Nez Perce bison hunt reclaims a tradition

[Okwes]

Nez Perce bison hunt reclaims a tradition

Nez Perce bison hunt reclaims a tradition

www.idahostatesman.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060205/NEWS01/602050347

"We need buffalo to survive," says Rosalie Little Thunder. She spoke
both metaphorically and literally. Nez Perce youth killed five bison
Saturday near Yellowstone National Park in Montana.
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GARDINER, Mont. — The wind was blowing so hard it was all Coty Reuben
could do to stay upright on a snowy hillside in the Gallatin National
Forest. He peered down the barrel of his father's 300 Mag Reuger, took
five deep breaths and squeezed the trigger.

"It seemed like the wind was about to blow me over," he said as
swirling snow hid the peaks in a valley of heart-stopping immensity.
"There was so much adrenaline I had to wait to make sure my hands
didn't shake. I wanted to make sure I got a good shot."

The shot wasn't merely good; it was historic. When he drew his fifth
deep breath and pulled the trigger Saturday, the 17-year-old became
the first Nez Perce Indian in 140 years to shoot a buffalo in one of
the tribe's ancestral hunting areas. Old Faithful and many of the
other geysers and springs in nearby Yellowstone Park once had Nez
Perce names.

This fall, the state of Montana opened its first hunt in 15 years of
bison leaving the park. Thousands of hunters applied for 50 licenses,
but that isn't why the Nez Perce are here. They don't need licenses.

The 1855 treaty that ceded thousands of acres of the tribe's land to
the federal government gave them the right to continue to hunt in
perpetuity in their accustomed places. With the decimation of both the
bison and the tribe. In the 19th century, however, the annual Nez
Perce treks to buffalo country ended.

Saturday, they resumed.

140 years is a long time to wait for a bison hunt

When Yellowstone's bison population exceeds its optimum number of
3,000 — it's currently estimated at about 4,000 — the state slaughters
the bison that leave the park to prevent them from transmitting
brucellosis to cattle herds. The disease can cause cows to lose their
calves.

The Nez Perce, who consider buffalo sacred, find the slaughters
offensive. With the park's bison population potentially at an all-time
high, the tribe informed the state last month that the time had come
for Nez Perce hunters to return.

The state had little choice but to let them; the tribe's federal
treaty trumps state regulations.

"This is an affirmation of our treaty rights," Nez Perce elder and
spiritual leader Horace Axtell said by phone Saturday from his home in
Lewiston. "A long time ago, our people went on an annual journey to
buffalo country. They'd stay a year or two, cure their hides, make
robes, dry the meat and come back to share it with the people. My
grandmother had seven buffalo robes from those trips."

"This is a historic day. It's good that our young people finally have
this chance. I've never even shot a buffalo."

Axtell had another reason to be happy about Saturday's hunt. Reuben is
his grandson. The 17-year-old with the sharp eye and steady hands is a
descendant of Nez Perce Chiefs Joseph, White Bird and Looking Glass.

"It's probably one of the biggest honors I'll ever have in my life,"
Reuben said. "I didn't think I'd ever be able to hunt a buffalo in my
life."

The senior at Lapwai High School is an honor student and standout on
the basketball team. He hopes to become a wildlife biologist and to
"work to protect our hunting and fishing rights."

"He's hunted with me since he was little," his father, Darryl Reuben,
said. "This is a proud and honorable day for us. It's been 140 years
since this has happened."

10 students chosen for their essays on treaty rights

Coty Reuben and nine other students from the tribe were selected for
the hunt based on essays they wrote about Nez Perce treaty rights.

The Nez Perce Tribal Executive Council limited the number of buffalo
they could shoot to five. Accompanied by tribal fish and wildlife
commissioners and conservation enforcement officers, they quickly
encountered a herd Saturday morning. The quota of five was reached
within an hour, though not without a number of missed shots.

"I wasn't sure which bull they wanted me to shoot," Anthony Capetillo,
18, said of a failed first attempt. "They said 'shoot behind the ear,
shoot behind the horn,' and I got confused."

A cheer arose when 15-year-old Kymberlee Holsinger downed a bull with
her first shot.

"One shot!" Nez Perce Fish and Wildlife Commissioner James Holt
shouted. "She's done the Nez Perce women justice. She can talk about
this for years to come."

