InterTribal Buffalo Council, founded in 1992, has restored bison to tribal lands across the Great Plains, recognizing that the buffalo's return is simultaneously an ecological, cultural, and spiritual event. The Lakota Tatanka program, the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes National Bison Range, and dozens of other initiatives are healing both the grassland ecosystem and the cultural wound inflicted by the buffalo's near-extermination. The Blackfoot Confederacy's collaboration with Canada to create a 34,000-square-mile Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area that would allow bison to roam the Badger-Two Medicine region represents the most ambitious buffalo restoration effort in history.
When the buffalo return, the people return to themselves.
Ecologist Joel Berger documents in The American Serengeti that the return of bison to grasslands triggers cascading ecological restoration — increased plant diversity, improved water retention, recovery of associated bird and insect species — confirming the ecological centrality of bison to the Great Plains system.
Lakota oral tradition