Bring back the bison: Indigenous ranchers in Texas push for buffalo conservation

DALLAS — The sun hangs low over the horizon as a black pickup crunches the gravel road. As the truck comes to a stop, bright dark eyes stare nervously out of its trailer, whites bulging as a thick furry neck twists about for a better look.

The creature is restless — and for good reason. It has traveled hundreds of miles from Missouri to the GP Ranch in Sulphur Springs, northeast of Dallas. Theda Pogue, who owns GP Ranch with her husband Chris, knows it’s only a matter of time before restlessness turns into something else.

Pogue clambers into a golf cart and the pick-up and trailer follow close behind. Once the trailer is lined up with a pen overgrown with tall grass, the animal bursts out, an American bison in all its six-foot, shaggy-headed, humped-shoulder glory.

For Pogue, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the sight of the bison, and the others that arrived with it on this late October day, is a kind of cultural homecoming. She and many other Indigenous ranchers in Texas and across the United States are part of a growing initiative to bring bison back to their lands. This effort is reconnecting Indigenous people with their heritage and helping to establish economic sovereignty in their communities. It’s also reviving North American grasslands.

Lone survivors

In prehistoric times, bison roamed all over North America, from Alaska to Mexico, from the Nevada’s Great Basin to the eastern Appalachian Mountains.

An estimated 30 million bison dominated the Great Plains by the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in the 15th century. Three hundred years later, the westward expansion of European settlers, the development of the Transcontinental Railroad and the U.S. military’s encouragement of bison hunting to force Indigenous people into reservations reduced the wild population to less than 1,000 animals.

Remaining bison, or buffalo as the animals are called by Indigenous people, were gathered into herds and safeguarded, said Dawn Sherman, the executive director of the Tanka Fund, a South Dakota-based nonprofit that helps Indigenous ranchers obtain bison.

“During the slaughter of the buffalo in the 1800s, it was ranchers in the north and south that hid a small amount of buffalo,” Sherman said, citing examples in the Wyoming area and in South Texas.

These and subsequent conservation efforts by private, public and government entities have bolstered bison numbers: 20,500 Plains bison roam in conservation herds (which aren’t bred with cattle) and 420,000 in commercial herds (which are managed as domestic livestock and may be bred with cattle ), according to the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife. None of these animals roam as freely as their ancestors once did.

Restoring Indigenous communities

With the decimation of the bison came the loss of the Indigenous way of life, Pogue and Sherman said. Now, Native communities are reclaiming their cultural heritage and autonomy through bison conservation and stewardship.

Currently, there are about 30,000 bison on tribal lands, according to the National Bison Association. While bison have been transferred as part of conservation efforts in the last few decades through organizations like the National Wildlife Federation, the number of transfers rose after the historic 2014 signing of the “buffalo treaty,” a cross-border agreement between 13 Indigenous nations in the U.S. and Canada to restore bison to 6.3 million acres of tribal land.

For federally recognized tribes, the process of repopulating their lands with sustainable bison herds is fairly straightforward. Organizations such as the InterTribal Buffalo Council — which formed in 1992 as a collective of 19 tribes and now spans 84 tribes across 21 states — distribute animals from preserves to member tribes. For Indigenous ranchers like Pogue operating outside of tribal leadership, bison stewardship doesn’t have the same support and is far more expensive.

In January 2018, when she and her husband were buying their first herd — five cows and a bull — from a private rancher, the couple cashed out their retirement funds.

“The first herd of bison I think cost about $12,000,” Pogue said.

The high costs of acquiring and maintaining bison, including fencing to keep them from roaming free and veterinary care, are often an economic barrier to individual ranchers, Sherman said.

“We work with the individual tribal members and those affiliated communities because they don’t get access to the same funding and benefits as a tribal herd,” she said. “That’s why Tanka Fund was created.”

Since 2018, the Tanka Fund has helped Pogue transfer a second batch of bison in 2023 and a third batch this October. The animals come from grassland preserves overseen by The Nature Conservancy, which has about 7,000 buffalo over 11 grassland preserves in several states, said Suzanne Scott, the organization’s state director in Texas. Since 2020, she added, through partnerships with the InterTribal Buffalo Council, the Tanka Fund and various tribes, 1,800 buffalo have returned to Indigenous-owned lands.

Healing grasslands

Back on her ranch, Pogue watched the sun set over the new batch of bison eating grass in their new home. The animals have a strong spiritual presence, she said, which is what made them a revered symbol of strength and prosperity in Native American culture.

“Spiritually, I get a sense of peace when I come out here with them,” she said. “I get a sense of calmness … No matter how angry a person can get, you forget you’re angry. You forget that you were upset about anything to begin with.”

The benefits go beyond the spiritual. Studies show reintroducing bison to grasslands increases plant diversity, particularly in tallgrass prairies, which are resilient to extreme drought.

“The way the buffalo interact with the ground, how their hooves disturb the group, how seeds attach to their fur [and] how even their waste is a fertilizer creates a connection between the buffalo and the health of the prairie,” Scott said.

Fauna also benefit from the bison, Sherman said. When rolling around on the dry ground, whether to relieve an insect bite or shed excess fur off their thick hides — a behavior called wallowing — the bison make depressions in the ground that can fill with water and create habitats for tadpoles, frogs and toads.

Animals like the brown-headed cowbird have a historical partnership with the bison, eating insects off the lumbering giant’s back or when they’re stirred up from the ground under its hooves. Black-billed magpies like to feast for insects on the bison as well. Other birds like long-billed curlews and burrowing owls use bison dung to build their nests or line their burrows.

Bison also have a symbiotic relationship with prairie dogs, which tend to build their burrows where bison have grazed. The prairie dogs in turn are a source of food for black-footed ferrets, one of North America’s most endangered mammals and dependent on the prairie dog for survival.

It’s this ability to transform the landscape in a myriad of ways that has earned bison the affectionate title of “ecosystem engineers.” Their impact brings home to Pogue the importance of the work she is doing as a rancher and a conservationist of Indigenous roots.

“Everything we’ve done so far with the bison, I feel, has been God-led,” Pogue said. “It has always felt like this is what we’re supposed to do.”

Miriam Fauzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The News makes all editorial decisions.

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