Wild Bison and The Buffalo People: Reimagining “The Heart of Everything That Is”

Abstract

Passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years, oral histories told by Plains Indian peoples—Lakota, Dakota, Arapaho, Arikara, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and many other tribes—account for how the animals, people, plants, and natural forces of the world came to be. As expressions of a cultural stream of ancestral memory, oral histories are interwoven with a people’s sacred ceremonies, dances, and songs, affirming their cultural significance. The Lakota speak of The Buffalo People, sacred beings who live below the surface of the earth and became the four-legged, shaggy-haired creatures we know today as tatanka, the buffalo, or wild bison. Hunted and slaughtered to near extinction by the end of the nineteenth century, wild bison continue to endure, yet their existence as wildlife remains in peril, confined to a landscape we know today as Yellowstone National Park.

This dissertation guides the reader on an exploration that moves beyond the public policy debate about the presence of wild bison to the spoken-word narratives of the Plains Indian peoples and the significance of the buffalo with respect to their lifeways and ceremonies. It continues on to examine the historical narratives taught by Euro-Americans and the Western Christian heritage in which these narratives are rooted, which leads to the ultimate questions of concern with regard to humanity’s relationship with the natural world. It finds a basis for hope in the vast body of wisdom rooted in Western Christian heritage that supports a paradigm shift in the fundamental realities on which Western culture has been constructed over the most recent centuries, a shift that moves from a critical assessment of contemporary materialistic and rationalistic modes of thinking toward a more comprehensive recognition of the inherent value of the natural world and all sentient beings. The buffalo are people too, it is said, but what can that actually mean?