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Yellowstone Bison Slaughter
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Article 3/20/05 |
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| Reborn
buffalo nickel not universally lauded
Symbolic meaning may vary with the beholder's ethnicity
or environmental views.
By Douglas Brown, The Denver Post
3/20/05 |
Pockets
and purses across America this month will rattle with
shiny new buffalo nickels, the first minting of the currency
since 1938.
The West trades in a pantheon of symbols -- cowboys, mountain
peaks, wagon trains, even the Golden Gate Bridge -- but
the bison persists as the most visible ambassador, a shorthand
for all things west of the Mississippi.
But what does it stand for?
The new nickel has an image of a bison on the tail side
and a profile of Thomas Jefferson on the head side. Jefferson
replaced the visage of an American Indian on the original
coin, which the mint produced from 1913 to 1938.
'Phoniest' symbol
But the bison is not something savored by Ben Sherman,
an Oglala Lakota and president of the Western American
Indian Chamber in Denver.
The bison as symbol of the West is "the phoniest
and most duplicitous sort of action by the United States
government," he says. "I think it's along the
lines of political branding, to make us feel better about
America's own dark past, of attempting to eliminate the
buffalo in order to eliminate the Indian people."
If the federal government really cherished the buffalo,
he says, it would not permit their slaughter in Yellowstone
National Park, and it would work to transform parts of
the Plains states into a "buffalo commons,"
where grasslands are restored and bison are permitted
to roam.
Millions of the shaggy beasts once galloped across the
West's undulating prairie, sacred to indigenous peoples
who depended on them for food, clothing, shelter and spiritual
guidance.
And then, encouraged by the U.S. government, white hunters
in the late 19th century nearly exterminated the bison,
their numbers diminished to fewer than 1,000 animals.
The logic was that by killing the bison, they'd kill the
Indians.
There's no such thing as a purely innocent symbol, but
some are more fraught than others. Many American Indians
don't celebrate the Statue of Liberty, but for a broad
chunk of America, the tall copper woman in New York Harbor
stands for compassion and freedom. The Liberty Bell? Triumph
and democratic idealism. Baseball? Hope and tradition.
Extermination was goal
The slaughter of millions of bison, with the concomitant
storm of death for American Indians, stands as a guilt-stirring
episode in the nation's history. And yet governments and
others brandish the victim of the carnage as a stand-in
for the West.
Frank Popper, the Rutgers University professor who, with
his scholar wife, Deborah, coined the term buffalo commons
in the late 1980s, called the bison a "slippery subject,"
that like other Western symbols trumpets nature and rural
culture, even though the West "in reality is quite
urban and suburban."
The bison, he says, "is commercial and it's wildlife
and it's mythic, all rolled up into one."
It also fits with the theme of the West, as presented
through its myriad symbols, as "a cornucopia, an
abundance of wildlife like the buffalo, of gold, of open
land," says Lisa Penaloza, a University of Colorado
marketing professor who has studied Western symbols.
"Part of the appeal of the buffalo is it's wild,"
she says. "We like to think of us as not tamed and
not domesticated, even though we very much are, and the
more tame we are, the more we look to these symbols of
utopia."
The nation supports about 250,000 bison today, many of
them raised for slaughter.
Linked to triumph, tragedy
The bison is a fitting symbol for the West "because
the animal is so tightly woven through the fabric of cultures
and climate of this part of the world," says Dave
Carter, director of the National Bison Association. "It's
tied in not only with the triumphs, but with the tragedies,
the way Native Americans were treated."
As a symbol, "should we look at (bison) and think
on what we have done?" asks Ruth Rudner, a longtime
Montana author who wrote the book "A Chorus of Buffalo."
"Maybe thinking on what we have done, and how we
are capable of righting what we have done, maybe that
makes it not at all a symbol for sadness, but of possibility,"
she says.
To most Americans, writes Temple University history professor
Andrew Isenberg, author of the book "The Destruction
of the Bison," in an e-mail, the buffalo "is
a symbol of majestic, wild nature in the West."
"For others who reflect on the bison's near extinction
in the 19th century, it is a symbol of a sordid, shortsighted
environmental catastrophe," he continues. "For
still others, who focus on the effort to preserve the
bison, it is a symbol of public-spirited conservation.
And for some people, I think, the bison is somewhat incongruously
all of these things simultaneously."
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