Forced Migration
1. Alloway
Charles Alloway tried to hold onto a bison bull, to anchor him to a post. But the bull dragged the man and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.
Until his dying day, Alloway controlled the myth of how he “saved the buffalo.” His story: the white hero, the repentant slaughterer. His words are the ones that survive in the colonial record.
One word—half-breed—tried to obscure the body of the Honourable James McKay, Scottish and Cree, trader and guide with the piercing grey eyes.
Together, McKay and Alloway drove their oxcart down the rutted mud streets out of Winnipeg to meet a convoy of Métis hunters. Searching for bison to slaughter for hides and pemmican.
A matriarchal band of cows and calves moved through meadows just emerging from winter’s grip. Grandmothers, aunties, mothers.
The bison must have stampeded as the first round of bodies fell. Brown-headed cowbirds took to the sky, their liquid chirps and trills drowned out by hooves and bellows as they abandoned their posts on the bison’s backs.
Encamped at a distance, the women and children heard what they couldn’t see: “a sound deep and moving like a train moving over a bridge... a continuous deep, steady roar that seems to reach the clouds.”
Close to the carnage, McKay and Alloway felt the gutteral calls of anguished mothers resonating in the cavities of their chests. The hunters sought cows, their flesh more palatable than the bulls’. Which meant the next generation were in their bellies when they fell.
Women were brought in to butcher and process the bodies. Calves lingered near their fallen mothers, watching. These “pitiful creatures” were run down or lassoed at McKay’s and Alloway’s command. The partners recognized that the current rate of slaughter could not be maintained.
Five freeborn bison calves were captured, survived and reproduced, forcibly adopted by domestic cows. But their relationship to the land died.
On the establishment of Buffalo National Park, Alloway said: “The animals will increase under natural conditions of peace and contentment. Every one of them came from my original group of three heifers and two bulls.”
When the last Canadian bison were being slaughtered in 1878, Alloway sent out a hunter who brought him back thirty bison hides. “We cannot see distant things from the all absorbing present sometimes,” he lamented.
In trying to anchor the bison bull, Charles Alloway was left with scars on his hands that he carried to his grave.
2. Bedson
It is a testament to how remarkable the sight of bison were, that in 1880, eight hundred people attended the auction that determined the fate of just fourteen. Remarkable, because the bison were once so plentiful here that at a distance, they could have been mistaken for a churning, brownish-black river surging across the plain. The winner of the auction was Samuel L. Bedson, the warden of Stony Mountain Penitentiary.
In the early hours of a frigid morning, a tawny bison calf was born onto trembling legs. Still wet with afterbirth, he had barely taken his first tentative steps when his herd, now fourteen in number, was roused from slumber by men sent to drive them to their new home.
Imagine the wind whipping across a sea of flat, uniform ground on a painfully bright February day. On top of a sudden swell in the land sits a three-story sandy brick building. Dozens of elegant arched windows peer down upon you, the bars not discernable from a distance—that's what those fourteen bison saw.
The bison were often corralled in a stone pen near the farm on the prison grounds. This complex was nicknamed "the castle," and Bedson was its king. He was no great hunter; he was a collector, always trying to domesticate wild animals for the amusement of his family and neighbours. The farm at Stony Mountain housed a collection of wolves, deer, bears, and badgers, but Bedson's moose were local favourites; a pair had even been trained to pull a handsome sled in the winter.
On a Christmas afternoon, Bedson tried a similar trick with a two-year-old bison bull. His shaggy brown body was hitched to a toboggan. Eight merry-makers loaded on the sled while five or six of the incarcerated men held onto a rope tied around the bison’s neck.
Imagine this ludicrous game of inter-species tug-of-war, the free laughing and playing while the prisoners, human and bison, were scared for their lives. A tense calm lasted for about fifteen or twenty minutes until suddenly the bull leapt into the air, scattering prisoners and guests into the snow.
There was no catching the bull, once he had gained his freedom. Months later, Bedson recieved a letter from North Dakota that a lone young bull had been found grazing with an old rope tied around his neck. Bedson sent a hired man across the border to bring his property back.
