Animals from fish to fowl and reptile to mammal once played significant cultural, historical and even economic roles in every tribe of North America. But like the American Indian, many of the fish and animals were driven out of their natural lands and hunted down. As tribal communities nurture their economies and strengthen their governments, the resurgence of wildlife preservation has become an important activity for those in Indian Country, just like their ancestors before them.

The Red Lake Band of the Chippewa are restoring fish to their lake, the Jicarrilla Apaches are managing elk and mule deer populations, the Iowa and the Zunis are providing homes for injured eagles, and the Nez Perce are introducing the gray wolf population to Idaho and bringing back the beloved Appaloosa horse.

About 57 tribes are working together to bring back bison; others are reintroducing the prairie dog. The Hoopa Valley tribe is protecting northern California spotted owls from going extinct, and on the Flathead reservation in Montana, the Salish/Kodenai people are building wildlife structures that run under the highways so animals, such as bear, cougar and elk can avoid getting hit by cars. (See story: 'Bringing Back Wolves, Horses to the Nez Perce').

Tribes everywhere are going head-to-head with government agencies, spending tribal funds and overcoming the obstacles to protect wildlife on their tribal lands. These efforts have accelerated with the growth of tribal government gaming.

“There are so many tribes out there doing conservation work today. It’s incredible. We are even bringing back species that were on the endangered list,” said Victor Roubidoux, a citizen of the Iowa Nation and manager of an eagle rehabilitation project in Perkins, Okla.

The Iowa people run several wildlife programs, including a bison farm and the eagle rehabilitation center.

“The eagle is sacred to our people,” Roubidoux said. “We are responsible for taking care of them when they are ill or too old to go back into the wild. We make a home for the eagles on our land.”

According to the Native American Fish & Wildlife Society (NAFWS), federally recognized Indian tribes within the lower 48 United States have jurisdiction over a reservation land-base of some 52 million acres, or 81,250 square miles, which are home to hundreds of thousands of animals. While the economy in most of Indian Country still needs improvement, conservation programs are getting a boost thanks to improved tribal income from tourism and gaming.

“We were able to put tribal money into bison programs and our eagle rehabilitation center in part because of funds we got from gaming and our tobacco sales in Oklahoma,” said Roubidoux, who was the treasurer for his tribe for 13 years.

“Having natural resources for your tribe is a huge part of sovereignty,” said Jim Stone, Yanton Sioux, and the executive director of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC). “It is about providing for your tribe through your own resources that come from your land, your natural habitat and the animals that live or used to live in it.”

REINTRODUCING THE BISON

For many Indians, the American bison, also called buffalo, are sacred animals. Some native people, including Stone, say that the calculated slaughter of the American bison was a kind of mirror to the genocide of the native people. According to ITBC, more than 60 million buffalo were killed in the 1800s, leaving only a few hundred remaining on the American prairies. Until now.

The InterTribal Bison Cooperative, made up of 59 tribes in North America and Alaska, was formed in 1990, backed by the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, and buoyed by funds from Congress. To date, members collectively own 15,000 bison.

Members of the cooperative, which include the Oneida, Lakota, Jicarilla Apache and Ho-Chunk tribes, said that at the heart of the project lies the hope that in returning the bison to native communities, both the animals’ and the people’s spirits will be healed.

The ITBC’s headquarters are located in Rapid City, S.D., in Black Hill country, once home to millions of buffalo.

“The tribes really do the work,” Stone said. “We are here to offer technical assistance to the tribes who join our cooperative. We help with grants, but the tribes are absorbing the costs. Our members are really making the reintroduction of the buffalo in America a priority.”

Some cooperative members sell their buffalo meat or the buffalo themselves, some use the hides and fur in ceremonial and decorative art, and all tribes provide meat to their tribal members at low or no cost.

“Having the buffalo back also helps rejuvenate the culture,” Stone added. “In my tribe, like others, the buffalo was honored through ceremony and songs. There are buffalo hunts and prayers to give thanks to the buffalo. When the buffalo went away, we lost some of that tradition, but now, it is coming back.”

Alvah Quinn, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, who manages the cooperative’s extension program at the SWST Bison Farm in South Dakota, wasn’t alive when the bison were part of the landscape.

