MERGING WITH A BUFFALO

Heart Butte, as a community and as a school, has been hit hard by the struggle to preserve their identity while still participating in the world.  It’s only made worse when outsiders come in, because it takes a long time of “being there” to understand from the inside.  The new theories of how a person claims an identity and empathy with other identities are “phenomenological” which has been a term of contempt in the past.  It means that mammal bodies are based on their sensory interaction with the world, not just the five senses that are specialized by organs, but with the cellular records (memory) of subtleties like direction, proximity, wave impacts from light and sound, and so on.  This is how mind is created.  Memory is sensory based.

To be a Blackfeet, or other denizen of the pre-contact prairie, one literally ingested buffalo: the smell, the taste, the sound, the patterns of grazing, the means of killing and preparing to eat, the metabolism of meat, stomach contents, and all the other aspects of “inni,” who were called by the old people “real meat.”  As opposed to ‘nothing meat’, like lesser animals or even birds.  Men who took loads of fur hides to the east for purposes of trade, said that they hated to go because it meant not having “real meat,” being forced to eat “nothing meat.”

So when the superintendent, Greg Hirst, opened up the school to the idea that they should “become Blackfeet again”, that meant learning through their bodies, their senses, what a buffalo “is.”  When I was there, Leo Zackowski, the biology teacher, had borrowed a kit from the Montana wildlife people.  In the kit was a set of tanned sample squares of hide, hair-on, of each of the various game animals in Montana: deer, moose, elk, wolf, bobcat, and so on.  The idea was to feel them so as to know and name them.  Any oldtimer would find this obvious.  Aside from a few boys who had hunted with their grandfathers, I was the only one who could do it — because of being married to a taxidermist.

This sent the boys in particular into a state of rage, deprivation, yearning, and diminished self-worth.  They were no longer hunters, they no longer walked the barricades of the mountains or the long stretches of prairie or the coulees that marked the streams.  Hirst knew about this.  Betty N. Cooper and her daughter, Theda New Breast, understood.  This is NOT the same thing as celebrating your Scots grandparents by eating haggis.  It is much deeper and more crucial.  There are still plenty of people back in Scotland who can eat haggis.

When the idea of giving the Blackfeet some buffalo from the bison range first came up, the whites in charge were told the tribe would accept the buffalo only if they could kill them.  It had been a standard agreement when selling the animals that the new owners WOULDN’T kill the first generation, so the managers were shocked and repelled.  They had visions of a starving people scarfing down the animals, bull first, like the possibly apocryphal stories from the 19th century about beef issues that had been meant to be breeding herds.  But the tribe asked, “Are these going to be our animals or not?”  And there was enough pressure from increasing numbers that finally the buffalo were transferred.  You can see them often along Highway 2 between Browning and East Glacier.

A few years ago at Blackfeet Community College someone had the idea of killing and processing a buffalo.  I wish I knew more about that.  I wasn’t there.  I'm told it took all day for the students, some of whom knew very well how to butcher a cow, to skin, disembowel (which meant eventually crawling inside the carcass to detach pieces), de-bone, and then cut the muscle meat into thin strips to hang on a framework over a drying fire.  I don’t know whether anyone tried tearing out a mouthful of liver and squeezing onto it a bit of yellow bile as though that were mustard.  I don’t think they boiled the bones to get the marrow out, but maybe.  I need to find out what the students wrote and said.

Theda New Breast and Betty N. Cooper

The mother/daughter team helped the Heart Butte students take apart a buffalo.  After the dry meat was ready, they organized a feast for the whole community.  The students who were part of this will never wonder again about one aspect of what it was like to be an old-time Nitsiitahpi.  I’m hearing about it from thirty miles away.  It’s not my place to claim this ceremony — but then again, it exists.  They’re reality; I’m theory, a bridge.  

The bodies of the bison and the bodies of the people were once again one, literally merged.  In the old days they formed a circle of survival in a specific ecology which is what tribes are about, how homeostasis works.  But what’s most wonderful about Cooper and New Breast is how colorfully, how aesthetically, how joyfully they pursue such things.  And how, in their day jobs, they link these projects to the care of individuals, through a visiting helper program.