3. Fight or Flight
We are grazing, hidden in the breaks between sand hills. Always alert, our ears panning for the sounds of men. My body orients toward the wind, waiting for the odour that twangs my fraught nerves and triggers our flight.
I don’t want to leave this place. The snow has just melted from the slopes, moistening the thirsty earth below, reviving the scrubby grass after a long winter.
There are so few of us, now. So few babies. We cannot let down our guard to breed as we used to. Two lame bulls follow us but they barely have the energy to register when we are in estrus. When we do conceive, our bodies can no longer nourish the unborn. We are haunted by those stolen from us. Mothers who aren’t killed fighting off the snatchers return again and again to the site of their loss.
As the night lifts, my body is alive with sensation— rain drizzles, a sweet, pungent balm rises from the earth. I don’t detect them until they are among us.
We bolt toward the wind. We cannot stop moving. We might still outrun them.
The bulls cannot keep up and drift away, but these predators are not enticed by weakness. Night settles again and they keep pressing us. The sun rises and they are still there. Three nights and days they keep at our heels.
Urine, sweat and dead skin wafts toward me on a breeze exhaled from a canyon mouth. I turn, lead my sisters and their young onto an open prairie.
My instincts have betrayed me, betrayed us.
I hear the oscillating whistle of a lasso and the desperate, grunting cry of a calf. I hear him fall. A thud, thud, thud, dragging and scraping. The man’s rope finds another of our young and pulls him down. But now we know what he is here for.
My sister is a blur of bristled hair as she charges him. There is a crack of thunder, and mushrooming from the deafening sound is the acrid, smoky, rotting smell of water that cannot breathe. My sister staggers a few strides from the source of her pain and sinks to the earth.
Disoriented by the sound and smell of death, I barely register the hum of the rope when it strikes out and brings down our last baby.
4. Buffalo Jones
Some people would have you believe that Charles Jesse ‘Buffalo’ Jones got his nickname for his conservation efforts. Please don't believe them.
Jones heard God's call in Genesis 1:26; “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over ... all the earth and over every... thing that creepeth upon the earth.” He set out to capture the last remaining remnants of the great southern bison herd, not as some noble conservation effort, but as breeding stock for his own grand experiment.
On the first three expeditions, he took only calves. He learned as he went, and the bison he encountered suffered for his mistakes. The calves refused buckets of water and called relentlessly for their mothers. Jones and his men rode out, looking for range cows to forcibly milk, but instead found two of the bison mothers wandering the site of their loss. Jones shot one of them for her meat and milked her dead body.
When calves became rare, he resolved not to leave any bison on the plain.
Capture myopathy was not identified until 1964, diagnosed in another endangered species. The stress of being captured triggers the creature's biological defense mechanisms, and the prolonged or intense engagement of these mechanisms causes massive, often fatal system failure. The animal suffers lethargy, muscle weakness, incoordination, rapid breathing, shivering, dark red urine, and hypothermia. Their blood turns to acid. Their muscles suffer necrosis and die as the animal is still struggling for life.
This is how the last of the Southern bison died.
Jones believed that there was no place for wild bison on their former ranges. Man's mastery transformed these arid tracts into productive farms "made exceptionally fertile by the manure, bones, and flesh of the millions which lived and died there during centuries past.”
With a name like Buffalo Jones it would be easy to believe that he saved the bison.
5. The Search for Facts
The search for facts goes in circles. I find a fact and follow it back to its source, only to find every new telling contaminated. Who first brought the bison back to the Flathead Reservation?
A white trader named Charles Aubrey inserted himself into history by recording his story.
