Restoration and the Affective Ecologies of Healing: Buffalo and the Fort Peck Tribes

Abstract

Intentional acts of restoration are purported to have a multitude of benefits, not only for non-human nature, but for the people who conduct restoration. Yet, there is limited scholarship that considers the nature of these benefits in all of their complexity, including psychological and spiritual dimensions. Using the case study of the restoration of bison/buffalo by the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their reservation in Montana, USA, we observe that ecological restoration can promote and facilitate emergent and dynamic processes of reconnection at the scale of individuals, across species and within community. In an indigenous setting marked by historical trauma and other challenges, these re-connections have therapeutic benefits that align with the relationality that mental health frameworks suggest is a key protective factor for many indigenous people. Affective experiences of and with buffalo play an important role in building and articulating that therapeutic relationality in our case study. Our work points out the importance of access to spaces of affective ecologies and personal investment in spiritual traditions as elements of the therapeutic benefits of restoration in this case, raising questions and possibilities for future research that considers patterns and avenues of diffusion of restoration benefits within social groups more broadly.

Full text

Conservation and Society 16(1): 21-29, 2018
INTRODUCTION
The histories of Native American tribes and the wild bison of
the central and western United States rank among the most
powerful narratives of linked social and ecological fortunes of
the modern age. In this story, resilience dynamics play out over
centuries at vast scales, with the entire societies and ecosystems
changing together in response to epochal developments: the
end of Ice Age, the arrival of the horse, and the invasion of
the American West by railroads and markets (Haines 1977).
By the 1880s, both the bison and Native Americans of the
Plains were facing an epic battle for survival. As their fortunes
suffered, so did the ecological resilience of the extensive
grasslands systems that nourished them (Isenberg 2000). The
twenty-rst century marks a new, more optimistic chapter
in this longer social-ecological narrative. Native American
self-determination efforts have encouraged a major cultural and
Special Section: Affective Ecologies
Restoration and the Affective Ecologies of Healing:
Buffalo and the Fort Peck Tribes
Julia Hobson Haggertya,#, Elizabeth Lynne Rinkb, Robert McAnallyc and Elizabeth Birdb
aDepartment of Earth Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA
bDepartment of Health and Human Development, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA
cRetired, Fort Peck Community College, Poplar, MT, USA
#Corresponding author. E-mail: julia.haggerty@montana.edu
Abstract
Intentional acts of restoration are purported to have a multitude of benets, not only for non-human nature, but for
the people who conduct restoration. Yet, there is limited scholarship that considers the nature of these benets in
all of their complexity, including psychological and spiritual dimensions. Using the case study of the restoration of
bison/buffalo by the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their reservation in Montana, USA, we observe that ecological
restoration can promote and facilitate emergent and dynamic processes of reconnection at the scale of individuals,
across species and within community. In an indigenous setting marked by historical trauma and other challenges,
these re-connections have therapeutic benets that align with the relationality that mental health frameworks
suggest is a key protective factor for many indigenous people. Affective experiences of and with buffalo play an
important role in building and articulating that therapeutic relationality in our case study. Our work points out the
importance of access to spaces of affective ecologies and personal investment in spiritual traditions as elements
of the therapeutic benets of restoration in this case, raising questions and possibilities for future research that
considers patterns and avenues of diffusion of restoration benets within social groups more broadly.
Keywords: reciprocity, restoration, bison, buffalo, Fort Peck, Sioux, Assiniboine, affective ecology, keystone
species
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And I believe we all have that ability as individuals to
take from the buffalo and be good medicine to each other
in regards to positive thoughts and actions and behaviour
towards one another. They’re teaching us. We have to stop
and watch and look for them. Hearing one of my brothers
who killed a buffalo out there, how the other ones would
come there and try to lift it, pick it up. This is how we should
be with each other.
Sioux elder from the Fort Peck tribes, 2015
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22 / Haggerty et al.
ecological renaissance in which the reintroduction of bison to
tribal lands commands a central role, in keeping with bison’s
status as a cultural keystone species (Garibaldi and Turner
2004). These developments create a unique opportunity to
explore affective ecologies of restoration.
This article reports on ongoing research focused on the
experiences of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the
northeastern Montana’s Fort Peck reservation with buffalo
restoration.1 The Fort Peck tribes rst welcomed buffalo to
their 2-million acre reservation in 2001 after a 120-year-long
absence. The tribes have continued to grow their herds,
including in their historic role as the rst Native American
tribes to welcome buffalo stranded by the ongoing controversy
surrounding the bison migration out of Yellowstone National
Park (White et al. 2011). Our work proceeds through a
community-based participatory research (CBPR) model
(Rink et al. 2016) and reects priorities of the Assiniboine
and Sioux community members who work with our research
team and our broader scholarly commitments. Our community
partners invited us to conduct research on the outcomes of
buffalo restoration for individual and community health and
well-being. Many aspirations accompany buffalo restoration at
Fort Peck, including the hope that the presence of buffalo and
their reintegration into community life will mitigate profound
mental health, physical health, and economic disparities that
affect many members of the Fort Peck tribes. The perceived
healing potential of buffalo has myriad elements, including
changes in diets and economic diversication. In this article,
we focus on how buffalo may shape the health of individuals
and communities at Fort Peck through affective experience:
the affective ecologies of buffalo restoration.
