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The Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma reconnects with bison : NPR


One of Denver Mountain Park’s 35 bison stands in a barn as it waits to be delivered to representatives of four Native American tribes and a memorial board so they can return the animals to the land of the tribe on March 15, 2023, near Golden, Colo. the bison went to the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma.

David Zalubowski/AP


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David Zalubowski/AP


One of Denver Mountain Park’s 35 bison stands in a barn as it waits to be delivered to representatives of four Native American tribes and a memorial board so they can return the animals to the land of the tribe on March 15, 2023, near Golden, Colo. the bison went to the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma.

David Zalubowski/AP

Oklahoma’s Yuchi tribe received five bison from Denver earlier this month, marking the first time in nearly two centuries the Yuchi will once again interact with the animals.

Richard Grounds, CEO of Yuchi Language Projectworks to create new Yuchi speakers by letting fluent elders work with children.

The Yuchi tribe is one of some to get bison from the city of Denver, which maintains two conservation herds descended from the last wild bison in North America. Since 2018, the city has donated 85 surplus bison — which many, including Natives, commonly call buffalo — to Native American tribes rather than auctioning it off. reflect a broader effort to return governance to Native Americans.

“Part of the beauty of this whole project is that it’s reconnecting the different Indigenous countries,” Grounds said. For example, the countries of Cheyenne and Arapaho already have herds, and they are “training us on how to handle buffalo, helping us with the collection process.”

These five bison will be used to establish a new herd through a combination of breeding and future transfer. They will also serve to re-establish spiritual bonds that were broken when the Yuchi were forced out of their homeland and the bison were nearly exterminated.

Importance and long-term absence of bison in Yuchi . culture

“yUdjEhanAno so KANO,” Grounds remembers telling the bison when he faced them in Denver.

It means “We, the Yuchi, are still here.” They, like bison, survived colonial efforts to wipe them outbut were physically separated after being forced out of their homeland in what is now the southeastern United States.

During a major Yuchi celebration known as the Green Corn Feast, there is a dance to honor the relationship between humans and bison. For generations, it was passed down by people who had never met in person.

Halay Turning Heart is a project administrator for the Yuchi Language Project and a lifelong participant in the Green Corn Feast, which includes the buffalo dance. The dance, she said, evokes “the sound of buffalo running that shakes the ground” through the stomping of the feet.

heart turn talking animal was an abstract concept to her as a child – she only knew it through pictures. She had never seen a bison with her own eyes until she became an adult and visited her husband’s Lakota reserve in South Dakota.

“For my kids, it’s been so much fun to actually be around buffalo and see them in real life, in their natural habitat, and have a connection and a better understanding of who they are. makes sense,” said Heart, turning its head. It will “reveal more meaning to the buffalo dance we’ve been working on” and increase respect for the dance and the creatures themselves.

The song for the Yuchi buffalo dance doesn’t have a word for buffalo, and when the Yuchi Language Project started, Grounds said that older people had trouble remembering it. They’ve never seen one, and neither have their parents or grandparents.

“We didn’t think of naming the buffalo in our buffalo dance song, because who would have imagined that these wonderful creatures would be slaughtered by millions?” Base says.

Connect with the natural world

Restoring the Yuchi language has allowed people to reconnect with land, plants and animals, Grounds and Turning Heart both said. For example, the Yuchi language does not have a word for animals as a category and refer to them with the same pronoun as all non-Yuchi creatures.

“Through language we are learning the worldview and respect that our elders hold, which is a very different worldview from the dominant society in Britain,” which considers animals are lower beings, said Turning Heart.

Indigenous spiritual connections to the natural world have historically been seen as unscientific or childish with racist prejudices. But Grounds points out that the destructive nature of seeing things as “worthless, lifeless clumps of matter” has contributed to things like climate change and serious ecological problems.

For example – tens of millions of bison once lived in North America, but by the late 1800s they were nearly driven to extinction “due to uncontrolled hunting and the eradication policy of the United States associated with the willful harm and control of Native American Tribes,” according to the Department of Internal Affairs.

The Grounds said that when bison were loaded onto a trailer in Denver to take them back to Oklahoma, their hooves sounded like thunder and the sight was “very impressive.” After nearly 200 years of performing the buffalo dance without them around, “now I get to see how the buffalo dance really works.”

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