Last week, cultural educator Patti Harris-Baldes (Northern Arapaho and Big Pine) introduced herself with humility to the bison on the ground in front of her on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Her greeting extended to the crowd of people surrounding the animal, prepared for them to harvest.
“I’m still trying to be the Arapaho I was meant to be, learning new things like harvesting,” she said. “One thing I always think about that we say in our ceremony back home is, ‘we know what we don’t know.’ And when we think about that term and that saying, you have to participate, you have to meet your prayer halfway.”
Harris-Baldes hosteda women-led bison harvesting team at the Pine Ridge Reservation last week.
Pine Ridge students from several schools took part in the harvest, hosted before Thanksgiving at the Makoce Agriculture Development. The bison was donated by Tanka Fund rancher Ed Iron Cloud with collaboration from the group’s Buffalo to Schools Initiative.
“We created this space for all of our community members here to enjoy, but also as a space that we can reconnect ourselves back to our food, our culture, and our lifeways,” Makoce Ag Development president Nick Hernandez said.
Harris-Baldes’s lesson plan is rooted in principles that promote healthier foods for Native people and greater control over food production through tribal cultural practices.
“Collaborate and build relationships with your peers, your brothers and sisters,” she told the crowd as several women on her team prepared their knives. “To take this animal, he gave his life for us, he is giving us life.”
The bison harvest demonstrated land-based cultural education, community collaboration, intergenerational healing and responsibility, honoring the buffalo through kinship and women-led stewardship.
The partnerships for prominent bison restoration seen in places like Pine Ridge show how tribal, non-profit, agriculture businesses and land stewardship groups can collaborate for greater impact.
In South Dakota, another women-led buffalo harvest was completed last month at the DuBray Buffalo Ranch in Mobridge. There, 15 young Indigenous women participated in the first Young Women’s Buffalo Harvest, sponsored in part by the First Nations’ Native Agriculture and Food Systems Investments program.
“The focus on young women was intentional,” program director Yadira Rivera said. “In many settings, young women are too often left on the sidelines of conversations surrounding our buffalo relatives and land-based practices. At times, they are also overshadowed by more experienced voices and male-dominated roles.”
The event in South Dakota was hosted by Codie Horse-Topetchy (Kiowa, Comanche, and Otoe-Missouria) and Elsie DuBray (Cheyenne River Lakxóta Nation). It’s part of the Native Agriculture Food Systems Investments that include support for direct food access at tribal grocery stores, homes and across agricultural sectors.
“During the buffalo harvest, I noticed the younger women leading the teaching and guiding their older sisters, based on their own experience, access, and familiarity with butchering,” Rivera said.
Back up in North Dakota, Harris-Baldes instructed first-timers to line up behind the women with knives that make up her bison harvest team.
“These ladies come with their knives; these are the buffalo sisters I have here,” she said. “Besides our protocols for our different tribes and things, there isn’t a certain way to do it. I hold my knives differently than (she) does. We all cut in different ways, and being able to connect and find that for yourself is where this connection will happen.”
From there, Harris-Baldes leads from the lessons she learned from her sisters and brothers.
“All these tools and foods and medicines inside of this animal that will help better our lives, and being able to connect to this animal through getting bloody and smelling and learning about all of the parts,” she instructed. “The stomach from the toes, from his nose to his tail.