Affective experiences are those involving the embodied
sensation and experience of the force of other bodies and beings.
Affect theory emphasises that ‘being’ (human or non-human) is
a not an essential, predetermined condition but emerges through
relations (Ingold and Palsson, 2013). To focus on affective
ecologies, then, is to explore and emphasise the importance of
the emotive/emotional, sensory, and other experiential ways that
humans and non-human nature ‘relate’. An affective ecologies
perspective understands such non-rational experiences as
critical to participation in and experiences of resource use
and environmental politics (Singh 2013, 2016). To explore
outcomes of the buffalo restoration movement at Fort Peck, our
approach joins closely-related conceptual frameworks including
the reciprocal restoration (Tomblin 2009; Kimmerer 2011),
postcolonial models of mental health (Gone 2016), and affective
ecologies (Singh 2013, 2016). We hope to promote a dialogue
among these frameworks as well as to emphasise the benets of
analytical approaches to ecological restoration that understand
self, society and nature as co-constitutive (Guattari 2005). In
particular, we hope to demonstrate that an appreciation of
affective dimensions of restoration can amplify and expand the
call for multi-dimensional approaches to measuring restoration
success (Wortley et al. 2013).
The article proceeds as follows. In the remainder of
Part 1, we draw connections between literature on restoration,
indigenous concepts of health and affective ecologies. The
Part 2 provides an introduction to the study area and context,
and a discussion of methods. In Part 3, we present and analyse
affective aspects of buffalo restoration, based on a series of
in-depth interviews conducted in 2015 with leading gures in
the buffalo restoration movement at Fort Peck. The conclusion
offers the summary of thoughts about expanding the role of
affective ecologies in evaluating restoration outcomes.
Scholarly context
Within the broad category of ecological restoration
(Egan et al. 2011), Fort Peck’s efforts exemplify the kind of
“reciprocal restoration” associated with “Indigenous People’s
Restoration Culture” (Tomblin 2009). This approach (among
3 categories of cultural approaches to restoration cultures
identified by Tomblin) focuses on the restoration of life
ways and food for cultural survival and as expressions of
self-determination. Tomblin’s observations are reinforced
in Robin Kimmerer’s 2011 synthesis that draws attention to
reciprocity, holism and spirituality as unifying values guiding
indigenous restoration efforts. Invoking the adage that “what
we do to the land we do to ourselves,” Kimmerer (2011: 263)
highlights the continuity across humans and non-human nature
in the majority of indigenous world views. In the case of Fort
Peck, restoration focuses not on land but on animals and a
particular “cultural keystone species” (Garibaldi and Turner
2004). However, as this article will demonstrate, the kind of
relationality between land and people expressed in Kimmerer’s
framework applies equally to how Sioux and Assiniboine world
views approach human-buffalo relations.1 (We switch here to
using the term buffalo, the standard English term used by Sioux
and Assiniboine peoples to refer to bison).
Kimmerer’s review goes on to observe the strong connection
between the cultural and the spiritual in indigenous societies,
noting that paradigms of restoration grounded in western
science struggle to capture this dynamic.1 This critique
suggests the importance of exploring alternative models for
evaluating restoration. Implicit in the concept of reciprocal
restoration, but open for further exploration, is the idea that
restorative processes occur at the scale of the self as well as
at the natural-cultural collective/community. In providing
fundamental concepts and frameworks to understand the
processes of recovery of self, society and nature, scholarship
on American Indian mental health frameworks provide helpful
guidance for our work.
According to American Indian epistemologies, to be healthy
is to have access to a full spectrum of relational experiences.
Spirituality, reciprocity, interdependence, and harmony
within families, tribes or clans and the natural world are
basic elements of American Indian belief systems (Dieter
and Otoway 2002; Salois et al. 2006; Marks 2007). Current
research links the signicant health disparities witnessed
among American Indian populations today in the United
States directly to the disruptive effects of colonisation on
world views emphasising relational harmony, reciprocity, and
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Restoration and the affective ecologies of healing / 23
connectedness (Duran and Duran 1995; Brave Heart 1998,
2003; Grandbois 2005; Breland and Park 2008). Emerging
models of American Indian and Native Alaskan health and
well-being focus heavily on understanding, nurturing and
restoring relationality between self, society and the natural
world (Whitbeck et. al 2004; Hill 2006; Jervis et al. 2006). In
rethinking suicide prevention paradigms, for example, Wexler
and Gone (2012: 805) note that a marker of maturity in many
indigenous societies is not the quest for independence, but
rather the demonstrated knowledge of “one’s role in a shared
and co-created” reality, something, they argue, that “stands in
stark contrast to … [the] notion of individuation as an essential
stage in becoming an adult in Western culture.” Mohatt et al.’s
(2011) 12-item scale designed to measure awareness of
connectedness as part of a mental health evaluation for Native
Alaskan communities is another example of the scholarly
recognition that feelings of connection, including to place,
family and community, are core elements of well-being and
mental health.
