One of the 35 Denver Mountain Park bison stands in a corral because it waits to be transferred to representatives of 4 Native American tribes and one memorial council to allow them to reintroduce the animals to tribal lands March 15, 2023, close to Golden, Colo. Five of the bison went to the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma.

David Zalubowski/AP

conceal caption

toggle caption

David Zalubowski/AP

One of the 35 Denver Mountain Park bison stands in a corral because it waits to be transferred to representatives of 4 Native American tribes and one memorial council to allow them to reintroduce the animals to tribal lands March 15, 2023, close to Golden, Colo. Five of the bison went to the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma.

David Zalubowski/AP

The Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma obtained 5 bison from Denver earlier this month, marking the primary time in practically two centuries that Yuchi folks will as soon as once more work together with the animal.

“We have an opportunity to connect with them in direct ways and help them on their journey,” says Richard Grounds, the chief director of the Yuchi Language Project, which works to create new Yuchi audio system by having fluent elders work with kids.

The Yuchi Tribe was one in every of several to receive bison from the town of Denver, which maintains two conservation herds which might be descended from the final wild bison in North America. Since 2018, the town has donated 85 surplus bison — which many, together with Indigenous folks, generally name buffalo — to Native American tribes as a substitute of promoting them at public sale, reflecting a broader effort to return stewardship to Native Americans.

“Part of the beauty of this entire project is that it’s reconnecting among different Indigenous nations,” Grounds says. For instance, the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations have already got herds, they usually’re “coaching us on handling buffalo, helping us with the pickup process.”

These 5 bison will probably be used to ascertain a brand new herd by way of a mixture of breeding and future transfers. They will even serve to reestablish a non secular bond that was bodily damaged when the Yuchi had been compelled from their homeland and the bison had been practically eradicated.

The significance, and lengthy absence, of bison in Yuchi tradition

“yUdjEhanAnô sô KAnAnô,” Grounds remembers saying to the bison when he got here nose to nose with them in Denver.

It means “We, the Yuchi People, are still here.” They, just like the bison, survived colonial efforts to wipe them out, however had been bodily separated after being compelled from their homelands in what’s now the southeastern United States.

In a significant Yuchi celebration referred to as the Green Corn Ceremony, there’s a dance to honor the connection between folks and the bison. For generations, it was handed on by individuals who had by no means seen one in individual.

Halay Turning Heart is a undertaking administrator for the Yuchi Language Project and a lifelong participant within the Green Corn Ceremony, together with the buffalo dance. The dance evokes “how buffalo sound when they’re running, shaking the ground” by way of stomping, she says.

Turning Heart says the animal was an summary idea for her as a baby — she solely knew it from photos. She by no means noticed a bison in individual till she reached maturity and visited her husband’s Lakota reservation in South Dakota.

“For my kids to actually be around buffalo and see them in real life, in their natural habitat, and have a better connection and understanding of who they are is very powerful,” Turning Heart says. It will “reveal more meaning to the buffalo dance that we’re still carrying on” and enhance respect for the dance and the creatures themselves.

The music for the Yuchi buffalo dance would not embrace the phrase for buffalo, and when the Yuchi Language Project began, Grounds says elders had bother remembering it. They had by no means seen one, and neither had their mother and father or grandparents.

“We didn’t think to put the name for the buffalo in our buffalo dance song, because who could ever imagine that these magnificent creatures would be slaughtered by the millions?” Grounds says.

Connecting with the pure world

Restoring the Yuchi language has allowed folks to reconnect with the land, crops and animals, Grounds and Turning Heart each say. For instance, Yuchi language would not have a separate phrase for animals as a class and references them with the identical pronoun as all non-Yuchi dwelling issues.

“Through the language, we’re learning that worldview and that respect that our elders held, which is a very different worldview than the dominant English society,” which sees animals as lesser beings, Turning Heart says.

Indigenous non secular connections to the pure world have traditionally been dismissed as unscientific or infantile with racist stereotypes. But Grounds factors out that the destructiveness of viewing every part as “nonliving, non-valued hunks of matter” has helped contribute to issues like local weather change and critical ecological issues.

For instance — tens of thousands and thousands of bison used to reside in North America, however by the late 1800s, that they had been practically pushed to extinction “through uncontrolled hunting and a U.S. policy of eradication tied to intentional harm against and control of Native American Tribes,” according to the Department of the Interior.

Grounds says that because the bison had been loaded onto trailers in Denver to be introduced again to Oklahoma, the noise of their hooves was thunderous and the scene was “very striking.” After practically 200 years of carrying on the buffalo dance with out having them round, “now I get to see how the buffalo dance really goes.”