by Meteor Blades
"The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization." – Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, Testimony to Congress, 1874 The Wasichus [white men] did not kill them to eat, they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them." – Lakota shaman Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks, 1932 By 1870, the great herds of buffalo, or American Bison, that had in the 1500s roamed everywhere except present-day New England, were limited to 11 Western states and territories. There were still millions of them, perhaps 40 million. The massive slaughter that began in earnest in 1874 ended nine years later. By 1890, only 500 bison remained, and the devastated, decimated tribes who had depended on them were confined to reservations. Today, there are around 400,000 fenced bison in commercial herds, most of them genetically intermixed with cattle breeds and sold for meat domestically and abroad. But over the past 23 years, there has been a movement to repopulate the lightly populated areas of the West with vast new herds of genetically pure bison. That idea began with Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper in a 1987 article in Planning, The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.
continued at Daily Kos....