In traditional Assiniboine and Sioux belief systems, buffalo
and humans are related through ancestral heritage. In this
relational cosmology buffalo can communicate, act and
relate with human beings. Given that Sioux and Assiniboine
beliefs do not distinguish a conventional/Western species
boundary between buffalo and human beings, and heeding the
link between awareness of connectedness and mental health
described above, it stands to reason that experiences that
enhance and express awareness of human-buffalo relationality
are important to building and sustaining individual and
community health. Correspondingly, the notion of reciprocal
restoration suggests that the mental and physical health benets
provided to humans are complemented by benets to the buffalo
relatives—hence the reciprocity. To approach relationality, we
turn to the emerging concept of affective ecologies.
In this article, affective ecologies describe systems or spaces
that create possibilities for iterative and reciprocal interspecies
exchanges and communication. These are spaces that have
long been emphasised in American Indian belief systems. The
disruption of the physical environments that host affective
ecologies are among the many problematic legacies of conquest
for many cultures, including for the Assiniboine and Sioux
peoples of Fort Peck. The work of buffalo restoration at Fort
Peck, then, has been about re-establishing an ecology that
facilitates interspecies communication and reciprocal care. Our
analysis explores the kinds of experiences emerging through
this reconnection. This exploration is an important (and to our
knowledge, unique) attempt to document whether and how
some of the hoped-for benets of cultural keystone species
restoration in an indigenous context are materialising.2
METHODS
Study context: buffalo restoration at Fort Peck
The Fort Peck Reservation is located in the northeastern
corner of Montana and is one of the seven reservations in the
state. Fort Peck is home to two separate Indian nations, each
with internal bands and divisions. Of approximately 12,000
enrolled members of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux
nations, about 6,800 live on or near the reservation. The Fort
Peck Sioux comprise Sisseton/Wahpetons, the Yanktonais, and
the Teton Hunkpapa divisions and the Fort Peck Assiniboine
comprise Wadopana (Canoe Paddlers who live on the prairie)
and Hudashana (Red Bottom) bands (Fort Peck Tribes 2016).
These bands and divisions remain vital and inuential in
tribal community organisation and decision-making. Ofcial
government occurs through the Tribal Executive Board, with its
twelve voting members, chairman and vice-chairman elected
at large every two years.
Fort Peck is a vast landscape comprising 2.1 million acres
of rolling open prairie. The reservation boundaries include
the 47 ½ parallel to the north (just south of the border
with Canada) and the Missouri River to the south. Land
ownership within the reservation is extensively fragmented,
with communally-owned tribal lands comprising 20% of the
total area and individually allotted Indian lands about 25%.
Over half of the reservation lands are privately-owned by
non-tribal members (American Indian Relief Council 2010).
The dominant land uses within Fort Peck are dryland grain
farming and grassland cattle ranching.
When serious conversations about a tribal buffalo herd
gained momentum on the Fort Peck Reservation in the 1990s,
it had been over a century since wild buffalo had roamed the
area. Buffalo were lost to Fort Peck during the ‘starving years’
of the early 1880s when the brutality of the United States
policies towards the indigenous people and the land manifested
in widespread suffering. Two events in 1883 signalled the
severity of the situation for the Fort Peck peoples—the banning
of Sioux religious ceremonies by the United States Secretary
of the Interior and the killing of the last buffalo in northeastern
Montana (Miller et al. 2012: 128-130).
Decades later and beyond Fort Peck, Native American
self-determination in the 1970s and 1980s led to the
establishment of buffalo herds on the sovereign homelands
of Native American nations lands. By 1992, there were
approximately 26 tribes raising some 3,600 buffalo on tribal
lands across the United States and Canada (Zontek 2007: 69).
However, Fort Peck was not yet among these tribes. And by
the end of the 1980s, some Fort Peck people were wondering
why not. Tribal elders, elected leaders, and tribal government
staff began to explore procuring land and a buffalo herd in
earnest (Peterson 2001). Their efforts were supported by their
engagement with the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, a group
established in 1990 by 19 member tribes to coordinate and
assist tribes in returning buffalo to tribal lands.
Cattle ranching presented a hurdle for buffalo restoration
at that time—and continues to pose problems today—for two
reasons. At the state and regional level, many cattle ranchers
bitterly oppose the presence of wild bison on land bordering
their ranches because of the risk of transmission of brucellosis
between wild bison and domestic cattle. Livestock interests
have fiercely opposed the relocation of wild bison from
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24 / Haggerty et al.