In the year 1877, I was located at the Marias River and engaged in the Indian trade…Among the Pend d’Oreille Indians... from across the mountains, was (a)... man... whose Christian name was Sam. He was known to the Blackfeet as Short Coyote... A rather comely girl had attracted the attention of Sam… (and) she became his wife. I told him very frankly that he had made a mistake…I said to him; “You are a strong Catholic and your Church does not permit polygamous marriages” He feared he would be punished by the fathers of St. Ignatius Mission…I thought there was still a chance to make peace with the soldier band of his tribe by getting a pardon from the fathers... I then suggested…he rope some buffalo calves…and then give them as a peace offering to the fathers at the mission. Sam herded his buffalo with the milk stock for five days, resting and making arrangements for his trip across the mountains... seven head in all is my recollection of the bunch... I afterward learned... that immediately upon his arrival upon the reservation he was arrested and severely flogged... In the course of time I heard of Sam’s death…passing away peacefully in his lodge...
Other tellings of Sam’s story seep into my consciousness as I wade deeper into newspapers and websites. Racism oozing between every word. They describe Walking Coyote’s meeting with Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, who bought the bison calves. They speak of him “brooding... over gleaming piles of wealth.” They record his death as “a less-than-heroic exit” under a Missoula bridge, resulting from “a drinking spree,” and “one that matched the spirit in which he had lived and captured the calves that were now prospering on the rich grasslands of the Flathead.”
The words sit like bile in my mouth. Walking Coyote’s legacy as a drunk, greedy Indian became entrenched in the dominant archive. I wonder if the tendrils of Aubrey’s story have made their way into others. Did interviewers seek out those that would corroborate their stories? Or did the keepers of more profound knowledge withhold it, for fear of contamination?
In 1978, when he was 87 years old, Pend d’Oreille Elder and historian Mose Chouteh recorded the story of how bison returned to the Flathead reservation. I will let Mose Chouteh’s words speak for themselves:
While I was growing up I heard this told by many elders…It is about a man called Ataticeʔ. (While on a hunt several buffalo followed their camp) And so in the evening, (the men) went into the tipi. The chiefs were smoking... Ataticeʔ said, “Hello. I have come to ask you, my chiefs. I think that it would be good if we took these buffalo back to our land to live there.” Some of the chiefs said, “that’s exactly right.” And some chiefs said... if we take them back to our land, we will be tied down... We will not be able to go anywhere. We will just be in one place as we gather our food.” The chiefs disagreed with each other. Half of them said yes and the other half said no. (After three days the council remained at an impasse and out of respect for the tribal need for consensus on major decisions Ataticeʔ withdrew his proposal). As he mounted his horse... He waved at these buffalo, like sending them to different parts of the prairies. Ataticeʔ said to the buffalo... “it will be up to each of us whatever happens to you and whatever happens to me. That is all.” And all these buffalo turned towards the east, the rising sun... They were going away. And Ataticeʔ cried. Ataticeʔ’s son Ɫatatí having the same deep connection to the buffalo as his father, renewed his father’s request to capture calves in the 1870s. The council, seeing the effects of the unchecked settler slaughter of the buffalo, approved Ɫatatí’s plan. Six calves were brought over the mountain range, they soon flourished and became twelve. Ɫatatí’s mother, meanwhile, remarried Samwel Walking Coyote. While Ɫatatí was away, two people went to see Samwel. One was called Charles Allard, and the other man was called Michel Pablo. These two men met with him and told Samwel, “we’ve come to buy your buffalo.” Samwel said, “ok, it will be so...” Ɫatatí returned to his house... all the buffalo were gone... he asked his mother, “where are my buffalo?” And his mother told him, “your stepfather sold them.” And Ɫatatí cried.
6. Blood Memory
Michel Pablo’s bison were sold to the Canadian government in 1907. Extraction from the land was violent and rail travel for bison was perilous.
I wonder if the removal triggered memories of their previous transfer from Kansas to Montana. The only recorded death during that transfer of bison 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 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?
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 my daughter’s body? 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.
I imagine the phantom call of a calf falling under shifting panicked feet, echoing in the body of another cow who died shortly after being loaded onto a wagon train on the Flathead Reservation.
Cowboys loaded her into a reinforced wagon without her calf. The calf grunted and called to his mother.
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. 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 know that nineteen other bison 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.
The colonial story of bison conservation is one of rescue. 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. It is theirs to tell. It is incumbent on us to find it.
