A tribal food systems fellow says that Buffalo are good for the land, but they also teach us how to relate to place, to other beings, and to ourselves.
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A tribal food systems fellow says that Buffalo are good for the land, but they also teach us how to relate to place, to other beings, and to ourselves.
June 25, 2025
Photo courtesy of Elsie DuBray.
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By Elsie DuBray, in conversation with Civil Eats
Han mitakuyepi. Cantewasteya nape ceyuzapi ksto. Mahipiya Ile Win emaciyapi na wasituya micaje kin Elsie DuBray na Oohenunpa Lakota na Nueta na Hidatsa hemaca na Waka Waste Oyanke hemantanhan ksto.
Hello, relatives. I greet you all with a good heart. My name is Mahpiya Ile Win, and my English name is Elsie DuBray. I am Two Kettle Lakota, Mandan, and Hidatsa, and I come from the Cheyenne River Reservation, in what is now known as South Dakota.
We as Lakota people came from the center of the earth, out of what is called Wind Cave, in He Sapa, the Black Hills, the heart of everything and the center of our universe. There are multiple iterations of our creation story, but in one, when we first emerged from the Earth, it was clear there was going to be a lot of hardship, that our people would starve and would not be able to live in this new world. As a sacrifice, the last woman out of the cave transformed into a Buffalo, giving herself to feed the people. From that moment on, our people committed ourselves to honor the Buffalo in gratitude; we had an understanding that we would always take care of each other.
I had always heard that as women we learned how to be mothers from the Buffalo, observing how they care for their young. I have to admit, I had minimized this to a somewhat sterile, biological relationship, until one particular day.
I was out among the Buffalo, and I had been there watching for some time and they weren’t paying attention to me anymore. They were resting, and it was really peaceful. There was a mother lying down, and her calf came up to her, not to nurse, not to do anything. She just came up to her mother and they nuzzled each other and held their heads together. It really felt like I’d witnessed a hug or a kiss, and I felt how tender and real it was, and I started crying on the spot. I don’t know how to communicate just how genuine it was. It was love.
The Buffalo have a lot to teach us. But we are still, as we speak, facing the consequences of the federal government’s genocidal campaign, where they killed the Buffalo, intentionally trying to kill us. And it did kill a lot of us, and it killed a lot of things inside of us. Make no mistake: both were intentional.
When you have a people whose entire social structure is modeled after the Buffalo, an economy modeled after the Buffalo, a food system centered on the Buffalo, and then all of a sudden the Buffalo are not present in our everyday lives—a relationship violently and actively withheld from us, for generations—you can understand that some people may struggle with a sense of purpose.
The Buffalo teach us how to relate to place. They teach us how to relate to other beings. They teach us how to relate to ourselves. They teach us these valuable lessons that ground us and our experience in this world, about who we are and how to have strength and belief and love for ourselves and this life.
So, to me, Buffalo restoration isn’t just the next eco-trend or hot new social justice campaign. I see Buffalo restoration as food sovereignty. I see it as language revitalization. I see it as suicide prevention. I see it as an economic alternative to a capitalist society.
I see it as the path towards a healthful Indigenous futurism and the imagination of an otherwise-world. I see it as essential to the continuation of my people on this Earth. It’s not just some romanticized image of Buffalo and Native people; it’s really, truly the core of who we are.
I only heard about Buffalo corridors because my dad talked about them as being a really big deal. He told stories of his late friend, Rocke Afraid of Hawk, who talked about a corridor between the Cheyenne River Reservation and the Pine Ridge Reservation, and then maybe others, and how this was not only a way to bring Buffalo back together, but to bring Lakota people back together too.
Something my dad always taught me is that the more Buffalo that can roam on more land, the better. They should never be in tiny groups, nor on small bits of land. You’re not doing them any favors if you have five Buffalo on a few acres with no plan or space to grow the herd. When my dad worked for our Tribe, he built the herd up to almost 5,000 head, and he said the more the herd grew, you could just see it: It looked better, it felt better, it felt more natural. You could feel this sort of healing in real time. Everyone could.
“Lakota people have always been here and will always be here, and so have the Buffalo, and they will persist.”