Yellowstone National Park to any lands in Montana, including
Fort Peck. Secondly, because most tribally-owned grassland
was historically leased to cattle ranchers, establishing a tribal
buffalo ranch involved a land use change that displaced
ranching. The bitterness and strength of the local and state
opposition to buffalo restoration are important dimensions of
the tribes’ experience with buffalo restoration.3
As of 2015, Fort Peck buffalo numbered about 375 and lived in
two herds on the 25,000 acres of tribally-owned land. The Tribes
rst acquired 100 buffaloes in 2001 from the neighbouring
Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes of the nearby Fort Belknap
reservation. This herd was dubbed the ‘business’ herd, destined
primarily to feed Fort Peck people and gain revenue for the
buffalo programme of the Fort Peck Fish and Game Department
through paid hunts. In 2012, the Tribes gained an historic
opportunity to reconnect with the Yellowstone buffalo, the
sole surviving direct descendants of the buffalo known to the
ancestors of modern Native Americans in the United States.
Members of this ‘cultural’ herd arrived from Yellowstone Park
in March 2012. The herd was tripled with another infusion from
Yellowstone in 2014. The Fort Peck home for the Yellowstone
buffalo has special signicance—it showcases the leading role
the Fort Peck Tribes are playing in ending the decades-long
practice of culling buffalo that migrate out of Yellowstone
National Park. The Fort Peck nations and their buffalo relatives
are thus working together to heal and grow from a traumatic past.
Since the return of the Yellowstone buffalo, community interest
in the buffalo ranch has surged, manifest in part by the formation
in 2014 of a citizen-led group focused on cultural aspects of
buffalo, the Pté Group (pté is both the Nakoda [Assiniboine]
and Dakota [Sioux] word for female buffalo) (Smith et al. 2017).
Data collection approach
In order to better understand outcomes of buffalo restoration, our
research team conducted a series of in-depth interviews in 2015.
We adhered to a CBPR framework adapted specically to Fort
Peck (Rink et al. 2016). A CBPR approach insists on research
studies conducted with, for, and about Indigenous communities.
CBPR methods have demonstrated the importance of Indigenous
nations’ proactive production of their own knowledge and
the need to ensure that research with Indigenous populations
has relevance for their culture and communities (Salois et al.
2006; Christopher et al. 2011; Koster et al. 2012). Like other
forms of participatory research, CBPR does not offer a scripted
methodology. Rather, it entails an “epistemological orientation”
(Jacobson and Rugeley 2007). Citing Israel, Schulz, Parker,
and Becker (1998), Stanton (2014) succinctly describes three
values that guide CBPR: “Scholars should recognize and value
the community as a partner in the process, research should be
comprehensively collaborative, and results should benet all
partners through continuous action and clear applications.”
Our project was led by both MSU researchers and a Fort Peck
tribal elder, and interview transcripts were member-checked
by participants. Discussion by participants and interviewees
informed the evolution of the research.
Using a purposive sampling approach, we targeted
individuals who had been or are currently active in buffalo
restoration activities. The selection rationale was that
individuals engaged in buffalo restoration would be those with
the greatest exposure to buffalo, and thus, best able to speak to
and explore affective dimensions of the restoration process and
its outcomes. While neither the interviewees nor this research
claims to speak for the diverse assemblage of people living at
Fort Peck, our sample does include individuals with different
roles in buffalo restoration. Some interviewees held elected
positions, others were staff in management of the buffalo
ranch, several were spiritual leaders in the community and
others were interested community members. We interviewed
a total of 18 people.
The interview format was semi-structured and varied in
its formality. We conducted interviews in teams of two or
three, and the interviews lasted between 1.5 and 3 hours. Our
interview guide featured three groups of questions regarding
personal history and memories about buffalo, experiences
with contemporary buffalo, and ideas about personal and
community sources of resilience. In many of our interviews,
informants offered stories and we attempted to follow
customary expectations regarding listening well rather than
strict adherence to the interview guide. Interviewees received
a small cash gift in acknowledgement for their time. Interviews
were tape-recorded, professionally transcribed and then
coded using a grounded theory content analysis approach
(Glase r and Straus 2009). Our interviews were supplemented
with participant observation at numerous meetings and
community events related to the buffalo.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: AFFECTIVE
DIMENSIONS OF RECIPROCAL RESTORATION
The conceptual framework informing our analysis follows a
basic logic of possibilities established in existing literature:
affective experiences may produce or enhance feelings of
relationality and connectedness. Those feelings may in turn
have therapeutic potential. Therefore, restoration guided by
relationality has important transformational potential. The
following is analysis of statements and stories shared about
feelings from and experiences with buffalo exploring these
possibilities. After highlighting patterns in affective responses
to buffalo, we develop a discussion of relationality as it has
manifested in the buffalo restoration experience at Fort Peck.
Lastly, this section discusses the intersection of buffalo
restoration with personal recovery.
Being with buffalo
The physical return of buffalo to the Fort Peck reservation has
allowed for a new expression and experience of a long-standing
interspecies kinship. All of the interview transcripts referred to
this new opportunity to be with buffalo in terms of feelings of
awe, joy and pride. The knowledge that the buffalo are nearby
promotes a feeling of well-being for some. When asked about
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Restoration and the affective ecologies of healing / 25
what makes the Fort Peck tribes resilient in the face of major
challenges, one interviewee simply responded, “just knowing
that they’re here.” His comments suggest the tremendous
importance attached to the mere presence of the buffalo.