7. Numbers
Numbers. They transmogrified breathing, eating, shitting, connected bison into numbers.
That's what happens when a being becomes a commodity.
20 to 60 million bison ranged North America before colonial contact.
Surveyors and homestead inspectors came looking for a home for the government’s newly acquired bison. What they saw was land that had no value because it could not be settled or farmed. It was worthless, but maybe it could be made useful. This place, southwest of Wainwright, Alberta, became Buffalo National Park in 1908. Reducing the bison’s lives to numbers.
In 1888 there were 103 wild plains bison in North America.
The land and the bison had sustained one another. The bison compacted the arid ground, helping it hold on to precious moisture. Cows and bulls felt their way across the grassland, stems and blades tickling their nostrils as soil stirred up by a roving muzzle and probing tongue was inhaled.
By 1912, 748 bison had arrived at Buffalo National Park from Michel Pablo’s herd.
There was an intimate interconnection between bison and the thousands of "microbes; fungi, bacteria, and protozoa" populating each square centimetre of forage. These microscopic beings had the enzymes to break down cellulose in the grasses the bison eats. Neither being could live without this symbiotic relationship.
The government wanted quick and exponential growth. By 1922, 6,780 bison were sharing the park’s limited resources with large deer, moose, and elk populations. The land strained under the pressure of all these mouths and bodies.
Reciprocity and movement had co-evolved over centuries, enabling the dunes and desert-like conditions of the Hills to sustain vast herds over the winter months.
Over 19,141 bison were slaughtered over the park's thirty-year existence.
With Canada’s involvement in World War II looming, the park was declared a failure. On December 30, 1939, the last bison were shot; untold numbers of deer, moose, and elk followed them to the abattoir.
Just numbers.
8. Apology
I want to speak to you today about what we did— our predecessors— the many branches of the Dominion government and the people who ran them; the treaty negotiators, the Department of the Interior, and Parks Canada.
The creation of Wood Buffalo National Park was an act of "ecological imperialism.” From its first inception, the Park was designed to be a place that excluded Indigenous peoples, a place where Canada could extinguish treaty rights.
We created a swath of Land where vital relationships between human and non-human have been severed. We saw the bison as an exploitable resource and used their bodies to make money.
Our park wardens slaughtered bison one day and persecuted your hunters the next.
We turned exercising your rights and sovereignty into a privilege.
We used racial dogmas to determine who had hereditary rights within the Park, and we used a politics of purity to drive communities apart.
We separated families. We ignored letters pleading to be reunited.
We contributed to the residential school system and intentionally engendered dependency instead of acknowledging your right to hunt and practice lifeways on your own lands.
We chose to believe that pulling the strand of bison from this web wouldn’t cause it to unravel.
We armed police and then wardens to arrest and harass your guardians.
We created a policy of surveillance and intimidation.
Even when we built abattoirs and killed hundreds a year, still we kept you from the bison.
Our attachment to conceptual borders extends to policing the boundaries between Wood Bison and Plains Bison, between pure and hybrid, between contaminated and uncontaminated. Steeped in white supremacy, we did not see how these logics of purity were weaponized against both bison and your people. These imagined borders place bison and Indigenous peoples outside the protective bounds of white and human.
This pattern has continued. Our pools of knowledge are shallow, and our spatial and temporal scales are different than yours. Your pools of knowledge are deep and dependent on a connection to place and language.
We have come to embrace the term “two-eyed seeing,” as envisaged by Mi’kmaw Elder Dr. Albert Marshall. It is a concept of “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together for the benefit of all.” But first, we acknowledge that for nearly a century our laws stripped Indigenous peoples of their treaty rights if they pursued a university education. We tried to outlaw “two-eyed seeing”.
We are ashamed that we fought for nearly a century to avoid fulfilling our Treaty commitments to your Nations.
We apologize to you.
We apologize for making your communities fight for what was theirs.
We would like to work with you, the descendants of the dispossessed, to make restitution for these wrongs. To move beyond access and towards true sovereignty on the Land.
We recognize that decolonization is not a metaphor.