This massive expanse of land was their home, where they were with family, until they weren’t. There was a time when buffalo were plentiful across North America, with estimates that their numbers were in the tens of millions. The destruction of the buffalo population was part of the campaign to destroy Native Americans and clear the way for settler colonialism in the U.S., and a documentary film being screened at the San Diego International Film Festival this month explores the decades of work to reunite the buffalo with their land and their people, the Blackfeet Nation.
“Bring Them Home/Aiskótáhkapiyaaya” chronicles the obstacles, the wins, the reeducation, and reconnection to Indigenous culture found in returning wild buffalo to the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.
“We’re really excited to be a part of it. It was really important because Ivy and I both grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation and we’re really connected to our culture and understand the deep significance and connection that we have to bison as Blackfeet people,” says Ivan MacDonald, a director, writer, and producer of the film. (His sister, Ivy MacDonald is also a co-director, as well as Daniel Glick, another director, writer, and producer.) “So, when the story was presented to us, we were really intrigued and really interested in helping to tell it.” Glick had been researching and developing the project for a few years before the MacDonalds joined, and the film is executive produced and narrated by Academy Award nominee, Lily Gladstone. The San Diego festival is Oct. 16 to 20, and “Bring Them Home” will be shown at 10:15 a.m. and again at 1 p.m. on Oct. 20 at the AMC 14 UTC theater in La Jolla.
Ivan MacDonald is a member of the Blackfeet Nation and an Emmy-winning filmmaker based in Montana. His work includes “Blackfeet Boxing Not Invisible” for ESPN’s 30 for 30, along with “When They Were Here,” about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. He took some time to talk about “Bring Them Home,” the significance of the buffalo to Blackfeet culture and history, and the healing that comes with their return. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: What did you know about the buffalo and its relationship to your Blackfeet culture, before beginning work on this film?
A: Yeah, I grew up knowing that bison-iinnii, the Blackfeet word for bison-were raised to understand their significance. In some of our creation stories, the creator created us, the Blackfeet creator (that we call Napi Natoosi, which means Father Sun) created us and then created the bison shortly after, so we could have sustenance. The bison provided a lot of our tools and definitely our teepees, which were made out of bison. I viewed them really cognizant of that aspect, but we were also really aware of the spiritual connection, so a lot of our ceremonies are centered around bison. As we mentioned in the film, there’s a specific ceremony that Blackfeet call an okan, which is kind of like a Blackfeet version of the sun dance and bison is kind of central to that. We use their hide to put up the lodge, the tongues are used for a ceremony, the meat is consumed during the ceremony-pretty much everything is used and the skull is presented to the person who completes the ceremony at the end, and the horns. We were really brought up understanding this importance of bison, even if there was no bison readily accessible on the reservation. I know, for a lot of the ceremonial stuff, people used to go down to Yellowstone to get their bison, so growing up with that knowledge, we were able to implement a lot of it into the film. I think when Ivy and I were brought on, that’s what we were able to help with. We were able to help with creating the cultural, spiritual connection.
Q: How would you describe the significance of the buffalo in Blackfeet history, culture, and identity?
A: I think we’re inextricably linked. I think our genocide and assimilation mirrors theirs pretty closely. In the film, we talk about how there was a targeted attack to not only eradicate Blackfeet people, but also the bison. There were a lot of similar aspects of assimilation, like trying to bring them in as livestock, but there was also a very clear and deliberate genocide, which not only had cultural, spiritual, and ceremonial loss for the Blackfeet, but kind of created ecological problems as a whole for the United States. So, I think our connection to them is inextricably linked in that aspect because we kind of framed it in the film where we talked about how there is no Blackfeet without the bison and there’s no bison without the Blackfeet. I think that link between all of us, our connections, is just something that’s incredibly important; we revere the bison and it’s central to a lot of our story. We have a sacred buffalo women’s society, the Maotokiiks, and it’s always been kind of a core tenet of our culture and ceremony has been these animals.
Q: In the film, you include a quote from Union army officer Grenville M. Dodge in 1867, in which he says, “Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Who was Dodge and what was happening in 1867 that led to this kind of campaign?