The potency of being with buffalo in shared space,
according to interview comments, has everything to do with
affect. Describing the importance of having the buffalo on the
reservation, one interviewee said “when I miss them I go to
them, you know?” Her word choice emphasises the kinship
quality of the relationships that our interviewees have with
buffalo. In her description, she and other elders drive out to
a place on the ranch where they can see the herds grazing in
order to watch, listen to and experience them. “Being with”
buffalo in this way makes her feel restored. She went on to
say that she also beneted from other ways of being with
them, “… at the same time praying for them, eating them...”
Interviewees frequently commented on the strength of the
buffalo, in both the physical and the metaphorical sense.
Describing a public celebration after the return of Yellowstone
buffalo, one interviewee said: “I mean, never in my whole
life did I ever feel that I would be sitting there with our
governor and all these other leaders and basically praying
and celebrating that the bison were nally back here. It was
a tremendous feeling.” Another interviewee said, “with the
buffalo I see not just an animal but I see in the qualities of
the buffalo this strength, endurance, perseverance, fortitude.
You know, facing those things that [challenge us].” In
this statement, the speaker invokes a sense of pride in the
endurance of his own people against tremendous hardships.
But his is more than the symbolic pride of having won a erce
political battle over appropriate ecologies with dominant
mainstream Montana. The speaker went on to explain his
belief that the strength of the buffalo is actually physically
embodied by his family and tribal community: “we have
eaten the buffalo for centuries and they say part of the DNA
is with us, that we have that within our people, and we have
all of those values. And we’re still here, you know? We’re still
here.” His is a clear expression of a belief in a co-constructed
‘being’ wherein humans assimilate qualities of the buffalo.
This affective engagement occurs through both spiritual
and bodily practice and, in his telling, results in actual, vital
survival of both species.
Interviewees consistently associated feelings of awe with
being in the presence of buffalo. Their descriptions implied a
strong sense of an interspecies energetics, where the buffalo’s
strength and vitality inspires and infuses human observers. In
one of the interviewee’s words: “[w]hen we watch them…it
says a lot. You feel that there’s the energy. You can’t really
write it down. You just kind of have to be there to feel it
and see it.” In emphasising not just seeing, but ‘feeling’ the
energy of the buffalo, this respondent signals the energetic and
affective dimensions of these engagements. Some understand
that energy as inherently therapeutic—and emphasise the
importance of proximity to buffalo to this dynamic. In the
words of one interviewee,
I have had very little contact with them, and it, you know,
makes me sad that I don’t get to see them every day. I wish
I could. … [W]hen I do see them it makes you feel so good.
It just makes you realize the strength of the buffalo.
Indeed, a serious challenge for the buffalo programme at
Fort Peck is creating opportunities for all residents of the
region to experience the buffalo in person. An hour or more of
driving on rugged dirt roads separates the buffalo ranch from
the reservation’s main population centres. Furthermore, the
buffalo can be difcult to locate within the ranch’s extensive
area. Despite these challenges, teachers and others focused
on youth education have worked hard to bring the youth to
the buffalo ranch. The buffalo’s potential for healing and
teaching surfaced as universal concerns in our interviews.
“All youth should be around the buffalo. There’s a healing,”
was one simple explanation. Reecting on one experience
with bringing children to the ranch to participate in traditional
ceremonies, one educator noted: “…I went to that camp that
they had last week and the kids had an opportunity to go to
sweat, just reconnecting with the land, having an opportunity
to go out for tours to the buffalo. I think that it will resonate
with those children.”
These statements imply the concern that many adults at Fort
Peck have about the welfare of local children. Fort Peck youth
face a host of challenges including under-resourced schools,
a crumbling built environment and high rates of substance
abuse and mental illness among the adult population. Many
participants in the buffalo programme explicitly hope that
by connecting with the buffalo through ceremony, youth
will acquire necessary resilience and strength to survive this
environment. This hope motivates programme leaders to
work hard to create opportunities for youth at risk to have
opportunities to experience buffalo directly. A key feature of
the hoped-for benets to youth from the buffalo is a heightened
sense of relationality and connectedness.
Relationality
Relationality is a core concept inuencing engagements with
buffalo and acts of buffalo restoration at Fort Peck. This is
because relationality is at the foundation of Assiniboine and
Sioux belief systems linking buffalo and humans in an ancestral
kinship governed by reciprocity. Our interview transcripts
suggest three themes in the way that buffalo restoration
has engaged or produced relational experiences: 1) buffalo
model an idealised reciprocal society; 2) individuals relate to
buffalo as teachers or role models; and 3) buffalo enable active
expression and honouring of relationality and reciprocity.
To many interviewees, buffalo herd behaviour models and
demonstrates a strong sense of relatedness and connectedness.
Interviewees frequently referred to kinship expressed in
buffalo behaviour and how buffalo social behaviour contrasts
with contemporary society at Fort Peck. For example, one
interviewee said, “…we can learn from those buffalo …how
to treat one another. …[H]ow they are is the way we should be.