“I grew up hearing about the buffalo, but we didn’t have any around on the reservation,” Quinn said.

Stone calls Quinn, who has been part of ITBC since its inception, a wonderful mentor. Quinn’s tribe was the first buffalo project in Indian Country, and he is considered an expert in bison management.

Quinn will always remember the night he helped bring 40 buffalo home to his tribal lands in September of 1992.

“You know, the last recorded buffalo hunt was in 1879,” he said. “We have many cultural connections to the buffalo, but I was really surprised that night. There were 60 tribal members waiting in the cold and rain to welcome the buffalo back home after a 112-year absence. We have over 350 buffalo today, so it’s a real success story for us.”

For all ITBC members, the lean, healthy meat of the buffalo is the most important factor.

“When we see a buffalo, we want to eat it,” Stone said with a chuckle. “We can provide buffalo meat at no or low cost to our members.”

Quinn and others agree.

“Buffalo meat, grass-fed meat, is more healthy for you. But it’s expensive if you go to a grocery store,” Quinn added. “We can offer 100 percent pure buffalo meat to our tribal members for nothing or almost nothing. With all the diabetes in Indian Country, eating right is important. This is something people with diabetes can eat that is good for them.”

Quinn teaches classes at the farm to educate school kids and others about the importance of the buffalo program and its health and cultural benefits to the tribe.

“It’s hard for these kids to imagine that the buffalo once gave our people everything they needed to survive—food, blankets, ceremonial items, its bones, even its head was used. I tell the kids that the buffalo was to our ancestors like Wal-Mart is today,” Quinn said.

THE RETURN OF THE WALLEYE

For other tribes, fish were a mainstay of their diet. Fisheries have been a long-standing source of nourishment and commerce for many in Indian Country. One of those tribes is the Red Lake Band of the Chippewa who live on a sprawling 827,000-acre reservation in northern Minnesota.

Red Lake is the sixth largest body of freshwater in America, and all but 15 percent of the lake (which is made up of two connected bodies of water called Upper and Lower Red Lake) belongs to the tribe. Aside from the cultural connection to the lake, it was once the tribe’s biggest income generator.

The Red Lake Fishery opened in 1917 during World War I. An extremely successful operation for decades, the fishery was one of the only fisheries in the United States at that time.

Al Pemberton, Red Lake Band of the Chippewa, and director of natural resources for the tribe, grew up on the reservation. According to Pemberton, tribal members who worked for the fishery involved their family members in the process of catching, cleaning and processing the fish. In return, each family who worked for the fishery received a ‘fish check’ and fresh fish to supplement their diet. At one time, more than 400 members were fishing on the lake through the cooperative along with sportsmen and illegal poachers. By the early ‘90s, over-fishing had dramatically depleted the walleye population. The fishery went from hauling in over a million pounds of walleye in 1989 to only 15,000 pounds in 1997.

The commercial sales that brought important revenues to the tribe were in steep decline, just like the fish.

“Even though it was how our people earned their living, the tribe chose to close down the fishery. We knew we had to do something to save the walleye,” Pemberton said.

The tribe created the Red Lake Recovery Project and worked tirelessly to put a stop to commercial walleye fishing in the lake. The economy took a powerful hit as tribal fishermen put away their nets and poles and began to look for work in the logging industry and at the tribe’s casinos. The tribe ceased fishing the waters for walleye and waited.

In just seven years, the walleye population came back from 100,000 to approximately 7.5 million fish.

In 2006, the Red Lake Band reopened the lake to sustenance and sport fishing. The tribe’s efforts are considered one the most important and successful fish repopulation stories in the history of North America.

“It’s been a long hard haul to bring the fish back, but the lake is coming back bigger and better than it ever was, and we are dedicated to keeping it that way,” Permberton said. “We even put sturgeon back into the lake, and they had been gone since the 1960s.”

The fishery has also returned. Last April, the tribe received a $1 million economic development grant from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota tribe to help them reopen the fishing cooperative. As of early September, members began using hook and lines instead of the gill nets, which had contributed to the depopulation of the walleye. It is too early to tell, Pemberton said, if the fishery will yield the commercial and economic results of its past.