A: Grenville served under Ulysses S. Grant and he was really involved in a lot of the early settling with European settlers, colonists, who arrived on the East Coast of the country and then, slowly, over the expanse of 300 to 400 years, went westward. It was “settling land,” destroying Indigenous culture and history and people along the way. Later in that timeframe of the west really beginning to be settled, there’s Manifest Destiny, this philosophical underpinning that the government undertook to talk about this divine right to colonizers and settlers to settle the West and push out Indigenous communities. So, Dodge was paramount in a lot of that. A lot of the work he was doing was prior to the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, of 1887. So, around that timeframe, the government was kind of trying to look for different ways to open up the western part of the United States for settlement. A big thing that came through was why were Indigenous communities so set on this specific area-the plains, the West? Oh, it has to do with how bison are really central, I think they understood the importance of bison to our existence-using the tools, using the meat, stuff like that. With this westward expansion to manifest destiny, they kind of realized that they could slowly get rid of Native Americans by cutting off the food supply. That was a big thing with the bison. It was the deliberate attack on bison and a jumpstart of their genocide. Within that timeframe, the West was being settled to accelerate the colonization of the West. They decided to go for bison because they were so central, especially in this area, in the communities and there was the hope that once the bison were eradicated, that forced Indigenous people to civilize them culturally because their main form of sustenance wasn’t there anymore.
Q: And, how did this purposeful elimination of the buffalo align with colonialism and the genocide of Indigenous people?
A: That’s been an interesting, kind of deliberate aspect of that through the history of colonization of Indigenous people, so that was a big thing. A lot of it was, essentially, kind of an anthropological study of us as a people, to understand what was our main form of sustenance? OK, we’ll go after bison. What is our main form of government and land stewardship? Collective kinship. That’s something we mention in the film, too, during the time of the creation of the reservation system, President (Theodore) Roosevelt said it was “a mighty pulverizing engine” to the collective kinship of Indigenous communities. I think that it’s always been kind of linked, this acute understanding of Indigenous culture and our way of life. The government had a lot of deliberate acts to upend that, so that included the bison and destroying our land because after destroying the bison and opening up our land for settlements, they placed us on small plots of land under the Dawes Act and then opened up the remaining land that Indigenous people had. It was something like 200 to 300 million acres of land was then ceded to settlement and non-Indigenous settlers.
Q: Where did this hope for a return of the buffalo begin?
A: In the film we talk about how there was always this desire, this drive to somehow bring back bison. There were these smaller efforts over the decades, and the better half of probably 100 years, to bring back wild bison, so the efforts of the Blackfeet kind of began about 60 years or so ago when they had brought back a specific wild herd. So, they brought back some wild buffalo and they couldn’t find anyone to manage them. In the film, we kind of showed these different aspects of how there was a herd brought back in the ’60s, it didn’t work out, and they had to get rid of them. There was a herd that they tried to bring back in the ’90s, it wasn’t successful, and they got rid of them. There was a herd in the 2000s that was successful and they still got rid of them. It was actually the Iinnii Initiative, which is the current initiative, that really did a deep dive what didn’t work in the past. What can we do to rectify those issues, and then, how can we provide a really established infrastructure to be able to even handle bringing back the bison? It was these efforts over the last century or so, but the community really started to understand and look at what could be achieved by bringing back bison. The Iinnii Initiative has been really active for maybe the last 10 or 12 years and they’ve been one of the longest standing bison revitalization programs in the U.S.
Q: Can you talk about the process to prepare for the return of the buffalo? What’s necessary to reconnect after such a long separation? What did reeducating the people look like?
A: I think the Iinnii Initiative did a really good job at that. They were founded by community members. Of course, there were other outside entities, like the Wildlife Conservation Society, who were early proponents of it. They turned to the Blackfeet elders and the elders were like, ‘OK, we need to include community, we need to include culture, we need to include language, we need to include the youth.’ So, Paulette Fox, who’s one of the subjects in the film, she explains it as going from the ground level, up. It was community organizing and when you let the communities buy in, then they went to the tribal council, to tribal leaders, entities. That was largely an early success. Also, in the film, we talk about a huge barrier to bringing back the bison, was the lack of land for them. So, we talk about the historical aspect of Indigenous communities forced into ranching and farming, and how that was really limiting and just something that wasn’t historically how we operated as a group because land was more of a collective kinship-based model. So, when the bison were brought back, they were going to need huge swaths of land to sustain them. That’s where the effort started of retiring cattle leases, which hadn’t been really done before that point, because cattle ranching has understandably been really important to the financial health of the tribe. We kind of touched on how we needed land, but how do we do that? So, they decided to establish conservation areas, the leaders understood as needing to be able to set aside land and designate it with this conservation status so that it will be this ever-prescient model and infrastructure to house these animals. They set aside a few million acres by one of the most sacred places on the reservation, Chief Mountain (Ninastakoo) established the conservation area that borders Glacier National Park, it borders Canada. I don’t think most people know that there’s historical precedent for bison to be in that specific area. There’s some scientific, anthropological research, archaeological research that shows that bison were in that area 10,000 years ago. So, that was part of the effort to bring back this this herd. The tribe had to place a lot of this infrastructure in place and kind of create this framework that just wasn’t there and didn’t kind of exist anywhere outside of Yellowstone. Those were some of the steps they had to take.