It was the only cheer of the day. Like most Indian people, the Nez
Perce hunt for sustenance and to honor cultural and spiritual
traditions rather than for sport.

"It's too easy if we shoot them from right here," Orlando Taylor, 14,
said as the group sighted the herd from their vehicles. "It's not fair
to the animals."

Taylor eventually got his chance. Before shooting a bison and again
when it died, he said a prayer for it. Hunters and tribal enforcement
officers sprinkled tobacco on the carcasses, a traditional offering of
respect and gratitude.

Idaho's Coeur d'Alene tribe treated the Nez Perce hunters to a meal on
their way to Montana. Members of tribes from other states traveled to
Montana to wish them well.

Many criticize Montana's policy of slaughtering bison

"This isn't about sport," Rosalie Little Thunder, a Lakota from South
Dakota, told the Nez Perce as they prepared to leave on the hunt. "We
respect the buffalo. The buffalo is our relative. We seek the
permission of our relative whose spirit is going to be separated
before we proceed. That was the intent of our ancestors. ... And once
again, we need the buffalo to survive. McDonald's is killing us."

She and others were critical of Montana's policy of slaughtering bison
that leave the park.

"They've slaughtered about 580 this year," Holt said. "We don't agree
with that. We've been monitoring it and feel that our way, hunting the
buffalo and using it for subsistence and ceremonial purposes, is
better. That's why we decided this was the time to reassert our treaty
rights."

Richard Milda, a member of the Crow Tribe from South Dakota, said his
people would like to take Yellowstone's excess bison "home to the
plains. Our reservations there have the land base to treat them
respectfully. We've spoken to the Montana authorities about it, but
the answer is 'no.' They say it's not in their plan."

Holt envisions a buffalo herd on the Nez Perce reservation at Lapwai

as well.

"We're taking steps in that direction," he said. "We're putting
measures before the Intertribal Bison Cooperative. We have plains,
forests ... there's prime habitat for buffalo in North Idaho."

Saturday's hunt began with a prayer.

"This is a great day for Indian people," Justin Gould, the hunt's
quality control officer, told a hushed audience. "I pray that we will
be able to connect with our past. I pray for our future, that this
will be taken in a good way and not a negative way. I hope people can
learn by having our children at the forefront of something historic.
This is a day that can never be taken away from them, something
they'll take when they meet their maker and will be able to report to
their ancestors and make them proud."

Young Nez Perce hunters have to do the heavy lifting

It didn't take long for the young hunters to learn how hard their
ancestors worked. The five bulls weighed an estimated 1,800 to 2,000
pounds each. Though taken in about an hour, it took the rest of the
day to field dress them and drag them with ropes to waiting vehicles.
As many as nine students were needed to hang on to one bison to keep
it from rolling down a hill while it was being cleaned.

"Always bring at least a dozen knives with you," veteran Nez Perce
hunter Harold Scott of Lewiston said as he made a long, slow incision.
"You'll need that many because they'll all get dull. That's how tough
this hide is."

Steam rose as he cut, but for a 2,000-pound animal there was
surprisingly little blood.

Little if any of the animals will go to waste. The hunters and their
families will keep some of the meat, and some will be given to needy
Nez Perce families. Organs such as the heart and liver are cooked and
eaten. The hides will be used to make robes and moccasins, the gut to
make soup, the sinew to make drums and craftwork. The skulls will be
bleached for artists to paint and given to the hunters as mementos.
Some parts are used for ceremonial purposes. A community feast is planned.

With his buffalo dressed and ready for the long haul down the
mountain, Coty Reuben observed a poignant moment of silence. He patted
the body of the gigantic creature he had killed as if it were a dog,
then gently laid his hand on its face.

"That's the most important thing," he said. "You have to show respect
for the animal."

"Let's hope this is just the beginning," his father added. "Hopefully
we can come back again — and not just with our youth but with our
elders who have never seen this. It's been a long time coming."

[Okwes]

Moving In for the Kill With Montana's Buffalo Hunters

Moving In for the Kill With Montana's Buffalo Hunters

Is it a good way to manage the native herd, or is the solution to give
the animals more space?

