Customer Reviews

Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison (Bison Original)

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This book provides a brief, readable overview of Native Americans' efforts to restore bison to the western range. This includes historical efforts to save small herds from the slaughter of the 1880s, early tribal efforts, and the large-scale restoration supported by the Intertribal Bison Cooperative today.

The core of the narrative is infused with Zontek's ideological perspective. For example, he buys uncritically the "ecological Indian" idea though he is aware of debates over Pleistocene extinctions and knowledgeable about opposition to bison herds from Indian livestock producers.

Zontek also tries to build parallels between US Indian policies such as the Dawes Act or termination and US bison policies. Many of those are a stretch. In addition, as he admits, those parallels don't work for Canadian policy. That suggests that the parallels aren't really causal or helpful, and he should have dropped them.

Still, that perspective means that he wants to call bison slaughter a form of racism. He means this not in the sense of General Philip Sheridan, who saw bison slaughter as a tool of war (genocide) against Plains Indians by removing their food supply. No, Zontek means to classify bison slaughter as genocide, really, as equivalent to killing so many millions of people. One can be opposed to bisoncide without needing to identify it with genocide.

It's also worth noting that, for Zontek, the phrase "Buffalo Nation" in the title has at least three referents - - bison, Native American nations dependent on the bison, and the symbiotic relation of bison and Natives. This regularly creates some ambiguity throughout the text. Usually, it's easy to figure out what Zontek means, but some of that ambiguity is unnecessary.

Finally, the book has too many minor factual errors - for example, he puts Chief Mountain in Canada, not on the Glacier NP-Blackfoot IR border. He also makes minor errors of official titles and agency affiliations for some government employees.

And yet, at the heart of it all, Zontek has a readable introduction to the topic. He has visited a lot of sites and talked to a lot of people, and those interviews provide information not available elsewhere.