“A land of ice and snow, where Buffalo roam freely on the plains.“
This quote from an old American school book was the description used to describe the Canadian prairie.
Even though the text overlooked so much about what our prairie was – at the time, it was historically accurate.
At least 30 million “Buffalo,” or what we more accurately today call Bison, used to “roam” the North American prairies.
If all these bison were lined up, they would’ve circled the globe, plus some.
The strange thing is that given their numbers and importance to our history, we don’t recognize bison as a national or provincial animal.
At one point, bison were so abundant and vital that they defined Alberta’s culture even more than oil and gas do today. So what happened?
A Rich People
Before settlers’ arrival on the prairies, Indigenous peoples used Bison for everything. Tools were made from their bones, dwellings and clothing came from their hides, and their meat was the basis of plains nations’ diets.
The ease with which they could hunt the bountiful beasts allowed for more leisure time, giving people more time to pursue artistic, social, and spiritual interests. Essentially, the presence of the bison made these First Nations people rich.
Anthropologists say their living standards and lifespans were comparable to contemporary Europeans.
For about 5,500 years, Indigenous people used buffalo jumps like Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, located just west of Fort Macleod, to harvest bison.
The cliff is 36 feet high, and the Blackfoot would drive the buffalo from the Porcupine Hills, three kilometres away, towards the jump in a path lined by hundreds of rock cairns and with hunters dressed as wolves and coyotes directing the bison to the cliff. The stampede of bison would run over the cliff’s edge, plunging to their deaths to be harvested by the Blackfoot.
Across Alberta and Montana, over 200 buffalo jumps have been identified, but Head-Smashed-In was the “Grandfather of them all.”
Not only were the people resource-rich, but they were also culturally rich with elaborate rituals and ceremonies celebrating the bison. Bison hunts were a communal affair. The entire community was needed to hunt and then process the hundreds of carcasses afterwards.
The Indigenous people and the buffalo continued this pattern of hunting and balance for thousands of years.
Double Genocide
When settlers arrived, they saw how valuable the bison were to First Nations People, but they also saw the bison as an abundant commodity to be exploited.
Harvesting bison had the dual benefit of a resource to be exploited and as a way of “subduing” – a polite way to say genocidally eradicating – Indigenous cultures. The bison were the perfect “straw to break the camel’s back” when controlling indigenous populations.
Bison populations dropped fast due to overhunting, first for their valuable products and then through targeted killings for more sinister reasons.
One valuable product made from bison was Pemmican, a dried and pounded meat of bison mixed with rendered bison fat and occasionally dried or fresh berries made by indigenous nations for generations. It became a popular food for fur traders.
A market also emerged in the nineteenth century for other bison products, and they were trophy-hunted for tongues, fur robes, and sport.
But the bison weren’t the animals killed. Carcasses were abandoned and laced with strychnine, poisoning wolves and bears and leaving the carcass inedible to humans. The number of carcasses wasted is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
By the mid-nineteenth century, many powerful people saw bison not as something essential to life on the prairies but as a block to the future of white settlement.
The US Army started arranging culls and paying people to kill bison. The aim was to remove Indigenous plains peoples’ food source, thus crippling them and restricting their independence.
Although this practice was never formally implemented in Canada, the migratory bison herds had no concept of borders. As they were hunted to near extinction in the US, they also disappeared from Canada’s plains.
But by the turn of the century, all but about 500 bison had been slaughtered — a collapse that happened in some regions within a decade.
And governments here took full advantage of the situation. By the 1870s, indigenous populations in Canada were starving, just as they were in the US.
The so-called “Indian Commissioner” of the time, Edgar Dewdney, deliberately used the crisis to bend local nations to his will. He called his policy “sheer compulsion.”
He withheld rations from First Nation bands who refused to sign treaties or who left their reserves. With no bison to survive the winter, they were starved into submission. Every last band ended up signing treaties by December 1882.
Once treaties had been signed, each band lived on reserves and had to work for their rations or receive nothing.
All that remained at the end of the 1800’s were millions of skeletal remains of the bison. The prairies were littered with skeletons as far as the eye could see.
The Legacy of the Slaughter
Ironically, the bones of the animals that had fed and enriched the people of these lands for thousands of years were gathered and sold as fertilizer, funnelled back into feeding the masses through the prairie’s “bread-basket.”
This process created the iconic and haunting images of mountains of bison bones that you see in the feature image above.
The loss of their once abundant resources and their restriction to small parcels of reserve and forced the bison-dependent First Nations peoples into a cycle of poverty and cultural trauma.
Studies have shown that the cycle of poverty remains to this day, with formerly bison-dependent nations losing, on average, more than two centimetres in height — a commonly used proxy for measuring poverty.
In the early 20th century, infant mortality was higher among formerly bison-dependent nations. Men in these communities were 19 percent less likely to be employed than First Nations people not dependent on bison.
Bison were the basis of entire societies – their sustenance, independence, and wealth. “Economic opportunity is determined in part by history,” Donn Feir, an economic historian at the University of Victoria, told Town and Country Today.
Imagine if the oil and gas industry suddenly evaporated in Alberta. And no other renewables or job opportunities arose. And then all Alberta oil workers were forced to stay here, stripped of their assets, and expected to “feed themselves” – or join a cult, where they would be fed but had to follow all the rules of the new system forced upon them or starve.
That’s essentially what happened to indigenous plains peoples in Alberta, forcing them into a cycle of dependence and poverty.
“When you look at the landscape of economic development and Indigenous economic growth in Canada and the US, you have to keep in mind that history is still very much with us,” said Feir.
