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Where the buffalo roamed: Bill would return herds to ancestral Native American lands
Monday, July 1, 2024
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON, D.C — Buffalo are so iconic, Congress designated them as the national mammal in 2016. Native American oral histories estimate that 30 to 60 million once roamed the plains.
After nearly going extinct, the shaggy beasts are making a comeback and soon, many could find themselves on reservations where their kind hasn’t set hoof in decades.
A bipartisan bill pending in Congress would pay to relocate some of the 20,500 buffalo from public lands across the West and Midwest to reservation lands that were historically part of the animals’ range.
By the early 1900s, fewer than a thousand remained. The latest headcount is roughly 440,000 nationwide, mostly in commercial herds, according to the Interior Department. Over 4,000 wild buffalo live in Yellowstone National Park.
Support for moving some back to their ancestral lands shows signs of growing since the late Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican, proposed it in 2021. The House approved the measure 373-52 in late 2021 but it died in the Senate.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., the only Native American in the Senate, is leading a new push with Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.
The bill would ensure that Native Americans “continue reconnecting with a keystone of their historic culture and way of life,” Mullin said in a press release announcing the measure.
Buffalo are actually a species of bison. The terms are interchangeable in the United States, where French fur trappers began calling them “boeuf” (beef) in the 1600s and the name stuck.
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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