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26 / Haggerty et al.
You know, they’re a family and they stay close and they protect
one another. But we’ve become so disconnected.” Participants
in buffalo restoration are fond of sharing a parable about how
buffalo treat injured herd members similar to this one: “when
[a buffalo is shot] other buffalo will kind of surround it. And
they nudge it like they’re trying to help it, pick it up, you know?
[T]hey’re really helpful towards each other, and protective.”
Some in the buffalo programme have explicit goals that the
buffalo will act as role models for children exposed to them.
One interviewee put it this way:
With the buffalo demonstrating…strength [and] that
compassion…with each other. And once those younger
children can witness that and experience that, and know
that they are Dakota, they are Nakoda, that that’s who
they are, and that’s how they should act, that’s how they
should conduct themselves. And the buffalo can only be
a positive effect to that end, and to that means, to change
things in our community, on our reservation.
This strong statement expresses not only total condence
that buffalo model an idealised society marked by compassion
and connectedness, but also hope that the youth in the area can
assimilate these values through engagements with buffalo.
In this ambition, reciprocal restoration of culture-ecology
occurs through mimicry and adoption of (perceived) animal
behaviours by human society.
And among our interviewees—participants in buffalo
restoration primed for transformational engagements with
them, there is evidence of attempting to personally assimilate
the buffalo model of behaviour. After noting an absence of
traditional teachings about buffalo in his upbringing, one
interviewee spoke about his efforts to let buffalo serve as models
for his own life and actions. First, he related his understandings
of traditional ideas about customary social structures, saying
that in “generations past, [tribes] kind of mimicked the buffalo
in their society structure, you know? The women took care of
the children and the men protected them. That was the basic,
you know, life structure…” He continued to describe how
buffalo inform his own identity and ideas about gender roles:
So I kind of glean a lot of that for myself… just in daily
life? I think…what would a buffalo bull do in a certain type
situation? …[N]ot walking around and grunting and stuff
like that, but … just that energy of…who am I as a Dakota
and Lakota man, you know? What’s my responsibility?
And I look at that buffalo, knowing what he does, and so
it just kind of gives me a little direction.
To adopt buffalo as role models for personal behaviour
and identity is to engage in relationality. Buffalo restoration,
through opportunities to observe buffalo and the percolation
of buffalo parables and images into daily life, has expanded
the feasibility of this kind of relationality for those at Fort
Peck who seek it out.
Finally, to many interviewees, the restoration of buffalo
to Fort Peck creates a meaningful opportunity to actively
afrm the reciprocal relationship linking buffalo and humans.
Speaking of his own sense of responsibility to buffalo, one
interviewee said: “I just know that we need to protect them.
…[T]hose are our people. We are them. They are us.” This
comment is reinforced by another interviewee who noted
that “for millennia the buffalo took care of us. Now it’s our
responsibility to take care of them.” Another elaborated
on this theme, pointing out how restoration improves the
capacity for people of Fort Peck to engage in protocol.
With the buffalo living on the reservation, he said, “[n]ow
we can go there and tell them we’re grateful.” Customary
expressions of gratitude through prayer, ceremony and song
are important means to participating in reciprocal care, means
that only became possible through the restoration of buffalo
to the reservation.
Together these examples indicate the central role of
relationality and reciprocity in the values that interviewees
brought to and derive from their engagements with buffalo
restoration at Fort Peck. The following discussion of individual
recovery and catharsis through experiences with buffalo speaks
to the potency of the kinds of affective engagements possible
in this cultural framework.
Life histories of recovery and restoration
The intersection of buffalo restoration with individual
recovery emerged as a central motif in our interviews with key
participants in the buffalo program at Fort Peck. This pattern
is consistent with the linkage developed in our conceptual
framework between affective experiences invoking feelings of
relationality and increased well-being. In addition, individuals
report and demonstrate powerful cathartic experiences, in
which, the presence of buffalo is profoundly moving.
A number of the interviews we conducted centered on life
histories transformed by the discovery of Sioux or Assiniboine
spiritual traditions in adulthood. The (re)discovery of
tradition was part of a critical personal recovery: an embrace
of sobriety, sometimes indigenous identity, and sometimes
both. This usually occurred when an individual returned to
the reservation after time away. The time ‘away’ might have
been time spent abusing alcohol or drugs, or actually working
or serving in the military in locales far from the reservation.
In this narrative, buffalo restoration and the ability to practice
a ceremonial relationship to them in close quarters stands
out as an episode—perhaps the climactic episode—in a
personal odyssey toward well-being, harmony and a sense of
connectedness. The point here is that the narrative revolves
less around the politics or mechanics of restoring the buffalo to
the reservation, but rather around a person being lost and then
found. The nding involves connecting to ceremony within
their community, and the physical presence of the buffalo is
an installment in that reconnection.
The following interview excerpt provides an example of a
life history linking individual recovery and buffalo restoration.
We have shortened a much longer narrative. The quotation
below starts with a response to the question, “When did your
understanding of who and what the buffalo are start to change
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Restoration and the affective ecologies of healing / 27
and who taught you about that?” The speaker is an individual
who had worked directly with buffalo management.
