But the work of restoring this magnificent and iconic animal is unfinished. The ceaseless slaughter of millions of bison in the late 1900s coincided with the unremitting subjugation of Native people, who were confined to reservations as they were simultaneously cut off from the animal they had relied on for more than 10,000 years: for food, clothing, shelter and spiritual sustenance. This was a double tragedy in the nation’s history––for the American Indians and the American buffalo.

Led by the InterTribal Buffalo Council––and in cooperation with a number of nonprofit groups, zoos and federal agencies––reservations across the country are now reestablishing bison herds of their own. The goal is ambitious: to not only heal a sacred connection that was severed more than a hundred years ago, but also rehabilitate the prairie ecosystem and improve tribal food security. Already, 82 tribes are managing more than 20,000 bison, and earlier in 2023 Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a plan to devote $25 million toward returning more buffalo to their ancestral lands.

Yellowstone, as it should be, will be crucial to the task ahead. Its herd now exceeds the park’s carrying capacity in some years, and officials would like to increase the buffalo transfers to reservations eager to welcome them back and demonstrate that, as Haaland said, “the bison are still here, and the Indigenous people are still here.”

The program faces some political headwinds and challenging logistics, but the late writer and historian Wallace Stegner left us all with words of hope worth remembering. “Sometimes we have withheld our power to destroy, and have left a threatened species like the buffalo, a threatened beauty spot like Yosemite or Yellowstone, scrupulously alone,” he said. “We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.”

Top photo: Bison in the Lamar Valley, Yellowstone. Photo by Craig Mellish

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