A program that brings buffalo into the lives of Native American students at an elementary school on the Wind River Reservation has doubled reading comprehension and attendance. It’s just the beginning. This article is part of THE INDIGENOUS FOOD PYRAMID, a series of reporting that examines how Indigenous Food Sovereignty policies impact the overall health of Native Americans.
The return of the buffalo brought students back to classrooms at Wyoming Indian Elementary on the Wind River Reservation, where chronic absenteeism fell from 78% to 34% during the implementation of buffalo food aid and educational programs.
For those students who participate in the Buffalo Youth Nation Project, their recent assignment took them from the field into the kitchen, where they harvested buffalo that will be distributed at their school’s food lodge – the first brick-and-mortar food pantry on the reservation, where food insecurity rates are more than 10 times the national average.
This is the most hands-on experience students can have with the Indigenous food sovereignty program, which school officials credit for connecting traditional land ceremony with classroom success, like improved attendance and reading comprehension.
Patti Harris (Bishop Paiute, Northern Arapaho), the nonprofit’s food lodge coordinator and the executive director of the Wind River Native Advocacy Center, leads the Wind River students in buffalo harvesting ceremonies.
Harris told Native News Online that a buffalo harvest begins with the thought of the harvest. Prayer and ceremony follow, in which the buffalo presents itself to be harvested. The animals are killed with grass in their mouths, and the herd is given time to mourn.
“They all come up and pay their respects. It’s hard to see sometimes,” Harris said. “It’s not about hunting. It’s about taking a life and giving yourself this life.”
The buffalo is then transported for harvest. Students are bused to the harvest location, where they participate in the ceremony: making cuts, cleaning the guts, and removing the bones. Parts of the buffalo are traditionally consumed during the harvest: blood, parts of the heart, kidney, fat, and even vertebrae.
The kids are apprehensive at first, but they quickly get comfortable, Buffalo Youth Nation Project Founder Lisa Ansell Frazier (Cheyenne River Sioux) told Native News Online.
“At first, they’ll touch the buffalo a little, then they’ll get in there, start learning and start eating,” Frazier said.
Lean, rich protein source, almost eliminated
Buffalo meat is a nutritional powerhouse in Indian Country, where diabetes is rampant from the effects of United States termination policies that severed Native American traditional diets from tribes, forcing reliance on ultra-processed commodity foods.
Denyse Ute (Eastern Shoshone), the nutritional director for Buffalo Youth Nation Project, describes buffalo as a lean protein rich in omega-3 fatty acids and lower in saturated fat than beef.
“And for Indigenous people, there is a genetic memory component,” Ute said. “Our DNA is still connected to buffalo.”
That memory isn’t just tied to eating buffalo meat, but to living in synchrony with the animal.
The Wind River Reservation in west-central Wyoming is home to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. Long before the reservation’s borders were drawn, buffalo shaped life across the Plains, providing food, shelter, tools, trade, and spiritual connection. It’s estimated that in the early 1800s, up to 60 million buffalo roamed the U.S.
When white settlers flooded the Plains in the mid-1800s, the U.S. military encouraged buffalo hunting as a means of genocide against Native people, helping drive the species to near extinction and severing a relationship many Native communities considered foundational. By 1900, buffalo had been reduced to fewer than 500. A famous photo from the slaughter shows two men dwarfed by a massive mound made up of thousands of buffalo skulls.
Crow Chief Plenty Coups famously told his biographer in 1928, “[When] the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground.… After this, nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.”
Today, buffalo restoration efforts underway across Indian Country are run with tribes and Native-led organizations rebuilding herds while trying to restore traditional harvesting practices.
In 1992, the Intertribal Buffalo Coalition was formed to formalize and unify Indigenous Food Sovereignty efforts. That group now helps 89 tribes manage 25,000 buffalo across 22 states. Today, there are approximately 500,000 buffalo in the U.S., according to The Nature Conservancy.
For the Cheyenne, Wyo.-based Buffalo Youth Nation Project, buffalo restoration is both cultural and practical.
The non-profit established a 13-member buffalo herd on 200 acres of the Wind River Reservation. The meat provided for school food lodges is provided by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe.
Keeping Culture With Glitter and Glam
Harris sees the buffalo as a means of showing Native youth that being themselves and being Native are not mutually exclusive. For harvests, she wears her fanciest ribbon skirt, full makeup with blue mascara, and sometimes, fake nails, which she says are perfect for pulling out guts.
“I want to be a bridge to what kids think being a traditional or a keeper of culture means, and let them know that you can do it wearing glitter and badass sunglasses,” Harris said. “Buffalo help me connect to my ancestors in a way that isn’t so museum-ish. I want that for these kids, too.”
Harris is married to Jason Baldes, the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative, a nonprofit aiming to restore buffalo as wildlife. For Harris, who grew up with her grandfather’s stories of buffalo, the animals were more akin to a unicorn — a once powerful, abundant creature gone the way of myth.
In 2016, Baldes brought 10 conservation buffalo to Wind River. The night the buffalo were released to the land, Harris crawled on top of the trailer that held them to watch from above. When the thousand-pound animals walked into the darkness, she was left staring at a perfectly formed hoof-print. It had been more than 130 years since buffalo walked the lands.
“I think of that hoof print almost daily,” Harris said. “130 years seems like a long time to us, but it’s only a tiny amount of time considering how long they were here before.”