“After the lake recovered, we sent a tribal-wide survey to see what people’s concerns about the lake were. It seemed that people didn’t want to go back to netting. People all said ‘we want to protect our resources,’” Pemberton said. The tribe is currently making a video about the story of the fishery and Red Lake.

Others have been inspired and are putting resources into other conservation efforts similar to the Red Lake Band of the Chippewa.

In Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs are tagging Kohanee salmon in an effort to find out why the salmon population is declining. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest have a spiritual and cultural connection to salmon and depend on the salmon fisheries to not only feed their members but for the economic development of their communities.

In order to focus some attention on the Northwest, the Indian Fisheries Commission recently produced a docudrama entitled “Shadow of the Salmon.” The film stresses the historic and continued importance of salmon to Northwest Indian communities, including the challenges tribes face in protecting the salmon and its coastal homes.

“Shadow of the Salmon” is being sent out to schools in the Pacific Northwest and can also be viewed online at www.salmondefense.org/projects/shadow/index.htm.

RESTORING NATURE’S BALANCE

Natural resources on Indian lands also include predators such as bear, cougar and wolves. Native people are protecting these animals, whose fearful reputations have made them targets for hunters and ranchers.

In Montana, according to the World Wildlife Foundation, the Gros Ventre, Assiniboine and Chippewa-Cree tribes are researching how to restore cougar populations. They are studying the affects such a wildlife restoration will have on their tribes living on the Fort Belknap and Rocky Boys Indian Reservations in Montana. And in northern Idaho, the Nez Perce have been responsible for bringing the grey wolf, called “He’me” in the Nez Perce language, back to its native homeland through its wolf recovery program that began in 1995.

Like the cougar, the wolf population diminished during the expansion of settlers in the northwest who over-hunted bison, elk, deer and moose and destroyed their natural habitats with real estate developments. The Nez Perce continue to protect the wolves in the Northwest and to educate the general public about the animal. The tribe has been nationally recognized for its wolf recovery program and, like the Red Band Lake of the Chippewa, has also received an “Honoring Nations” award from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development.

What farmers, ranchers and others see as a potential threat, native people see as an integral part of their cultural landscape.

“The wolf was here before us, and according to our stories, the Creator told the animals that man would speak on their behalf,” said Aaron Miles, Sr., a Nez Perce tribal member and the Natural Resource Director for the tribe. “As a culture, we have promised to protect them. Our people lived for centuries on lands with wolves.”

While the real work has only just begun, wildlife conservation is getting a boost from the growing awareness of the situation and the countless success stories. Because of these factors, many tribes, especially those with extra revenue from gaming, have started to earmark monies for conservation projects.

“It’s important for us to take care of our lands and animals. This is what Indian people did in the past. Today we are doing great work,” Roubidoux said.

Miles agreed: “We have a responsibility to the animals and to ourselves.”

Bringing Back Wolves, Horses to the Nez Perce

First the wolf, now the horse

In the same year that the wolf recovery program got underway, the tribe began another endeavor: to bring horse culture back to the Nez Perce. The tribe was once known for their expert horsemanship and horse breeding abilities. During the war of 1877, the Nez Perce horse, the Appaloosa, which had been bred over generations to become a strong and fast horse with high endurance and stamina, were almost completely wiped out. Some were killed in battle; others were bred with the lesser quality horses of the U.S. soldiers.

The Nez Perce lost their animals and their homeland and were forced onto small allotments of land in Idaho. The horse culture, for the most part, vanished.

But 13 years ago, the tribe began a program to breed modern-day Appaloosas with Akhal-Teke stallions from Turkmenistan, Asia, donated by a breeder in Montana. The program was financed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the Nez Perce tribe itself and the First Nations Development Institute, a nonprofit organization that gives funding to native businesses.

Today, the new breed of Si’kums, the Nez Perce word for horses, is not only a cultural success, but it is also bringing some economy back into the tribe.

“We’ve been doing this for [more] than 10 years now, and we’ve had a couple of horse sales. People want our horses, not just because of the animal, but because of the Nez Perce connection to the horse,” Miles said. “We are laying the ground for the next generation to come. In order to do this, we need to have all the elements of our culture back, like the wolves, the horses and the land. We need to offer a resemblance of the environment that our people once thrived in. If you bring back all those things, how can you go wrong?”