Well, I started it’s called the ‘Red Road of Sobriety’ 2000,
1998...I don’t keep track of years. I’d say about 15 years
ago, …I was down in the bottom of hole, drank a lot, you
know, young and dumb. Drank around, partied around.
But [an older family member] said, ‘You have to break that
cycle of alcoholism. You don’t want your kids to drink.’
The interviewee’s family members intervened in his
substance abuse by bringing him to meet traditionalists from
the reservation.
[The traditionalists] used to come over and play cards. It
was a gathering and we used to sit around and listen to them
talk. …so they talked about sweat lodges, how the buffalo
people help us, how we take care of our families. So kind
of gradually I got into it. I kind of had that good feeling,
went to sweat, carried in rocks and stuff and listened to
them sing. …
[Then I] went to Bear Butte, and seen the buffalo down
there that year. And just kind of hung around camp and
carried buffalo robes up, buffalo skulls. And they started
introducing me to the buffalo, you know, what the buffalo
skull represents on an altar, the robe, you know, the shelters
and things like that. So from there I just kind of worked
along, went to ceremonies, went to Sun Dances, got really
involved in it. And that’s…how it started working out.
This speaker transitioned to describing his participation in
buffalo management activities. In addition to describing the
practicalities of establishing fencing and the like, the speaker
reected on how he came to understand the use of ceremony
in engaging with the buffalo by watching and learning from
elders. For example, when welcoming a couple of semi-trailers
loads of buffalo to the ranch, he followed the lead of tribal elder.
The elder chose to approach the new buffalo delicately and as
relatives arriving from a long journey, sprinkling the ramp of
the semi-trailer (that the animals would walk down) with sage to
“comfort their hooves.” Rather than driving the animals out of
the trailers with yelling and prodding (a standard way to move
cattle), the elder suggested they open the ramp and sit quietly
by the trailer smoking tobacco (a sacred act) while the animals
took several hours to exit the trailers “just taking their time,
smelling the sage.” The elder also chose to wait for all of buffalo
to arrive before performing a welcoming ceremony because “he
didn’t want the herd to be mixed up [i.e. confused]; he wanted
them together as one for them to start singing the coming-home
ceremonial songs for them... Because they’re family, so that’s
what he did.” In including these descriptions of appropriate
ways to engage with buffalo according to spiritual traditions,
this speaker demonstrates how his own spiritual/health recovery
narrative involved embracing a set of performances focused on
affective engagement with the buffalo.
In this narrative, engagement with buffalo is a chapter in
a longer story of personal recovery. The recovery involves
reconnection, with cultural traditions and the set of relationships
and practices they imply. The “good feeling” this speaker
mentions as an outcome of practising ceremonial activities,
highlighting the psycho-spiritual and health transformation
taking place through these recoveries and reconnection. In
this example, the awareness of connectedness that scholars
consider fundamental to indigenous mental health is expressed
not only in terms of the speaker’s growing engagement with
a circle of traditionalists, but later in his discussion of his
understanding of the appropriate way to engage with buffalo.
A motif similar to this, with individual variations, surfaced in
about half of our interviews.
Other aspects of personal recovery surface in intensely
emotional moments when buffalo evoke grief and cathartic
joy simultaneously. Both our transcripts and our observations
demonstrate this dynamic. Having been asked about early
experiences of learning about buffalo, one interviewee was
prompted to share a story about her mother. She prefaced
the story by explaining that her mother’s parents were from
the last generation of people to participate in buffalo hunting
as a livelihood; her uncles had been some of the area’s last
buffalo hunters. She had heard many of their stories, but
always regretted not having had the chance to witness the
buffalo in person. When the lm “Dances with Wolves” came
to the reservation, the interviewee’s elderly mother was “very,
very excited” about the chance to witness a recreation of her
uncles’ and relatives’ livelihoods. Watching her mother in the
movie theatre, the interviewee noticed that when the buffalo
rst came on the screen, her mother started to weep (and here
the interviewee started to cry as well, suggesting the potency
of the moment). According to the interviewee, her mother’s
tears expressed the grief of the loss of the buffalo from the
culture (“she never got to actually see them, … she never got
to hear … the sounds the buffalo made”). But when asked, her
mother, who eagerly attended the lm twice, explained that
along with her grief, she also felt profound happiness. The
happiness drew from the lm’s striking depiction of buffalo
and buffalo hunting. According to the speaker:
And so I asked her, I said, ‘Well, how did you enjoy it?’
And she said that she really enjoyed ‘being able to hear the
thunder of the buffalo running’. And she enjoyed ‘listening
to how they sounded, that the buffalo were speaking their
own language’. …And she was saying that[,] that movie
just really took her there, and it helped her to experience,
you know, some of those things that she never got to see,
you know, that her uncles saw.