By Nicholas Riccardi
Times Staff Writer
February 5, 2006
www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-buffalo5feb05,1,1244362.story


[foto] AMERICAN ICON: A hunting party prepares to skin a buffalo killed
after Montana issued 50 licenses to hunt the animal. - (William Campbell)


GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST, Mont. -- Boots crunching on iced-over snow,
Jeff Vader creeps toward two animals from the world's last wild herd of
pure buffalo.

The normally chatty 50-year-old crouches behind a cluster of juniper
trees and puts a finger to his lips. The four men behind him fall mute.
Vader lies on his belly, points his rifle at the biggest bull and
becomes part of a contentious experiment in controlling an icon of the
American West.

Vader has one of 50 permits from Montana to kill a buffalo during the
state's first legal hunt of the animal in 15 years. The quarry belong to
a herd of 4,000 that roams freely in Yellowstone National Park, where
hunting is banned. But winter snows chase them across the park
boundaries into southern Montana, where they are not welcome.

The buffalo can carry brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to
miscarry and that Montana views as a threat to its $1-billion cattle
industry. The state confines the buffalo to a narrow slice of land, and
chases them back to the park by helicopter and snowmobile should they
venture too close to the few nearby ranches with cattle.

Sometimes the buffalo are killed; this year, about 500 have been herded
into pens and slaughtered.

Montana officials and hunters hope the hunt can provide an alternative
way of controlling the herd's movements. Most game animals -- including
elk and antelope -- are managed by regulated hunts that keep herds at an
optimum size, not so big that they will steal habitat from other
species, but not so small that they risk extinction.

"It's more dignified for the buffalo to be hunted than to be put in
trucks and hauled off to slaughter," said Terry Suhr, 49, a taxidermist
who shot a buffalo the same day Vader was chasing one.

Environmentalists agree -- to a point. They have long decried the way
Montana treats the buffalo.

"Yellowstone Park was started to protect the last buffalo ... and we're
slaughtering them to protect animals that aren't even native to
Montana," said Mike Mease, co-founder of the Buffalo Field Campaign,
which monitors and protests Montana's treatment of the creatures.

Mease, 44, is a hunter who seeks to convert people like Vader to his
cause, hoping to strengthen the alliance of environmental and hunting
groups across the West that has helped preserve habitat for waterfowl
and elk.

His group shadows the buffalo hunters, carrying an odd combination of
recruiting brochures and objections -- they still oppose the hunt,
arguing that it is "canned" because the buffalo are being treated like
domestic animals in Montana, confined to a few thousand acres.

Vader and his hunting buddies have thought long and hard about these
issues: Is it sporting to stalk a creature that is so oblivious to
danger that, 125 years ago, millions were slaughtered by gunmen who
could ride right into herds?

Buffalo, also known as bison, are found throughout the West but mostly
live on ranches and are largely descended from cross-breeding with
cattle. The Yellowstone herd is among the few herds that have no
cross-breeding in their lineages and the only one that roams wild.

For several years until 1991, Montana's Department of Fish, Parks and
Wildlife held hunts to control the buffalo. State wildlife agents would
lead hunters to buffalo that ventured too far into Montana, then point
out which ones they could shoot. They'd even provide a tractor to haul
away each 1-ton carcass. Protests by environmentalists set off a
national outcry, and the state canceled the hunt.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer, an avid hunter and former cattle rancher, said he
was no fan of that approach.

When he approved the latest hunt, he said he wanted it to be a true
sporting event. In Montana, he said, "we like to hunt. We're not people
that put a bucket of grain behind our house so we can shoot an elk off
our deck. We like to get out."

Even so, some hunters have been able to drive up and stand near the road
to shoot the buffalo. Others have chased the animals, or, after wounding
one, stalked it for miles to finish it off.

The governor acknowledged that buffalo would never be as difficult to
hunt as more skittish animals. But he said he hoped they would develop a
healthy fear of humans to make their pursuit more challenging, which
would lead him to increase the number of buffalo hunting permits.

Schweitzer is also trying to persuade Yellowstone-area ranchers who have
small herds of cows to move them so the buffalo can roam more freely in
the state. That would end the need for the systematic herding of bison
that last month caused a group of buffalo to flee onto an iced-over lake
and fall in. Two drowned.

As the five hunters in the Vader party gather in the breakfast room of a
Gardiner, Mont., motel at 6 a.m. on a recent Monday, they shake their
heads and mutter regretfully about the drownings. Pictures of the
mishap, taken by Mease's group, were splashed across newspapers over the
weekend.

