Bison Restoration in Greater Yellowstone gets $3M Boost

The Eastern Shoshone Tribe in Wyoming has been awarded a $3 million grant for bison restoration, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced this month, providing a notable boost for tribal efforts to rebuild bison herds around the country.

The funding was awarded through the America the Beautiful Challenge, an initiative that the Biden administration launched in 2021 with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and other partners to support locally led conservation projects. This round of funding dispersed $122.4 million to 61 recipients, ranging from the Lower Clark Fork Watershed group to restore riparian areas for bull trout and other native fish, to the Nez Perce Tribe to reclaim habitat of an old hydraulic mine site in Idaho. Some 40 percent of the awardees are tribal nations, according to an Interior Department press release.

The money for the Eastern Shoshone Tribe will help expand the herd size and acreage of their bison program while boosting efforts to help other tribes build their own cultural herds. It will also help the tribe support the Intertribal Buffalo Council and Yellowstone National Park’s Bison Conservation Transfer Program, according to Jason Baldes, the Eastern Shoshone buffalo manager and vice president of the Intertribal Buffalo Council.

Currently, under U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the federal government has framed bison restoration as a priority and named the species the national mammal. But this wasn’t always the case. Scientists have estimated up to 60 million bison used to roam North America, but colonial land policies nearly drove the keystone species to extinction in just a century. Today, people use the words bison and buffalo interchangeably to refer to the same animal.

“It was the federal government’s effort to exterminate the buffalo,” Baldes told Mountain Journal. “Now it’s their trust responsibility to help try and restore them because of the important cultural and spiritual relationship that we still have.”

The Eastern Shoshone herd started in 2016 with 10 bison from the Neil Smith Wildlife Refuge in Iowa. The tribe has also received genetically pure bulls from Yellowstone. The original buffalo grazed on just 300 acres, but with help from the Intertribal Buffalo Council and other nonprofits, restoration efforts have grown. Today, the herd consists of 120 head of bison and its habitat has expanded to 2,000 acres.

Baldes sees the Eastern Shoshone Buffalo Program as a blueprint for other tribes building their own buffalo herds, and the grant money will help expand their support. The Eastern Shoshone live on the Wind River Reservation alongside the Northern Arapaho, which also launched their own cultural herd with currently 100 buffalo on 1,000 acres. The two tribes formed the nonprofit Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative to further their efforts.

“We’re trying to restore this animal in a respectful, appropriate way, and that comes with challenges,” Baldes said, “because it’s challenging the status quo of how things are done.”

In order to expand bison habitat, the tribes had to buy acreage around their existing herds, which was mostly used for cattle ranching or held by non-tribal members. In general, many cattle ranchers on the reservation have been averse to bison reintroduction, and steps need to be taken to ensure bison and cattle coexistence, Baldes says. That means the bison, which do have a vast area to roam, are still subject to fencing.

The grant will help fund fencing and other infrastructure for the bison herds, as well as land acquisition to expand their habitat, Baldes said. It will also go toward education about the importance of bison restoration for tribes and addressing questions and concerns surrounding their reintroduction.

Honing that education is key for supporting other tribes that want to restore bison. The Intertribal Buffalo Council, which consists of some 83 member tribes, has transferred hundreds of live bison to Native nations who want herds on their own lands.

Some of the transferred animals come from Yellowstone, where they are first quarantined for up to three years to ensure they don’t spread brucellosis to domestic livestock. Park bison specifically are genetically significant to tribes because they are allowed to live as wild animals and have not been inbred with cattle.

The grant could also help expand the Yellowstone Conservation Transfer Program. Started in 2019, the program is a way for the park to reduce its bison population while returning the genetically pure animals to Native tribes. Montana state policy requires the Yellowstone herd to stay under a certain population—officials called to remove more than 1,000 bison this winter—and the transfer program ensures some cull animals can find a home elsewhere.

Currently, Yellowstone’s bison transfer program is limited by the space for animals in quarantine facilities. While the park doubled the quarantine capacity last year, animals undergo a second phase of quarantine on the Fort Peck reservation in northeast Montana. But if there were additional options for that second quarantine, the number of animals in the program at a given time could increase.

“There’s an effort to have tribes step up in a way that Fort Peck tribes have to support the Yellowstone bison transfer program. I think that we need additional locations where that is possible,” Baldes said. “I don’t want to outright say that’s what is happening, because there are some significant steps that have to take place before that could even happen. We need community support, we need our leadership to buy in to move forward in that way, because it’s a very sensitive issue.”

In addition to increasing herd sizes, the grant money will also fund research and data collection about the ecological significance of bison. According to research by Montana State University and other scientists, bison grazing can build soil health and sequester carbon, ultimately boosting plant biodiversity and attracting other animals that benefit from having bison in their ecosystem. Being able to quantify those impacts with Indigenous-led research is key to showing the value of bison, Baldes says.

“It takes a lot of communication and relationship building for people to understand why this is important,” he said. “I think that helping to improve research is an important way to help people understand what this buffalo restoration means, not only to the tribes, but to plants and animals themselves.”

Rachel Dawson, program director for National Programs at the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, commended the grant award in an email to Mountain Journal, saying it’s extremely competitive, with overall requests for funds exceeding availability by five to one.

“Critically, this work will support the restoration and resilience of important grassland ecosystems while also returning buffalo to the ancestral homelands of the Eastern Shoshone, Fort Peck, Northern Arapaho, and other Native Nations,” Dawson said. “This project is a strong example of the cultural significance of many of this program’s conservation investments.”

Nonprofits including the Sierra Club and Greater Yellowstone Coalition also celebrated the $3 million award.

“We’re thrilled with this acknowledgment of the value in the Eastern Shoshone Tribe's efforts to aid in buffalo recovery, a keystone species that is so important to Wind River Reservation communities,” Kaycee Prevedel, an organizer with the Sierra Club’s Wyoming Chapter Public Lands and Wildlife, said in a press release.

“This funding will help the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative expand the Shoshone and Arapaho conservation herds. It will also help make more buffalo available to Tribal Nations throughout the country as they work to bring buffalo back as wildlife, ensure greater food sovereignty and security, and restore cultural connections,” Prevedel said. “It’s incredible to witness the Indigenous-led momentum in restoring one of our most iconic species to their native habitats.”