This page was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Michelle Wilson.
Blood Memory
The only recorded death during the transfer of bison from Kansas to Montana was a calf who was trampled to death in the stifling, shifting, rattling cars.
In my imagination the calf is still a reddish caramel colour, she is not yet weaned.
Was she with her mother? Had her mother been born into captivity on Jones’ ranch, or was she dragged by lasso from her own mother’s side? I know that somewhere in her matrilineal line a cow fought a man to keep her calf and probably died in the process.
Did this trampled calf carry that memory in her bones? Did her mother listen to the imperatives of her instincts and keep her calf close? Did her own feet bring her calf’s death?
I do the math. Jones’ bison arrived from Kansas in 1893.
Michel Pablo’s bison were sold to the Canadian government and began being swept off the land in 1907.
I doubt that same cow—the one whose calf had been trampled—would have been alive with a calf in 1907. But her daughter might, or her granddaughter. How does this kind of trauma make its way into genetic material? They say a butterfly has sense memories carried over from its caterpillar self, even though it basically becomes a gooey soup of cells in the chrysalis.[1]
The egg that became my daughter existed in my genetic code when I was an egg inside my mother. What of my mother’s trauma is playing out in her body? We are white and we are privileged but I have seen enough of the shadows of violence that haunt us to know we haven’t escaped gendered inter-generational trauma.
I imagine the phantom call of these memories, of a calf falling under shifting panicked feet, echoing in the body of another cow who died fourteen years later—shortly after being loaded onto a wagon train on the Flathead Reservation.
The twenty-five or so cowboys who had loaded her into a reinforced wagon separated her from her calf. The little one was further down the caravan of horse drawn carts. He grunted and called to his mother.
I know the sound of the cow/calf call and response—the rumble rising at the end when either is particularly insistent. But I have only met bison going about their usual daily interactions in a protected park. I have no frame of reference for the desperate and panicked plaintive call that cow heard.[2]
The call of her offspring drove her into a frenzy. In desperation she rammed her horns through the two inches of wood that imprisoned her.
The crates were well built, reinforced to withstand the force of a 2,000-pound bull.
Her horns became lodged in the wood and in thrashing against it she broke her own neck.
She was butchered, and her hide sold.
I don’t know what happened to her calf.
I do know that nineteen others died in the round up. Seven hundred and eight were shipped off the Flathead reservation. Six hundred and fifty-three made it to the ill-fated Buffalo National Park. Fifty-five stayed at Elk Island National Park and founded a herd there.
As far as brutality and waste and cruelty go, this round up has nothing on Buffalo Jones’ ventures, but it was still violent and costly. Five horses were gored to death and many more were ‘ridden into the ground’.
Was it necessary? Was it inevitable?
As a Canadian settler it would be so easy to rush to a position of innocence, to say the government that represents me saved these bison. That’s what my government has been telling the world for over a century; That these bison were “saved” from destruction through Parks Canada's protection.
The outlines of this story hold up if you stand very squarely in your settler identity—If you embrace Parks Canada, the protector of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage, for your enjoyment, as your inheritance.[3] But narrow your eyes and shift your perspective. You will see this legacy myth is only a thin shroud over the complicated tangle of colonial realities that brought these bison under our control.
Tribal members had brought bison to the Flathead Reservation in an act of stewardship and conservation. These bison were allowed free-range on pastureland that was held communally by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. There they thrived for decades, multiplying until over seven hundred grazed the valley south of Flathead Lake. The bounds of the reservation and the tribal authority there protected several generations while the US military and hide-hunters eradicated the bison outside the reservation. The Salish model of care was working.
Old bulls would sometimes stray off the reservation, and Michel Pablo or his ranch hands would drive them back. Pablo wanted to avoid conflict with his white neighbours, and when Pablo could not keep one bull within the reservation, he had him shot. When the old creature was butchered and skinned, they found that these neighbours had filled his tough, battered hide with all kinds of buckshot and .22 calibre bullets.
In 1904, after years of bitter protest by tribal leaders and in violation of the 1855 Hellgate treaty, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Flathead Allotment Act into law. This law forced tribal members to take individual parcels of land, opening the remaining lands within the reservation to non-Indigenous homesteaders. With white farmers and ranchers would come more fences and guns. The bison needed to be saved from federal American policy, though many would frame it as an inevitable tide of white expansion. The Canadian government arranged to purchase and ship 708 bison from the Flathead Reservation to the ecologically disastrous Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta.
Maybe the old bulls were lucky; Pablo had a few dozen killed, butchered, and skinned on the land when they proved too large and “wild” to herd and load onto carts and trains. They were not wounded with buckshot by white settlers. They did not break their own necks in desperation.
Once installed at Buffalo National Park these bison became emblems of federal conservation. Parks Canada’s bison, the descendants of those protected on the Flathead reservation, are still used to cleanse our collective image.
The stories we tell of settler-state salvation obscure Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreille efforts to protect the bison, their success in creating a pocket of free and thriving bison, and the violence and suffering that followed when federal governments wrested the bison from them. The colonial story of bison conservation is one of rescue. As Pauline Wakeham puts it, conservation narratives attempt “to overwrite colonial violence” and locate it in a distant past. The Confederated Salish And Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty are writing a new and yet ancient story, and it is theirs to tell. It is incumbent on us to find it.