The rolling hills of the Blackfeet reservation were covered with bright-yellow balsamroot flowers, and in the distance the ridgeline of the Rocky Mountains was frosted with thinning snow. It was early June, and in Browning, Montana, the reservation's largest town, clouds of dust rose from the unpaved back streets. In the gas stations and cafes, talk dwelled on the past winter: who ran out of propane, who lost the most cattle, who was in the worst fix.
On the grassy banks of Two Medicine River, though, the bison were doing fine. The Blackfeet Nation manages about 800 animals, and several dozen bison were gathered in and around a large, sunny paddock. Calves stood knock-kneed next to their mothers, their short, golden-brown hair contrasting with the adults' heavy, half-shed winter coats. Ervin Carlson, manager of the Blackfeet Nation's Buffalo Restoration Project, got out of his pickup truck and approached. As I followed, the animals snorted warily. One calf lifted a tail and peed abundantly, out of fear or defiance or both. I recalled a comment by Blackfeet elder Charlie Crow Chief: "They recognize a stranger."
Carlson chuckled, surveying the bison proudly. "The way I look at this herd is that they were in storage," he said. "They put themselves in storage until they were ready and we were ready." The ancestors of these bison were among the last remaining in Blackfeet territory in the early 1900s, members of a herd that was purchased from a private owner by the Canadian government. More than a century later, in spring 2016, 88 young descendants of that herd were loaded into livestock trailers and transported from Elk Island National Park in northern Alberta to the land of their forebears, where their arrival was celebrated by a waiting crowd.
The Elk Island bison and their offspring are now left largely to themselves, and most people see them only from a distance. But their presence is felt all over the reservation and has inspired projects ranging from a bison-meat lunch program at the Blackfoot language immersion school to a reenactment of a buffalo hunt at the reservation high school. Students participate in the annual harvest of members of a herd designated for local use, occasionally spattering themselves with blood as they learn how to butcher a bison.
The indiscriminate slaughter and last-minute rescue of the American bison at the turn of the last century is one of the best-known chapters in conservation history. What's not as well known is that the rescue was left unfinished. While the bison were saved from oblivion, they weren't returned to their former ecological and cultural roles on the prairie. The effort to complete that work and to fully restore bison to the North American plains continues today—and as its leaders reckon with the ironies and oversights of history, they're ushering conservation into the future.