Sandy
I joked to my videographer Matt that it was so strange seeing a bison so clean after being with living ones; You would never want to run your fingers through their coats (Rolling in dirt and piss is a favorite pastime).
But once I started spraying the water, all the dirt that was deep down in this young bull’s coat began to run and flow again,
and once it had dried a little,
it wafted off in little poufs
into my mouth and nose when I was in close gripping his flesh, wrapping my arms around him.
The tanned underside of his hide became pliable again as I wet and worked it, at times making me feel like I was looking at something indecent, like a skin suit in a horror movie.
At other times the pulling and tugging echoed pulling a swimsuit off a small child; somehow, you just know how much force you can exert on a delicate body.
I was often frustrated with myself and the process I had committed to because of the unexpected violence it required.
In the end, I realized that the three days of down to the bones exertion, worry, and anticipation most reminded me of the three days of labour it took to bring my daughter into the world; long, exhausting, and painful with a slow creep of progress, and then a quick rush of force and tearing and it was done. I still can't put words to the jumble of emotions that followed either process. And in both cases, the days of labour were what I spent months preparing for and, in the end, were only the beginning.
So, Why do it? Why deconstruct an expensive piece of Taxidermy?
Taxidermy is emblematic of a colonial way of relating to the more-than-human world. Taxidermy gives credence to the lie that the natural world is ahistorical. It extracts individuals from their web of connections and calls them specimens. The taxidermist creates out of an animal's body a human construct that denies both the act's violence and the vital materiality of the creature's lived experience. And disastrously, the taxidermy-mindset has led over a century of men to believe that 'saving' living specimens for display was enough while they went on pillaging and devastating the ecosystems these charismatic animals were now divorced from.
For me, this legacy starts with William Temple Hornaday, the head taxidermist at the Smithsonian at the turn of the 20th century. Ironically some historians now consider him as the “savior” of the bison.
Now that I think of it, all the stories of men who ‘saved’ bison are ironic.
In 1886 Hornaday set out on a hunting expedition to collect 6 exemplary samples of North America’s dwindling Indigenous buffalo.
Hornaday was not an anomaly. Colonizers often felt compelled to preserve samples of Indigenous life, especially when they appeared incompatible with European expansion.
For his part, Hornaday wound up killing 25 out of the few hundred remaining bison.
He needed specimens to choose from; he wanted to represent an ideal family group, led, of course, by a virile bull.
He didn’t just bring back corpses though, he also brought back a young male calf, which he kept in his workshop at the Smithsonian. He called the calf Sandy because of his caramel coloured coat.
Sandy had been orphaned by Hornaday’s hunt. He spent his days tethered to a stake on the Smithsonian lawn, an attraction for the public. At night he slept in Hornaday’s studio, surrounded by the remains of his kin.
While living in a taxidermy workshop was undoubtedly singular, Sandy's capture was not; this is how basically all conservation herds began. The adults too large and wild to be captured were killed, their young taken to be reared by domestic cattle. They would either adapt or die, as Sandy did. His little body, evolved in concert with the multitude of grasses on the arid plains, could not handle the wet clover of his transplanted home. His body rejoined five others from his herd. He is still on display at the Museum of the Northern Great Plains.
I'm telling you this story about Sandy because these bodies' stories don't end in hushed and dusty museums.
Because of the genetic bottleneck that occurred following this process of killing and semi-domestication at the end of the 19th century, the bison I interact with today can be tied through kinship connections to all the stories I tell.
I recently heard someone discussing thin places, where the barrier between the spirit world and physical world is tenuous and permeable, and it made me think of the bison I have known as thick spaces, places where so much of the past, present, and future can be felt. It's like that old aphorism: "the past doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I am trying to listen for those rhymes and arrange them into a song's call and response.