Story by Emily Senkosky // Photos, video by John Stember
When winter finally showed up in the Treasure State, it was a critical day for the Fort Peck Reservation Tribes of Eastern Montana. More than a dozen people surrounded a large corral, bated breath crystallizing in the minus 13-degree air. The bison from Yellowstone National Park had finally arrived.
After nine hours of travel — and one flat tire — a large semi-truck clambered down the long dirt road to Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, between Wolf Point and Poplar, Montana. In the dwindling evening light, men bulging in layers and wielding electric cattle prods waited as the 18-wheeler backed in. When the driver cut the engine and silence fell over the crowd, Robbie Magnan unlatched the back door of the semi.
A staccato of hooves broke the silence.
“That was pretty good,” Mangan said in a hushed, gravely voice. “Better than last time.”
The manager of Fort Peck’s buffalo program could have been referencing any number of times over the last 14 years that the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes received a shipment of bison from Yellowstone National Park. The delivery is part of a conservation and transfer program that became a solution for managing the animal’s expanding population.
But as states and the federal government continue to grapple with how to define and govern bison in Montana and beyond, the Fort Peck buffalo program offers an alternative management model as part of this state-federal-tribal collaboration. Amid polarized politics and ongoing lawsuits, the Fort Peck Tribes’ bison program is one of the longest running in the country, forging a framework that blends ecological protection and cultural reconciliation while scaling economically.
On this day in mid-February, the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes that make up Fort Peck received 219 bison from Yellowstone National Park, a touchstone of success after decades of litigation and bootstrapping to demonstrate that defining bison as “livestock” or “wildlife” doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
The buffalo chasers
The restoration of the American Bison — scientific name Bison bison, or buffalo as many tribes call them — has been a long and winding journey. It’s estimated that 30-60 million bison roamed in North America before the Civil War, a population reduced to just a few hundred by the late 1800s. A number of factors contributed to the species’ near extinction, including the Industrial Revolution, habitat destruction caused by the transcontinental railroad, and government policies that were specifically aimed at displacing Native American communities. Tribes of the Great Plains, a geographical area stretching from southern Canada to Texas, were along the most impacted by the fallout.
“Buffalo are a lot like the Native Americans,” Magnan said. “We were pushed out and put onto reservations just like buffalo were pushed off their lands.”
Prior to the establishment of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in 1886, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, or Lakota and Dakota people, roamed 20 million acres often in pursuit of bison. According to Magnan, much of what became the Fort Peck buffalo ranch was designed to mirror these historic patterns. In 1989, an architectural consultant, Craig Knowles, recommended that the wildlife-friendly fencing used throughout the 33,000 acres of the buffalo ranch follow the etches of teepee rings, in accordance with how the tribe and the bison moved across the landscape. The last known buffalo hunt for the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes was recorded in the early 1880s on a tribal calendar known as the “winter count,” which marks significant events of each year on a buffalo hide.
The Fort Peck buffalo program began over three decades ago when the tribes set aside 5,000 acres and purchased 100 bison from Fort Belknap with the financial support of the Mirror Foundation. These animals were the beginnings of what is now Fort Peck’s “business” herd, helping to pay for the program through hunts and lotteries provided to public and tribal parties. According to Magnan, bison were brought back for cultural reconnection, but the tribe quickly realized the expense of maintaining a large and roaming species. Creating the market needed for the “business” bison began with Magnan inviting some hunting buddies from Wyoming for a trophy hunt. But it created more demand than the tribe bargained for.
Tribal elders asked Magnan to rein it in, requesting he better ensure the cultural aspect of the bison’s return. And so in 2008, the Fort Peck Tribes formally separated their herd into two, making one distinct to cultural purposes like tribal hunts, ceremonies, food distribution and education. As Fort Peck laid the groundwork for managing their “business” and “cultural” herds, decades of treaty rights negotiations for bison were taking place between regional tribes and the federal government in Yellowstone National Park.
At the time, one of the main engines of tribal advocacy was the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which was formed in 1990 to restore buffalo to tribal lands by 2000. In 2002, the council filed an injunction to stop the slaughter of park bison. Lethal control was how the park previously managed animals that wandered out of Yellowstone, out of concern for transmitting brucellosis, a serious reproductive disease, to cattle roaming on Montana ranches just over the park border. (To date, there has never been a case of brucellosis transfer from bison to cattle.) ITBC lobbied for a quarantine facility in Yellowstone as an alternative solution to the slaughter.
“Our biggest thing at ITBC has always been bringing animals out of Yellowstone alive,” said Ervin Carlson, president of the council’s board of directors. “That’s where the work with Robbie and Fort Peck started.”
The policy scaffolding built by ITBC primed the pipeline for what became the Bison Conservation and Transfer Program, launched by Fort Peck in partnership with Yellowstone, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, and the State of Montana to redirect disease-free bison from Yellowstone back to tribal lands. According to Carlson, Magnan’s existing facility was a needed assurance for the program to start.
“Buffalo are a lot like the Native Americans. We were pushed out and put onto reservations just like buffalo were pushed off their lands.”
Robbie Magnan, manager, Fort Peck buffalo program
Rick Wallen, the former bison project leader at Yellowstone National Park, told Mountain Journal that when the program started in the early 2000s, the time was ripe to move bison out of the park.
“The logical ecology at the time was if the population grows, they need to expand their range and possibly even immigrate elsewhere,” Wallen said.
Although the National Park Service sees wild bison as a native species deserving of preservation and protection, Wallen says the state of Montana sees them as a pest that competes with livestock and should remain in the park. In his tenure, he estimates that nearly 80 percent of the workload for bison management fell on Yellowstone, and that as their populations expanded, the park’s bandwidth was tested. So, when Fort Peck and ITBC were able to lobby for a quarantine facility and then the transfer program, a solution materialized.