I see my role not as being a part of this specifically located and targeted program, but as an interface with the larger planet, not to promote trade or tourism but to get at some of the things we have forgotten or are newly learning about bodies, flesh.  This buffalo event is an anchor point.  Over the years I’ve accumulated a shelf of books specifically about the issues of flesh (not about Indians) and now I want to investigate them, searching for some kind of core about being a human mammal evolved, we now suspect, not from a monkey or any other primate, but far, far, earlier.  The kindling of life -- scientists now propose -- happened deep in the sea when conditions blew a little bubble that became the skin of a cell which gradually figured out how to go towards things it wanted and away from things that would destroy it, which is the beginning of self-managed homoeostasis.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-life-is-not-a-thing-but-a-restless-manner-of-being

“A restless manner of being” is as good a description of flesh-and-blood humans on the prairie as it is an account of grazing buffalo.

Heart Butte

BODY BIB

Fisher, Seymour and Cleveland, Sidney E.  “Body Image and Personality”,  Dover, 1958,

Gamble, Clive.  “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory.”  Cambridge, 2007.

Hutchinson, Marcia Germaine  “Transforming Body Image:  Learning to Love the Body you Have.”  The Crossing Press, 1985.

Keleman, Stanley  “Somatic Reality: Bodily Experience and Emotional Truth.”  Center Press, Berkeley.  1979

Kurtz, Ron and Prestera, Hector, MD.  “The Body Reveals:  An Illustrated Guide to the Psychology of the Body.” 1969

Mains, Geoff  “Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality”.  Gay Sunshine. 1984

Nelson, James B.   “Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology.” Augsburg, 1978

Page, David W. M.D.  “Body Trauma: A Writer’s Guide to Wounds and Injuries.”  1996,

Scarry, Elaine  “The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World”  Oxford, 1985

____  editor, “Literature and the Body:  Essays on Populations and Persons’  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988

Selzer, Richard  “Rituals of Surgery.”  Simon and Schuster, Touchstone,1974

Spicker, Stuart F. , editor.  “The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism”  Quadrangle/NY Times Book Co., 1970

IN THE PRESENCE OF THE BUFFALO by Daniel Brister

When it comes to me writing about Daniel Brister’s book, “In the Presence of the Buffalo: Working to Stop the Yellowstone Slaughter,” I have to be very careful not to sound patronizing, so I’ll put the info for how to help this movement right at the beginning.  There is a PayPal donate button on the website and things to buy.  Your contributions of songs, poems, etc. are invited. 

Dan, as of October, 2013, was fund-raising on the east coast.  Like so many spontaneous little groups fired by idealism, this is now a formal organization that requires maintenance in order to keep paying salaries for Brister and others.

Media & Outreach
Buffalo Field Campaign
P.O. Box 957
West Yellowstone, MT 59758
406-646-0070
bfc-media"at"wildrockies.org
http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org

As Doug Peacock notes in his foreword, charismatic megamammals have inspired humans since the first auroch was sketched on a cave wall.  Of course, Peacock has become a bit of a megamammal himself.  His participation is a major endorsement.

Daniel Brister

Brister came to Montana right out of high school and was drawn into the Yellowstone Buffalo issue right away -- and in the most dramatic way, as a physical intervener trying to prevent the killing of buffs who leave the park in winter because there is not enough grazing inside it.  When they emerge, they come onto cattle grazing lands where they threaten to spread brucellosis and eat valuable grass that ranchers expected to use.  The fifteen-year-long pitched battle between authorities wanting to cull the herd and the youngsters wanting to save every animal produces this little book, written in the chiaroscuro of righteousness.  

The book is in five chapters that take on five points of view, none of them flattering to the authorities or offering a viable solution to the problem of limited range.  The present standing  bison-management agreement in force is due to expire in 2015, so it’s time to start thinking and campaigning.   

