A program that brings buffalo into the lives of Native American students at an elementary school on the Wind River Reservation has doubled attendance and increased reading comprehension. 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.
Alice Posey quickly noticed the benefits when her grandchildren brought home buffalo meat in their school backpacks.
“We know the difference between that processed hamburger and the bison,” Posey (Northern Cheyenne/Shoshone) said. “We could see the difference, and it’s healthier, and we appreciate that.”
Posey’s grandchildren are students at Wyoming Indian Elementary School on the Wind River Reservation, where the Buffalo Youth Nation Project food lodge has distributed 230,000 pounds of food and introduced buffalo curriculum to students, an Indigenous food sovereignty support model credited for transforming the school since it was introduced three years ago.
Reading scores improved. Discipline referrals dropped. Students who struggled to focus in class began helping harvest buffalo, process and make dinner with the animal that once sustained their ancestors. Cheryl Coleman, a behavioral specialist at Wyoming Indian Elementary School, told Native News Online that chronic absenteeism fell from 78% to 34%.
“Everything changed,” said Cheryl Coleman, Wyoming Indian Elementary School behavioral specialist.
There’s plenty of data to show that food-secure kids have higher attendance rates and perform better academically. On the Wind River Reservation, transportation can be a barrier, and grocery stores are scarce. Being able to send kids to school and also stock the fridge can make all the difference. The nutritional benefits are compounded by the cultural health introduced to students when they learn about their role in returning the buffalo.
The Wind River Reservation is in west-central Wyoming and 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.
For the Cheyenne, Wyo.-based Buffalo Youth Nation Project, the food sovereignty work 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 the food lodges is provided by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe.
“It helps me put food on the table for them,” Posey said, describing how the food lodge is now a support service for her four grandchildren.
“A lot of grandmothers are raising their grandchildren, and so many of us don’t have good transportation,” she said. “It’s helped us with our health, and it has with the price of meat nowadays.”
Since the Buffalo Youth Nation Project’s food lodge opened at the school, Coleman said that increased attendance has led to improved academic performance.
“I have a kid who was in the first percentile in reading,” Coleman said. “Today, he earned a pizza party because he’s reading 105 correct words per minute.”
Buffalo Spaghetti
Colman now hears from kids who are proud of the meals they make with buffalo meat they get from the food lodge.
“I have third and fourth graders say, ‘Hey, you know that buffalo meat you gave me? I made spaghetti.’” Coleman said. “Without Buffalo Youth Nation, we would absolutely not have that. We would probably have given up by now, which would be such a loss, because I feel like these kids can change our whole world. They are learning their language and culture better, and they are going to thrive.”
The shift began when the Buffalo Youth Nation Project, a Native-women-led nonprofit, opened a food lodge at the school — the first brick-and-mortar food pantry on the reservation, where food insecurity rates are more than 10 times the national average.
The lodges operate more like a grocery store than a traditional food bank, offering pantry staples, fresh produce and buffalo meat without the stigma associated with emergency food assistance. Organizers say the buffalo are meant to provide both sustenance and connection.
“As Native people, when you’re taken off your land, when you’re displaced, when you don’t eat the foods of your ancestors, there’s the starvation of your cells, of your DNA,” Buffalo Youth Nation Project Founder Lisa Ansell Frazier (Cheyenne River Sioux) told Native News Online. “When you begin to connect again with those foods, healing takes place. It’s cellular, it’s spiritual, and it’s undeniable.”
Before the program arrived, Coleman said school staff spent much of their time trying to meet students’ basic needs in a region where temperatures regularly reach minus 40 degrees in winter.
Teachers spent their own money to buy shoes, jackets and supplies. They collected leftovers from the cafeteria and extra bagged lunches from field trips. Some days, Coleman called every food pantry in the county to see what they could offer.
“We just struggled all day, every day, to meet the needs of the students,” Coleman told Native News Online. “I saw so many of the behaviors, attendance, academic challenges, going back to food insecurity.”
Seven Generations After the Great Buffalo Slaughter
Food and agricultural policies make it difficult for the food lodge to rely on outside sources, Frazier said. The Buffalo Youth Nation Project is working to build a self-sustaining system with its own farm where it grows traditional foods — such as squash, hidalgo beans — and its own buffalo herd — as well as sourcing from Native farmers and ranchers.
“Food sovereignty means also nurturing and growing the traditional foods our ancestors thrived on,” she said. “Going back to the buffalo, our relationship with them has proved to be healing and abundant. We buffalo people are an abundant people, we are remembering this with the Tatanka oyate’s help.”
It has been seven generations since the time of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Great American Buffalo Slaughter and the highest population decline of Native people.
“It takes five to seven generations to work through that trauma,” Frazier said. “So we’re in the make-it-or-break-it stage right now. We’ve got to put as much as we can into healing right now, and it’s working.”
She speaks of a creation story in which the buffalo and humans promised to care for each other.
“The buffalo remember our contract that we had to take care of each other,” Frazier said. “We came from the ground, and we were scared, and we didn’t want to go up into the world. The buffalo came over and peeked his head down the hole and said, ‘Hey, it’s OK. I’ll take care of you. I got your back. Don’t worry.’ That is our agreement.”
IN PART 2 The Buffalo Youth Nation Project demonstrates to students the buffalo harvest ceremony that leads to the food they take home to their families.
