Sunday, March 13, 2016

Where the Buffalo Roam, Take Two

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo...Most of all, the buffalo were part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.
So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.
Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting something as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track.
The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.[1]

A year ago, when I moved to Kansas, I mourned for the buffalo. There is a terrible, tragic beauty to this barren landscape, where each year topsoil is lost to dust, what water is left is contaminated by fertilizers and herbicides, and human communities suffer due to their dependency on extractive and unreliable industries. The beauty that remains is in the broad wide landscapes, and the sunrises, and the flocks of birds migrating overhead, occasionally stopping to drink and to feed where the hospitality of the Great Plains still lingers on. I couldn't understand why people would live in this place, land that used to be free and open prairie, now subdivided into monocropped acreage dotted with oil wells. "We weren't meant to settle here," I thought, through images of dust bowl farmers and folks who didn't have whatever it took to make it further along the Santa Fe Trail.
I cried over the buffalo because they are a symbol, to me, of all the violence we have done to this vast and magnificent prairie, to the regenerative biodiversity, to the people who made their homes here, moving across the land, migrating like the birds, and the buffalo. I could cry about the people, but that pain was too great for my struggling, aching, heavy heart. So instead I cried about the buffalo.
A year ago, my sorrow over the buffalo was tinged with guilt. I knew the thrill of shooting buffalo from the Oregon Trail computer game, and believed that overhunting was the cause of the decline of the buffalo. White people, the story goes, contributed to the decimation of buffalo populations by shooting bison out the windows of passing trains, but the natives too did their part, committing occasional mass slaughters of buffalo.
While it may be true that the natives killed more buffalo than were necessary for their survival, and over-eager whites recklessly shot buffalo for fun, this is far from the complete story. The bison population would not have declined so dramatically if these were the sole causes. Rather, the decline of the buffalo population was due to deliberate genocidal policies on the part of the United States government in its attempts to wrest land from the indigenous populations. Destroying the local population’s food supply – in this case the bison herds – was a cruel and effective military tactic.
I only just discovered this truth this week, while reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. A year ago I wrote, “I know why we killed the buffalo,” and I genuinely thought I did. I thought it had something to do with the thrill and exhilaration of chasing down that which is rare and beautiful. I felt a deep mournful sense of complicity in destroying this landscape all because I knew I would have shot a buffalo.
What needless shame I felt! Dunbar-Ortiz writes: “In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations – the buffalo.” (142) It was the army, and governmental policy, that nearly brought the buffalo to extinction, much more so than a bunch of trigger-happy settlers. This doesn’t totally free me from complicity – I am the beneficiary of American imperialist land grabs – but it does help me to see that what happened was about much more than individual actions.
The slaughter of the buffalo and the subsequent land transfer was celebrated by (White) Americans as a “populist” victory of free land to homestead and thus “improve.” The blind arrogance of this makes me shudder, because what they actually did was slowly but surely destroy the land, due both to practices and to a mindset of private property and self-interest. Practices have changed over the decades, but the mindset has not, and the reason we keep failing this land we claim to love, this fruited plain, is because it was not meant for enclosure.
What does this mean for Kansas history? What does this mean for “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown? I’ve never been formally schooled in Kansas history, but what I’ve heard is that abolitionists and slaveholders fought violently over whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state – as though admittance in one form or another were inevitable, manifest destiny. I celebrate the abolitionist legacy of Kansas, and the fact that this state entered the union “free.” But the truth is that this wasn’t just free land up for grabs. It wasn’t just the bloody deaths of pro- and anti-slavery folks that earned the early “settlement” of this state the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” There were already people who lived on and loved this land we Americans were killing each other over – all in the name of abolition or slavery, depending on what side you were on – and we were just as brutal, and shamelessly so, about killing them and their means of survival. In my research for this sermon I discovered a verse of “Home on the Range” that I had never heard before, which at least acknowledges the price paid for us to call this land home. It goes: “The red man was pressed from this part of the West/He’s likely no more to return,/To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever/Their flickering camp-fires burn.”[2]
I’m going to stop myself before I go too far down the rabbit hole of hating American history. But I will say this: the settlers of Kansas, for all their violence, were pawns in a bigger game. Lives were lost not so much for the sake of abolition or slavery but for a deep imperial urge that ignored the sanctity of life.
We are warned about the tragedy of the commons, the idea that competition over limited shared resources leads to overgrazing, overhunting, overfishing, over-polluting. Climate change is certainly an example of the result of unregulated abuse of resources. But in most cases, climate change included, the true cause of tragedy is not individuals acting in their self-interest contrary to the common good but rather deliberate policies that encourage and reward the abuse and exploitation of resources.  The true tragedy of the commons was like the tragedy of the buffalo – a resource made scarce by deliberate avaricious policy. It is the outsider, the corporation, the wealthy landowner seeking to consolidate his wealth and power through privatization, who disrupts the agreed-upon social rules that serve to regulate the commons.