The first chapter explains how Brister got involved, since he is from back east, and sets up his poetic metaphor of collecting buffalo fur from barbed wire snags in order to make a hat from it.  This is associated with a vision involving his mother.  The second explains how in 1997 he came to be in the field, actually chasing the buffs through the snow, though much of his work has been in an office, doing publicity and so on.  The third relates buffalo mysticism to Sioux Indian beliefs and the fourth sketches the wickedness of the open range years of the American plains.  The fifth goes back to the personal intervention of people emotionally dedicated to this big iconic beast.

Brister doesn’t tell lies -- he just leaves a lot out.  In 92 pages one could hardly begin to address the complexity and ambiguity of this situation.  One of the problems is pinning down brucellosis, also known as “undulant fever,” which is quite real and not trivial.  At an early ASLE conference Barney Nelson, an expert on the matter, brought along a Crow Indian rancher named Small (who was not small in any sense!) to describe what it was like for a human to catch the disease from skinning a donated shot animal.  He spent the whole winter flattened on his sofa, fighting fever, fatigue, aching, etc.  Yet the more romantic at the meeting insisted that brucellosis was an invented disease, made up as an excuse to kill the bison.

Another issue that is slippery, because it is “science” and yet political, is the objection to cow genes being in buffalo, since they will mate with domestic bovines, which has been happening since early days.  The government maintains herds of buffalo that have been culled for animals with cow genes, but so far as I know none of the tribal herds have been tested this way.   Maybe it’s not surprising, considering what would happen if every Blackfeet were tested for Euro-genes and killed if they were found.  I often pass the Blackfeet herd which is kept along the highway on the approach to East Glacier.

When a rancher near here raised a sizable herd of buffs for sale to restaurants where people surrender their admiration for bison in order to eat buffalo burgers, no one went over to insist they be tested for purity nor did anyone risk serious injury to protect them.  To be fair, no one did that on behalf of the cows either.  These issues are compartmented, but they just about have to be in order to think about them.  In the end the rancher went back to cows because there was more money in them.

This book is considered here because the Valier librarian asked me to take a look.  A person named K.H. Brandt in Florida with the nicely oxymoronic email monicker of “Turtle on the Wing” was enough in sympathy with the issue to send copies to the Montana public libraries.  He won’t find as many romantics in Valier as in Missoula, but that’s natural.  Even ecological.

This bull was VERY angry: pissing, drooling, bellowing, compressed into a spring.

That's me just above his hump.  He did NOT smell like anyone's mother.

My relationship with buffalos goes back to when I was 21, new on the Blackfeet Reservation.  Since I was working with Bob Scriver in his Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, an offshoot of his shop and studio, I put my hands on a bull buffalo every day -- he was standing in the museum, a casualty of a duel to the death with another bull.  We rode in the Moiese buffalo roundup for several years and at one point I even tried to turn  back a whole herd of buffs -- or rather my horse did.  I just went along for the ride, a kind of shrieker, futilely waving my hat.  The animals were not rounded up to be killed, necessarily, but to be counted, branded, given shots, live-sold to ranchers.  We didn’t cull for purity in 1962.  We just tried not to be killed ourselves.  

This is me feeding apples to the two orphaned pets of the Moiese range.  You had to watch out for the little buff because she would sneak up behind you and butt you in the butt so you went flat on your face.

Daniel presses his buffalo hair collection to his nose, inhaling what he fancies to be the scent of his mother.  That wouldn’t work for me nor would I worry about much flesh being torn out of a buffalo by the little prongs on barbed wire.  But what I know is from direct observation.  

Many years later I went to a writing seminar led by Peter Matthiessen.  I talked about buffalo being narrow from side-to-side, which impressed me when I watched from a catwalk above the animals in chutes.  One of the young men outright accused me of lying -- he seemed to think it was a criticism, a diminishment.  In fact, it’s what makes them so able to pivot on the attack.  Also, their front legs are balanced on a fulcrum almost halfway between their nose and tail so that when they go on the jump, gravity gives them an advantage.  The young man didn’t like THAT either.  How could a forty-year-old female school teacher know ANYTHING about a charismatic megamammal full of macho?  Matthiessen quietly assured him I was right but the guy could hardly look at me after that.

So what I’m saying is that this little book is an effective representation of that point of view, but it’s not much more than that, except for being a good fundraiser.

"The Buffalo Runner" by Bob Scriver