Five Buffalo Days harvest at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative

(Morton, WY) – Five Buffalo Days was celebrated May 4th at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative’s camp outside Fort Washakie with a harvest, a hands-on lesson in butchering, and a lot of middle schoolers finding out what raw buffalo kidney tastes like.

Jason Baldes and his team from the initiative went out early that morning and dropped a buffalo bull. They brought it back to Buffalo Camp, the initiative’s main buildings, where students from Fort Washakie Middle School got off the buses and met them. Baldes and his wife, Patti, along with other workers from the initiative, got to work opening the animal up in front of the kids.

As the crew broke the buffalo down, they handed parts out to the children. Kidneys, liver, tongue, reproductive organs, and lungs were among the parts passed around. Kids were encouraged to handle everything, feel the weight of it, and try it raw, which is tradition during an Eastern Shoshone buffalo harvest. Cups of blood were passed around for sips. Some kids were all in, big smiles, grabbing at organs and tasting without hesitation. Others kept their distance, making faces. One kid tried some of the meat and offered a review: “The liver was good, but the kidney was pretty mid.”

The point of all of it, Baldes said, is showing kids that nothing from the animal goes to waste.

“As I take that animal apart, it’s important to show them how those things were used and to be able to describe that,” Baldes said. “But then also let them have hands-on. Let them notice what it’s like to skin the hide, let them know what it’s like, taste the liver or the kidney, to learn about how we use the bladder for a water container.”

Hooves, horns, intestines, stomachs. Baldes walked through it all. The horns are natural containers. The thick hide of the neck was once dried into rawhide and used as a shield that could ricochet bullets. There is no scrap pile at a traditional buffalo harvest.

“There’s really nothing that is wasted or needs to go to waste,” said Baldes. “You can eat the intestines, you can eat the stomachs. There’s really no reason to have any waste from this.”

For Baldes, who has spent years working to restore buffalo to the Wind River Reservation, the week is about something bigger than a field trip. Buffalo were gone from the reservation for roughly 130 years. The initiative has only had its own herd for about 11 years. Before that, if they wanted to do something like this, they had to buy a buffalo and have it shipped in. Now they have their own animals on their own land, and Baldes wants the next generation to grow up with that relationship intact.

“For most of us, we didn’t have buffalo growing up. They were gone for about 130 years,” Baldes said. “It’s like the return of our long-lost relative. We get to show the kids their relative, and the reciprocal relationship that we have with buffalo. That’s a very important part of who we are. It’s in our songs, it’s in our ceremonies, but it’s been missing from our lives.”

He told the high schoolers, who arrived later in the day, that the buffalo they harvested would end up back in school meals by the end of the week. Gathered in a large circle after they deboarded their bus, Baldes asked them to raise their hands if they knew someone in their family with diabetes. Hands went up across the group. He told them that buffalo meat is the lowest in fat and cholesterol and highest in omegas, proteins, and minerals of any meat, and that before processed food and fast food, diabetes didn’t exist in their communities.

“If we all start eating buffalo again, diabetes will go away,” Baldes said.

The harvest is just one piece of what the initiative is building. Baldes said he wants to establish internships, apprenticeships, and scholarships for students interested in biology, ecology, and environmental science so they can do culturally relevant research on their own land. The Shoshone and Arapaho herds work together, helping with each other’s harvests. Baldes said he expects to harvest 10 or 12 buffalo in the coming year, with the meat going out to families across the community.

Five Buffalo Days has its own history on the reservation. It started about 20 years ago, originally involving education about the buffalo’s relationship with native communities, powwows, traditional foods, and a buffalo harvest during the first week of May. It went through different versions, but faded out, until it was brought back to the schools right before COVID. Since its return, and now that the initiative has its own herd, Baldes said it’s not going anywhere.

“I can’t see this going away anytime soon, now,” Baldes said.

Hillary Reisig, principal at Fort Washakie Middle School, said this year the school’s Office of Indian Education worked to bring cultural programming back into the curriculum in a serious way, with something planned for students every day of the week.

“Classroom content and their culture do not have to be two different things,” Reisig said. “They can be married together. Learning through that cultural lens, I think that’s more powerful. It’s more applicable, hands-on, and I think our students benefit that way.”

She said the reaction from students was a mixed bag going in. Despite posters in the hallways and social media posts, some kids showed up Monday morning not entirely prepared for what was about to happen.

“Some of them were definitely ready for today,” Reisig said. “But some of them were like, wait, we get to do WHAT this morning!?”

Once the middle schoolers cleared out, the high schoolers from Fort Washakie arrived and broke into stations. Some worked on cutting and packaging meat. Others helped stretch and pin the hide up on a drying frame. Others prepared internal organs for drying. John Gookin, a science teacher at Fort Washakie High School, said the students had already seen a harvest in the fall when the animal was taken apart from the start. Monday’s work was about the next step, learning how to process the pieces.

“Today they’re going to learn more about how to do the actual processing once you’ve got these pieces,” Gookin said. “They’re going to go through stations to learn how to scrape a hide, kind of cut the meat into certain size pieces.”

Gookin noted that respect is built into the whole thing, and that different tribal traditions handle certain parts of the harvest differently. One of the school’s bus drivers, who is Navajo, was uneasy when kids drank blood because that’s not part of her tribe’s practice, while Eastern Shoshone tradition encourages it.

“We all need to learn how to deal with other cultures,” Gookin said. “It doesn’t mean you’re gonna become them. It just helps you understand something you can learn to respect that might be a little different.”

Before the high schoolers split into their groups, Baldes gathered them together and laid it out simply.

“Number one thing today is to be respectful,” he told them. “That’s what a buffalo teaches us… respect.”

Patti Harris-Baldes got the last word in to the kids when she added, “Just remember to have fun and to try new things,” she said. “Nobody is better than anybody else here and we can all learn from each other.”