By Tom Rea

Thanksgiving week seems a good time to remember that November is also Native American Heritage Month. Some news you might not have caught—we hadn’t—involves yet another boost for the ongoing effort to return the buffalo to Wind River. Last summer staffers at the Wind River Development Fund, a cooperative effort involving both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Reservation, learned that a long-shot proposal had paid off: The fund will receive $36 million in federal funds for eight projects aimed at creating and sustaining new jobs and improving life in general on the reservation and the communities around it.

The largest of the projects will be a new buffalo museum to be managed by the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. The 14,000 square-foot museum will be built on the reservation at a projected cost of $9.75 million, and will support 15 full-time and 6 part-time jobs.

Image

The buffalo initiative, under the leadership of Jason Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone man with graduate degrees in wildlife management, works to grow a buffalo herd on the reservation and to acquire more land for habitat. The Eastern Shoshone herd started with 10 animals in 2016; Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho herds together now total well over 150, partly by natural increase and partly through import of genetically pure animals—what Baldes terms “conservation buffalo”—from other herds around the United States.

The ultimate vision, according to initiative resources, is thousands of buffalo on tens of thousands of acres—with the buffalo managed as wildlife. The histories of buffalo and Native people “are intricately entwined,” Baldes notes, and adds,“while we cannot recreate the vast herds that once were, we can bring buffalo back.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Read more on economic development on the Wind River Reservation

Learn more about Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative 

And for much more this month on Native people, see Indigenous People in Wyoming and the West