To be clear, what brought the viewer to tears was not the
buffalo dying, but the evocative depiction of their physicality—
their sounds and action. Here, again, is the affective dimension
of the presence of buffalo moving and engaging a human
‘becoming.’ While this example discusses buffalo witnessed
on screen, as participant observers we have witnessed similarly
dramatic responses by elders to being in the presence of
buffalo. For these elders, the affective experience of being in
the presence of buffalo appears to involve tremendous grief
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28 / Haggerty et al.
about the past, but also potentially an opportunity for personal
catharsis and healing.
Whether buffalo restoration connects to momentary events of
catharsis or longer episodes of recovery from disconnectedness,
these examples emphasise the transformational potency of
buffalo restoration at Fort Peck. These transformational
dynamics for individuals are greatly enhanced by the capacity
to witness the buffalo in person (and on screen). The resulting
affective engagements between buffalo and humans are shaped
by cultural beliefs that understand buffalo both as human
relatives and as beings who speak and feel in ways aligned
with human experience. Taken together, these narratives and
examples align with the notion that awareness of connectedness
is enhanced through the interspecies connection manifest in
buffalo restoration, and that new levels of awareness contribute
to therapeutic transformations.
CONCLUSION
This article provides new insights about the potential benets of
ecological restoration for indigenous communities. Advocates
of ecological restoration emphasise the many dimensions of its
benets, including for participants in restoration efforts, but the
vast majority of restoration literature focuses on quantifying
metrics of ecosystem functionality (Wortley et al. 2013).
For this reason, there is little research exploring the cultural,
spiritual or psychological contributions of restoration. Using
the exemplary case study of the restoration of buffalo by the
Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their Fort Peck reservation,
we observe that there are emergent and dynamic processes
of “re-connecting” and relating to self, across species, and
within community resulting from the restoration of a cultural
keystone species to the landscape. We join threads from ideas
about cultures of restoration, postcolonial models of mental
health among American Indian communities and affective
ecologies to establish our claim that these reconnections signal
therapeutic outcomes in the broadest sense.
The connections that emerge as outcomes of restoration
are well-suited to an affective ecologies framework as they
emphasise an integrated dynamic process of ‘becoming’ within
an interspecies relationality honoured in Sioux and Assiniboine
spiritual traditions. The interviewees described in this article
reported experience of joy and awe, catharsis of the past
trauma, as well as un-namable ‘energetics’ in the presence of
buffalo. They also drew links between the nature of their own
cultural survival and that of the buffalo. As the epigraph to
this article notes, some observers clearly see in the bison a set
of lessons about sharing the burden of life and existence in a
communal manner, that the relatives of a fallen buffalo would
go to it to help it and that ‘this is how we should be with each
other’. A signicant contribution of this study is its emphasis
on the individual scale of the self as a site for analysis and as
a vital component of a larger restoration-recovery narrative.
Above all, this work demonstrates the importance of
including and being open to the spiritual realm in research and
explorations of affect and relationality in human-environment
interactions. In this case, we document clear evidence of
emergent affective ecologies that are embedded in and
realized through spiritual customs and world views. In the
case of buffalo restoration, the spirit world is a powerful and
vital mediator and medium. Restoration benets, for the Fort
Peck people who are experiencing them, play out as much
through the spiritual as through the material realm. A clear
limitation of this research is that our observations are only
applicable to individuals active in the buffalo restoration and
programming at Fort Peck. While this group clearly hopes
that the kinds of cathartic and benecial experiences they
report will accrue to others, one related point established by
our work is that such therapeutic benets have to date hinged
on having access to the buffalo and investment in Sioux and
Assiniboine spiritual heritage. For these reasons, though, this
work also signals a clear opportunity for future research to
explore the mechanisms, patterns and qualities of diffusion of
the restorative effects of affective ecologies across and within
societies engaged in ecological restoration.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research complies with Fort Peck IRB protocol approved on June
3, 2015. The authors are deeply grateful to the participants in this
research project for their generosity. This research was supported by
funding through NSF-IIA-1443108 and NSF DEB-1231233.
NOTES
1 Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual
restoration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities
of care-giving and world-renewal. Collectively and individually,
these indigenous spiritual values must be central to the
vision of community ecological restoration. Western science
and technology, is a limited conceptual and methodological
tool—the “head and hands” of restoration implementation.
Native spirituality is the “heart” that guides the head and hands.
Dennis Martinez, quoted in Kimmerer, page 263.
2 Conceptualizing restoration as creating material space for
interspecies exchanges of course parallels and complements the
‘posthuman’ turn in social sciences (Castree and Nash, 2006)
along with the ample literature in animal and cultural geography
sensitive to “biosocial” becomings (Ingold and Palsson, 2014;
Buller, 2014a). However, the posthuman is largely a Western
preoccupation, with indigenous cosmology having largely
escaped the kind of nature/culture dualism scholars now seek
to escape. In this paper, our priority is on allowing framings of
and sensitivities about affect from both indigenous and Western
traditions to inform and communicate with the literature on the
outcomes of ecological restoration.
3 The acrimony is aptly captured in a cable television documentary
hosted by Dan Rather, “Range War.” It aired on AXS tv July 22,
2014.
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Received: July 2016; Accepted: March 2017
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