“It’s a big animal that needs conflict resolution,” Wallen said. “The primary objective for when the program started was to lower the number of bison going to slaughter.”
The first bison taken outside of Yellowstone were delivered to Ted Turner’s ranch south of Bozeman, Montana, in the early 2000s as part of a research project to ensure the transfer feasibility. At the time, Wallen argued that if Fort Peck was a more substantial part of the quarantine program, more animals could move through the system and be held for the required periods of time to prevent brucellosis as outlined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Wallen even visited Fort Peck to give Magnan advice about the infrastructure and resources needed for his bison facility.
“I think that the tribes have the most interest and authority in leading wild bison conservation outside of the park,” he said. “They want to live with bison, and they have a long cultural history of doing so that informs their management strategy.”
Much has changed since the first quarantine facility, managed by USDA, was built in 2005. Yellowstone’s 2024 bison management plan, which is currently wrapped up in litigation between Montana and the federal government alongside tribes, noted 40 new items on its environmental impact statement concerning carrying capacity of the park’s landscape versus bison populations. Wallen emphasized that simply restoring the numbers of wild bison is different from a balanced ecological restoration — but that Fort Peck has gotten closer than most conservation programs.
“It’s a step in the right direction. It may not be preserving the ecology of wild bison, but it’s preserving some of the ecology,” he said about the Fort Peck buffalo program. “More importantly, it’s preserving the culture of tribal nations.”
Fort Peck’s buffalo legacy commenced in 2012, under cover of a spring snowstorm, when 69 Yellowstone bison arrived in the middle of the night. They were welcomed first by Assiniboine families gathered at the Missouri River bridge, and then by Sioux relatives at Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, formally establishing the Tribes’ separate “cultural herd.” At the time, Fort Peck had built the nation’s only USDA-sanctioned bison facility outside of Yellowstone National Park, backed by financial and technical support from the World Wildlife Fund and Defenders of Wildlife.
Today, Fort Peck hosts nearly 1,000 bison, after receiving over 200 from Yellowstone this year. The program works within the state’s livestock regulations, runs controlled hunts for both private and tribal parties, while also reserving a portion of their herds for tribal needs, whether for cultural ceremonies or food security. Fort Peck’s quarantine facility for the Yellowstone bison boasts four pens on 320 acres, follows federal and state protocols in testing for disease, and holds them separately for one year before they join the remainder of the herd. According to Magnan, Fort Peck’s buffalo are the “most tested animals in the world,” and throughout the tenure of the program, there hasn’t been one positive case of brucellosis.
“Yellowstone didn’t have confidence at first, but eventually we showed them we could do it,” Magnan said. “They’ve been giving us more and more every year.”
The InterTribal Buffalo Council is at the helm of delegating bison once the animals have cleared their safety stops at Fort Peck, with the list of tribal nations applying for Yellowstone bison growing. ITBC also vets tribal applicants to ensure that their reservations have the resources needed to host the animal. The cumulative collaboration between Fort Peck and ITBC has since transferred bison to over two dozen tribes across 16 states, and recently to one First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada. As Fort Peck’s herd expands, so too do the opportunities for tribes far and wide to restore their cultural and spiritual connections to the iconic species.
“We want to continue being resilient, just like the buffalo,” said Carlson about ITBC’s future plans with Fort Peck. “There is really no end. It’s not only healing for our people, for all the trauma that we went through, but it’s also healing for our lands.”
A cultural cascade
As buffalo return to Fort Peck, a cascading effect of historical, educational and cultural revitalization has reshaped how the community imagines its future.
The Fort Peck Pté Group, a coalition of mostly tribal women formed in 2015, are helping to steer broader educational initiatives that reconnect tribal lifeways tied to the bison. One of Pté’s core members, Suzanne Turnbull, is working with local schools and educators to integrate classes on the bisons’ environmental and cultural aspects in order to weave together traditional knowledge and contemporary research on the reservation.
“The return of the buffalo has created pride and prosperity for our tribe,” Turnbull said. “It’s part of our right to self-determination: to provide food to our community, and to also create new economic opportunities that can lift our tribe up.”
Work by the Pté Group has led to a large surveillance facility where a buffalo trail system is being developed, financially backed by tribal resolutions, foundation grants, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and a private donation from the philanthropic Butler Foundation. Designed as a “prayer path” and lined with story poles, Turnbull envisions the trail will provide space where families can visit the cultural herd. Turnbull hopes that the Pté Group will continue to foster new programs that help people understand the wealth bison provide, calling them an “ecosystem engineer.”
“I believe that the buffalo is a way back,” Turnbull said. “It is a central part to our cultural identity, but it also teaches us to be a steward of all living things.”
The ripple effects go even further. At Poplar Middle School, the Buffalo Unity Project brings the 7th-grade class out to the ranch each year to experience a bison harvest. As part of Montana’s Indian Education for All initiative, students get to see the cultural herd, and watch Magnan as he carefully processes a bull shot by a nominated hunter. The anatomy lesson is coupled with historical and cultural education so the next generation can understand the species’ role in their tribal heritage.
Adlee Archambault, a 7th-grader who was present for the harvest this year, was able to attend the Yellowstone bisons’ delivery to Fort Peck mid-February. “Watching all of the buffalo come out of the trailer was this feeling like, wow, they’re still here,” Archambault said. “We’re still here.”
Magnan says he has accomplished nearly everything he set out to do. His original goal was to build the tribe’s herd to a count of 1,500 buffalo that stretched over 150,000 acres, something he is inching toward.
“They provided for us once, and they can do it again,” he said. “I am trying to build something so that my tribe can provide for themselves like we used to. There is pride in that.”
