Elizabeth Bird’s scientific contributions

To the Nakoda and Dakota people, bison are seen as a people, Tatanga/Tatanka Oyate, or Buffalo People. In 2012, the Fort Peck Tribes in Montana (Sioux and Assiniboine) had the opportunity to bring back a herd of heritage bison from Yellowstone National Park to Fort Peck reservation lands; in 2014, an additional herd was returned to reservation lands. Seeing this as an opportunity to connect and re-connect with their relations, Tatanga/Tatanka Oyate, and to educate the young people in their communities about the historic and cultural importance of buffalo, the Fort Peck Tribes embarked on a community initiative in conjunction with the return of the buffalo to reservation land. In this article, Roxann Smith, Robert McAnally, Lois Red Elk, Elizabeth Bird, Elizabeth Rink, Dennis Jorgensen, and Julia Haggerty, collaborators from three different institutions involved in this initiative, document the efforts to educate about and re-connect with the buffalo, as well as their own research inquiry process, which involved utilizing community-based participatory research methods to investigate four strands of inquiry, education, and service: the impact of buffalo restoration on the Fort Peck Tribes, the Buffalo People Summit (a community education and outreach event), an oral history project documenting the history of buffalo restoration in Fort Peck, and the Buffalo Values Survey, an effort to understand community perception and needs regarding the management of the buffalo herds and wildlife conservation. This initiative, involving a collaboration among the Fort Peck Tribes, Fort Peck Community College, Montana State University, and the World Wildlife Fund, is collectively known as the Fort Peck Buffalo Project.

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.