Buffalo deserve to be their free whole selves. End of story. But I also think people don’t realize that it’s in all of our best interests from a climate perspective. You’re not getting the same sort of healing potential for the land if you have this one herd on this one sector of the prairie, only restoring native grasses there, or in one national park or on one ranch, or a handful of ranches. Corridors are really interesting and exciting to me, because they offer the potential for something different in a really big way.
Obviously, policy change is still necessary and could aid in this. And there are certainly political barriers in place. But I get excited about corridors because they offer a tangible alternative to the fragmentation and compartmentalization that limit Buffalo restoration today. If we can remove some of these barriers, providing the space for the reestablishment of migratory patterns and reuniting more land with more Buffalo, we’re starting to talk about large-scale ecosystem revitalization. Not just a healthier couple thousand acres here and there, but improved soil health, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, drought resistance, and more, on a climate-solutions level.
When I think about borders and fences, I think about limitations. And, necessarily, I think about the cattle industry and all it represents. To me, this is getting into the real nitty gritty, because when they nearly killed off the buffalo, what did they do? They put us on reservations, which have borders and allow us our little space to exist in.
I love my reservation and where I’m from; it’s the most beautiful place in the world to me. But it is not lost on me or my body or my lived experience that it’s also a really hard place to be from. And that’s exactly as it was intended, and that there’s these limitations on where you’re allowed to be Native and where you’re allowed to be yourself—and how much of yourself you’re allowed to be, as defined by the United States settler-colonial government.
And then we’re told that we need to be farmers and ranchers, and we need to put up these fences to separate what’s mine from what’s yours from what’s theirs. All of these things are fragmentations, divisions. Cattle culture says we need to fence these little cattle ranches off, further and further and further fragmenting our relationship to land, our relationship to animals and in the way that we are supposed to then relate them, to fit more and more into a capitalistic, individualistic society. So it’s not just the literal fences of these cattle ranches. It’s the fencing of our minds that comes with it, and everything that the cattle industry comes to represent in modern America, its origins, and the perpetuation of the settler state.
I think there are a lot of people who are interested in Buffalo restoration, who are curious, who are like, “Oh my God, traditional ecological knowledge, that’s so cool,” well-meaning people who really do think that there’s a lot to be learned from Native people. And also, people are seeing that they have to believe that Native people do have these answers—because we are facing the consequences of not seeing it.
Unfortunately, though, that’s all it is. This is still pretty much as it has always been: an extractive relationship. They want the ideas; they don’t want the people. And they sure as hell don’t want those people to have agency. Whenever there’s a seat at these climate tables for Native people, it is always about providing something. It’s, “How can we use you to save ourselves?” That’s not to say every person thinks like that, but on a functional level, that’s what’s happening.
And frankly, on this land and as a Native person, I’m like, if you want a climate solution that is specific to this place, as I believe it needs to be, you simply have to shut up and listen to the people who are from that place. You are inviting me to the table? That’s actually our table, and you are in our restaurant. And you’re making a mess.
People are so happy, sometimes, to pull up a chair for Native folks, but they don’t want to admit that it’s not their table and it’s not their restaurant. So sometimes I think the best thing we can do is flip the table over.
I want our planet to live as much as the next person does. And so it’s really frustrating to me when everybody wants to create something new so they don’t have to lose anything. Sometimes we have to give something up, and nobody wants to.
It’s hard for me to think far into the future, so far down, thousands of years from now, and dream of the ideal otherwise-world and what it could look like. That’s because I try to focus on what meaningful progress looks like now, at this point in time, where I’m situated in the cosmos, in the generation I was born to, and the time period that falls in—within this long, long story of Lakota people in Buffalo. I’m just this little snippet of it, and there’s so much beauty in that.
Lakota people have always been here and will always be here, and so have the Buffalo, and they will persist. I love Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book, As We Have Always Done, and how she articulates this idea of Indigenous resurgence. In that same vein, the Buffalo will exist, Lakota people will exist, and we will exist together, as we have always done. And it won’t be a fight to do that every day. It’ll just be normal.
That’s the most beautiful future I can imagine for my descendants. When I think of being a good ancestor, most simply put, it is of working towards a world where it’s simply normal for us to be our full selves, as Lakota people and as Buffalo, together again.
Editor’s note: Civil Eats receives funding from the First Nations Development Institute. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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We all want to discover our authentic selves and pass on our ancestral wisdom to our progeny. May we be privileged to do so.
I'm an ND gal and totally appreciate your Dakota culture and lessons.