The enclosure of land in England in the 18th century led to the consolidation of land and wealth amongst the rich, while the commoners were deprived of certain rights and access to land. In many cases, individuals who were closed out of land in England became landless laborers in the polluting industries of the industrial revolution, or settlers of North America, taking what land they could here and essentially closing out the indigenous people. The commons had been destroyed in practice and in mind, as settlers sought after the privatization of land and wealth they had been denied in Britain.
But it doesn’t have to continue in this way. By recognizing these truths about the commons we can restore faith in individuals’ abilities to self-regulate their consumption. I’ve been at enough occasions where no one wanted to be the one to eat the last cookie or piece of pie – at least not without the consent of the group - to know that our social instincts can often overpower our gluttony. And there are examples, like the Maine lobster industry, of successful self-regulation of a common resource.
I saw a picture on Facebook recently of some protesters at a Trump rally. They held a sign that read: “White people: what are we going to do to end our legacy of violence?” I can’t think of any more important question to ask. Our legacy has done violence to other peoples, the land, and ultimately ourselves. How do we undermine the power systems that are destroying us, and restore the commons for the benefit of ecology and humanity?
One way I’ve been working to restore the ecosystem at Heartland Farm is through holistic management. Holistic management is a decision-making framework designed with the grasslands in mind.  It starts from a point of recognizing that everything in life in a part of a greater whole; if you affect one part of the ecosystem, you will impact all of it in unforeseen ways. Key to holistic management is also the concept that not all environments function in the same way – particularly, it considers the brittleness of an ecosystem, based on both how much rain an area gets and the distribution over the year of that rainfall. In a nonbrittle environment, vegetation thrives in conditions of rest; in a brittle one, rest can lead to desertification. When it comes to implementation, holistic management starts with where you are, what you have, and what you want. The quality of life concerns of the people involved determine what steps are appropriate to work towards our desired ecological impact on the land. Unlike some approaches to sustainability that focus on minimizing our impact on the land, holistic management recognizes that ecosystems develop through the co-evolution of various species of flora and fauna and often having no impact can be just as detrimental as too much of one. The question becomes, how can we have a positive impact on this land such that a balanced ecosystem can thrive?
Historically, the buffalo were central to this ecosystem. Holistic management recognizes that reestablishing the buffalo commons, while potentially desirable, is not necessarily attainable. In the mean time, by managing our domesticated livestock in a way that mimics the behavior of large indigenous mammals across the prairie, we can begin to improve our ecosystems, sequestering carbon, reducing run-off, and encouraging biodiversity.
Holistic management can be used on the small subset of our 80 acres on which I plan to implement holistic grazing just as well as it can be used by someone managing thousands of acres. This adaptability is one of its strengths, but it privileges larger land bases, which closer approximate the whole of an ecosystem, which gets to one of my concerns, that agriculture needs to be for the people. How do we protect the ability of the public to benefit from the land, and the land to benefit from the people? Dan O’Brien, in his book Wild Idea: Buffalo & Family in a Difficult Land, writes: “Nobody knows how many protected acres is enough to ease the Great Plains ecosystem back from the abyss of industrial agriculture. But one thing is sure: while it is true that a small operator with a good heart can help set the tenor of the debate and the action to come, it takes an outfit with the ability to amass huge pieces of land to actually do something significant. To date, only government agencies, large conservation organizations, and very wealthy capitalists have the wherewithal to affect the future of the Great Plains. I had no access to, and little faith in, any of those entities.” (33)
The collective management of land, rather than the parceling out into sections according to an unnatural grid, is really the only way to impact an entire ecosystem. But in our current paradigm, that usually means the consolidation of wealth and land in the hands of a few. Our government and conservation groups, though well-intentioned, are subject to so many different sets of interests and conflicting scientific approaches that they become ineffective. Which leaves us with corporations and wealthy individuals, who even with the best of intentions are not accountable to the common good. An individual also cannot see all of and cannot know all that is best for an ecosystem, and we must recognize that humans are part of the whole that is our planet. We must manage with regards to the quality of life desires of everyone within our whole, our community, our ecosphere; if we don’t, we will suffer unintended consequences. We have to think about the social impact of our ecological decisions. Enclosure was the true tragedy of the commons, the loss of shared land and shared responsibility. Maybe we have to start to shift our ways of thinking about private property and land ownership. Maybe we need to find ways to more intentionally cooperate with our neighbors. Maybe we need to learn a thing or two from the indigenous people who lived here before us. Maybe we need to learn to work with them, to follow their lead. Maybe this is what we can do to end our legacy of violence.
While I was preparing this sermon my friend Aly shared this statistic with me: “According to a 2008 World Bank study, areas in which indigenous people occupy or control their traditional territory encompass 22 percent of the world's land surface and coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet's biodiversity.”[3] Those are powerful numbers. Indigenous cultures tend to affirm biodiversity with a reverence that settler cultures do not. As you go forth today I invite you to think about, in the words of Pope Francis, “Care for Our Common Home,” but particularly the question of how we fight the imperialist urge, in our culture, in our government, and in ourselves. In 1854, James Griffing, a Methodist minister, wrote of “the consuming avarice of the white man” as they claimed land from natives in Kansas Territory.[4] We are clearly not the first generation to think critically about this wrong. But maybe we can finally change. We must.




[1] Quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 143.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_range
[4] http://www.territorialkansasonline.org/~imlskto/cgi-bin/index.php?SCREEN=immigration&topic_id=88&search=American%20Indians