The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska’s Efforts to Bring Buffalo Back to the Plains

The Ponca tribe of Nebraska brings buffalo back to the plains. The goal of this program is simple: to care for their loved ones and the next generation. On a snowy day in January, more than a dozen buffalo set foot on their new home, the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska in Niobrara. “The buffalo took care of our elders and it was up to us to take care of the buffalo because they were almost wiped out,” herd master Larry Wright said. “We’re just trying to bring them back.” As the snow melted, KETV Newswatch 7’s Waverle Monroe and photographer Terry Sedivy headed out to see the buffalo. “Right now it’s calving season, so you have to be careful,” Wright said. “We probably had about 45 head and now we have 250.” Wright said building a herd of 250 was no easy task. “A lot of people don’t get the opportunity to see the buffalo. Here we can give them a chance to see them and be with them,” Wright said. Part of the herd came from Yellowstone National Park. Bison biologist Chris Geremia said hundreds of years ago, buffalo were almost killed off. “This was due exclusively to overhunting. Overhunting for sport. Overhunting as a means to remove the most valuable food that sustains Native Americans,” Geremia said. They feared that the bison would become extinct, so Yellowstone worked to increase the bison population. This led to the bison conservation translocation program. “This led to the largest transfer of bison from Yellowstone to Native American tribes in history. Now, these numbers don’t seem huge; they seem symbolic at best. One hundred and eighty-two animals over the past three years moved around twenty tribes,” Geremia said. “Introducing bison into our herd to strengthen and diversify it,” explained Angie Starkel. Starkel is the vice chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. She said the buffalo are distributed through an intertribal coalition. “We’re partnering with other tribes to help with advocacy, to help provide technical resources and to look at different funding sources, like working with Yellowstone Park,” Starkel said. “It’s a consortium of different tribes working together.” This has not been easy. “We reclaimed land, but we built this herd knowing this important relationship with buffalo and we went out of our way to make the sacrifice of adding a land base so we could have more buffalo,” Starkel said . She said the buffaloes were well worth it. “They are important because they are our loved ones,” Starkel said. The Ponca tribe still harvests some of the buffalo and continues traditional practices of using the whole animal.