Out on the windswept grass of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, without the safety of a fence, or a truck or a weapon, the buffalo amble close. Close enough that you can witness their tangled fur, a soft mess of spiny hairs thick enough to withstand South Dakota’s coldest blizzards. Close enough to observe their wild, beady eyes, the drips of snot rolling down oversize nostrils, muscular bodies twitching with a startle. Herd manager Tom Fast Wolf keeps a safe, respectful distance. He remembers the time the truck door snapped right off its hinges with the impact of an angry bull, a fellow worker almost losing an eyeball when a hoof nicked his face. Or the time he walked away from his truck to roll out a barrel of hay, and turned to see a large young bull following him. “I got nervous,” he recalled, staring out at the miles of prairie with a grin. There are other things that make Fast Wolf uneasy. He grew up just a couple of miles from here as an Oglala Lakota, and manages one of the few buffalo herds on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — a 2 million-acre plot of land in the Northern Great Plains in southwestern South Dakota. It has not been without a fight. It is expensive. Controversial. And the herd faces the same earthly hardships every generation has faced — fire, drought, blizzards, floods. Fast Wolf thinks of all the work it has taken to begin to restore the American bison to this land, how important it is to reconnect his fellow tribal members with the animal that once sustained them, and that can do so again to help them heal from historical traumas, eat healthier and continue their cultural traditions. And all of that is at risk if another extreme drought settles in to western South Dakota.Get the Story:
Restoring buffalo and resisting drought on the Pine Ridge reservation (Al Jazeera 3/21) Related Stories:
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