Conservationist and Indigenous Responses to the Near Extinction of the Bison

Sweet, “Conservationist and Indigenous Responses.” Responding to the drastic decimation of the bison population (c. 1880s), conservationist writers apportioned responsibility and agency among indigenous plains peoples,... [ view full abstract ]

Sweet, “Conservationist and Indigenous Responses.” Responding to the drastic decimation of the bison population (c. 1880s), conservationist writers apportioned responsibility and agency among indigenous plains peoples, white hunters, and bison themselves. Characterizing bison as sluggish and stupid, conservationists in effect held bison responsible in evolutionary terms for failing to adapt to hunting pressure, even as they decried increasing exploitation enabled by more efficient firearms and transportation systems. They frequently linked the fate of the bison to the fate of plains peoples, positioning the latter ambivalently as historically sovereign over the bison and sacrificial victim to “civilization.” Hornaday developed a racialized moral-juridical narrative according to which indigenous peoples were being punished by starvation for their wasteful overkill while whites could atone for their own wasteful overkill by domesticating bison in the West while preserving them in a zoo and memorializing them eastern museums. Hornaday’s explicit linkage of the theme of extirpation with vengeance and atonement resonates with several Blackfoot stories depicting the pre-conquest era’s distributive economy, which were transcribed and published by George Bird Grinnell at the nadir of bison population (1892). These stories add the element of deception to accounts of local scarcity, thereby commenting ironically on conservationists’ understandings of human and nonhuman agency.