Vader sits down, bleary-eyed. As he drains his Styrofoam coffee cup, he
confesses that he was up all night, powered by a mix of anxiety and
anticipation.

Neither Vader nor his brother David, who drove up from Denver, have
hunted anything on the scale of a buffalo before. Jeff Vader shot a
grizzly bear in Alaska 20 years ago, but now he spends his time chasing
elk and deer. Like most buffalo hunters, they savor its meat and relish
the chance to stalk a creature that has rarely been legal to hunt.

The party sets out in two pickups before sunrise, veering onto dirt
roads that rise onto the sagebrush plateaus where the buffalo roam.
George Stirner, a grizzled outdoorsman whom the group often looks to for
guidance, talks about the joys of hunting. "It's a challenge to meet a
wild animal on its own ground, its own turf," he says. But, he admits,
buffalo are more docile than most other wild animals.

The hunters soon spot several buffalo but move on because two other
hunters are watching the animals. Vader stops in front of a second cluster.

Regulations prevent the hunters from firing over the road, so they pour
out of their trucks and scale ridges to circle the animals. But the
buffalo wander off. Two big ones tramp up one ridge. The hunters follow,
and Jeff Vader carefully lies on his belly and takes aim.

Vader's permit allows one kill, and the animals are too close to each
other. A bullet might pierce one and hit the other. He waits. Suddenly,
a sound like thunder shakes the hillside. The buffalo run off.

Vader rises. "Our first lesson in hunting buffalo," he says with a
smile. "They spook."

The party gives chase, running up and down another set of ridges. "Now
this is hunting," Stirner says with satisfaction.

When the buffalo cross into private land, the hunters decide to look
elsewhere; they drive farther down the road until they spot another
group in a picture-perfect setting. The 13 buffalo are strung out on a
high plateau rimmed with scattered mountain cedar and juniper. Looming
behind them is the snowcapped 10,969-foot Electric Peak, and a wall of
other serrated mountains that form the northern boundary of Yellowstone.

The party splits. Two circle around to a rise at the north side of the
plateau to drive the buffalo closer to Vader. He and Stirner inch down
the hillside and position themselves behind a boulder, waiting for the
buffalo to pass by. The bison begin to move toward Vader, spreading out
in single file. The silence of the morning is shattered by the roar of
the rifle, and a bull in the middle of the herd collapses, then rolls
over on its side, legs twitching for a moment. Then the animal is still.

Vader climbs back up the incline to where the rest of the party is
waiting. "Not a record, but he'll be good eating," he says. "Cabernet
Franc, you think?"

"Definitely a red," David Vader answers.

But the hunters' work has just begun. Hollering, snapping tarps and
honking the pickups' horns, they slowly push back the other buffalo.
They spend three hours skinning the massive carcass and carving 500
pounds of edible flesh from its bones. The men haul the meat back to the
trucks in sleds. "That weighs more than a sack of concrete," Jeff Vader
says as he lifts one haunch onto a sled.

At the end, they peel off their bloodied overalls and gloves, pass
around a bottle of Buffalo Trace Kentucky Bourbon and marvel at the pile
of bones, suitcase-sized lungs and other organs that they leave on the
plateau for coyotes and ravens. It's been more than six hours since the
hunt began, and the men turn contemplative.

"Just seeing an animal like this, so large and beautiful," says Tom
Literski, 56. "I'll always remember this."

The hunters pile into their trucks and drive off. Six other buffalo were
killed that day, some falling less than 100 yards from one another. The
Buffalo Field Campaign workers had tracked down the other hunting
parties and lobbied them to push for more habitat for the bison. But
they never came across Jeff Vader's party.

Vader saw nothing wrong with the hunt -- he was proud he followed
regulations and treated the animals with respect. But the experience
strengthened his belief that buffalo should have more space to roam and
that hunting is the most humane and environmentally sensitive way to
control their habitat.

Vader starts following the buffalo controversy more closely once he
returns to his home in Helena. He complains to co-workers at the state
lottery warehouse about the way Montana treats such "majestic animals."

"They don't like to read about 500 buffalo being hauled to slaughter,"
Vader says of his co-workers. "They say, 'I'd pay a lot of money to hunt
one.' "

*

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