Q: There was support for returning the buffalo from outside of the Blackfeet community, from the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York City, which understood the ecological role of the buffalo to the environment. Can you talk about some of those ecological benefits the buffalo provide to the land and other animals?
A: The scientific term for bison is that they’re a keystone species, meaning they’re a species that is kind of at the top of the ecological food chain, ecological environmental chain. So, bison are kind of this paramount species to these specific areas. At one point in history, bison were one of the most proliferated mammals in the United States. They went as far east as New York, far south as Mexico, far north as the Arctic Circle. There were estimates that there were millions of bison at a given time, roaming the United States. So, there have been all of these historical elements of bison in the area. To put it in direct terms, their existence has largely been a part of the evolution of North America. They were there for the beginning and were one of the ever-present animals in the area. They are kind of perfectly fit to the climates we have in the United States. When we talk about keystone, we’re talking about the ecological health of their wallows, where they roll on their backs on the ground, create little ponds of moisture that help small mammals and frogs and other animals that need water. Then, there’s also their hooves. Bison are incredible animals; they’re like seven feet tall, 90% muscle, can jump six to seven feet in the air, but they have these tiny, little hooves that aerate the soil and spread seeds and pollen and grass. Then, they graze in this patchwork pattern where they’ll graze one specific area and go to another area to graze. Their grazing patterns are really kind of conducive to healthy prairie grass, as opposed to the flip side with cattle, which are kind of a lollipop or ice cream species. They’ll go for the most lush, fertile grass to graze until that ecosystem is kind of destroyed and it takes a while for it to recover.
Q: Do you see any parallels between the benefit the buffalo bring to their surroundings, and that of the Blackfeet and other Indigenous peoples to their environments?
A: I’m rereading a book right now that I read years ago called “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles Mann. He talks about when European settlers first came to the Americas, they were kind of amazed at the ecological infrastructure-there were trees perfectly removed for settlement and setting up housing, there were prime areas set up for fishing and hunting. When the settlers first arrived, they were like, ‘Oh, wow, look. This land must be divine because it’s been tended to, manicured, and well maintained for us, for our benefit.’ It turns out that a lot of the Indigenous communities have been using these land stewardship practices of conservation, fire management techniques. I was reading a study which talked a lot about how the historical fire management techniques in places like California were, historically, so beneficial to the environmental health of the area. Since they’ve been slowly destroyed and eroded over 200- to 300-plus years, that’s contributed to why the wildfires are so dire when they happen. We talk about how we learn to tend to the land by viewing bison, by watching their patterns, by watching how they interact with their environment. I think people always kind of think of Indigenous people as framed as kind of hippie, nature loving people. Of course, we are that. I like to say we are that, but we also understand the very distinct, unique, ecological and environmental areas we find ourselves in and we kind of tend to those in a way that is not overgrazing, it’s not exploiting an area. It’s understanding that we have a really finite resource that we have to protect because this is our land. The ways in which bison kind of protect and steward the land, I think Indigenous communities do a lot of that in the same way.
Q: In what ways has the homecoming of the buffalo brought healing to the Blackfeet Nation?
A: It’s been really interesting to see some of the feedback to the film, some of the feedback to the efforts of the community, some of the feedback of just when people see this work. I always tell people that Indigenous communities are kind of the canary in the coal mine. Like, whatever happens politically, it happens to other communities later down the road. Whatever happens environmentally, it happens to other communities down the road. So, I’m always aware that the reception of the bisons’ return has been incredible. It’s a big, big undertaking, a big effort. And, the tribe is currently trying to work on getting all of the animals out there because they’re very much based on place and kinship, so splitting them up doesn’t work. Within the community, and around the world, the efforts to return them have been very well received. It’s something that people are investing time, energy, resources, and money into because I think a lot of us see, in the long term, it won’t just benefit Blackfeet and Indigenous communities, but that it could benefit every community.
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