For Immediate Release:
July 4, 2024

Contacts:
Mike Mease, Campaign Coordinator
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
406-830-7493

James Holt, Executive Director
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
208-791-3306

Yellowstone National Park – The National Park Service (NPS) recently released a statement which confirms their awareness of the birth of Wakan Gli, the white buffalo calf named in a recent ceremony led by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle. However, in doing so, they once again display the reflexive impulse that asserts Euro-American knowledge over Indigenous knowledge ways and generations-long relationships with the sacred buffalo.

NPS’ recent communication regarding the sacred white buffalo calf thrusts into plain view the contradiction that lies at the heart of the agency’s relations with Tribal nations. Despite public claims that the agency “honors with gratitude… Indigenous peoples and values their continuous connections to their homelands,” officials persist in the habit of positioning Indigenous views and lifeways as secondary to Euro-American priorities. 

“I am offended by the Park Service when their press release reads for me that me and my people, and our long relationship to the buffalo, is a footnote,” J. Dallas Gudgell, Vice President of the BFC Board expresses. “That they somehow should be credited for the miracle. I get to be offended and not everyone needs to like that.” 

Despite calls from Indigenous peoples to let the buffalo roam free across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in a population of 10,000 or more, the NPS and livestock interest groups stubbornly resist. They keep a suboptimal population constrained to artificial park boundaries in order to appease the state of Montana and its livestock lobby.  

While the NPS actively works against the buffalo achieving their greatest ecocultural potential, they pervert the birth of Wakan Gli, whose name means “Returns Sacred” and “Comes Holy,” as their own victory. The agency asserts: 

“The birth of a white bison calf may reflect the presence of a natural genetic legacy that was preserved in Yellowstone’s bison, which has revealed itself because of the successful recovery of a wild bison population of 3,000-6,000 animals.” 

This statement, published shortly after the ceremony acknowledging the birth of Wakan Gli—before and during which NPS rangers repeatedly asserted the calf was dead—spits in the face of the buffalo and the Indigenous people who advocate on its behalf. It perfectly embodies the contrast of Euro-American and Indigenous buffalo connections. The former is exploitative, while the latter is reciprocal. 

The settler-colonial conception of buffalo exists only in the context of extraction. Despite lauding the current management strategy as a “conservation success story” following intentional extirpation, our relatives are still imprisoned within the park and sent to slaughter as mere meat. They are belittled as “resources” to be managed for human convenience. 

“Mother Earth is the source of life… not a resource.” Chief Arvol Looking Horse reminds us. 

For the First People, on the other hand, Wakan Gli represents thousands of years of reciprocal relations with the buffalo. Instead of coldly centering genetics and quantitative science at such a time, the Indigenous people of Yellowstone recognize the spiritual significance of the white buffalo calf’s birth. 

“Colonized thinking,” Paula Horne-Mullen  bluntly describes the NPS’ recent press release. “Just because it’s not in their [NPS] eyesight—it shows how much they know about wild animals. It’s not a dancing bear or a trained elephant captive, to be penned up. Mama knows better that her baby’s life could be in danger.” 

Wakan Gli’s birth is a blessing and a warning. The sacred white buffalo calf signals to us two-leggeds that it is time to come together to heal the world we share. To sideline Indigenous voices at this time as a footnote to superficial, false victories would be to ignore this warning and continue along the path of ecological degradation.