The topic from this week that always resonates really strongly with me is the extermination of bison on the Great Plains. To me, the systematic extermination of an entire species of animals for the sole purpose of eliminating a food source and source of cultural importance to Native communities is such a violent and barbaric act on multiple levels that it is difficult to understand the scale on which this extermination occurred and how deeply it impacted Indigenous communities in ways that still come up when we look at issues in Native communities today like increased rates of diet related health problems related to a lack of access to traditional foods. In addition, the environmental damage caused by the extermination of bison is difficult to comprehend. Between the extermination of bison, the building of railroads causing massive environmental impact, and the opening up of Native lands to mining and other environmentally destructive practices, it brings about the realization that in addition to removing Native communities from the landscape, colonization also altered the physical environment of the American West so that it is permanently different from the landscape that Native communities have ancestral ties to.
It is sobering to think about how we experience bison now versus how they once occupied so much of North America, and that the reduction was so sudden, violent, and intentional that we now think of bison as sort of a “rare” animal that you have to be lucky to see, rather than as something as common as deer. The reality that most people will only ever see bison in a national park, nature preserve, or on a protected bison range rather than in a natural landscape like nearly every other species of wildlife really sets in that reality that they nearly went extinct and that that was part of a genocidal project that still affects Native communities deeply in ripple effects from the same ways that it impacted them as it was occurring.
The “Homecoming” short film about Native communities and their programs to return bison to their reservations is really impactful to me because it is a display of a really successful and important program to reintroduce these animals to their homeland. The use of language like “homecoming” is particularly impactful because I think it helps show the spiritual and cultural placement of bison almost as kin, like they talked about in the Wind Cave creation story we watched in class. Another example I can think of of this language being used is in the title of the documentary specifically about the Blackfeet Bison Project, which is called “Bring Them Home.”