It also includes Snake Butte with its weathered petroglyphs left by a people whose culture centered on bison. Fox and the managers of reestablished bison herds on three dozen other Indian reservations in the arid grassy half of the nation are closing a circle linking the past and the future. The growing movement to bring back the bison embraces not only Indian tribes but also others seeking ways to reconnect the natural and human communities of the plains. In 1990 a coalition of tribes formed the InterTribal Bison Cooperative to foster bison reintroduction as an alternative to raising cattle on tribal lands. Driving this initiative was not sentiment over the Indian past but simple economics.
Indian reservations are part of five of the nation's ten poorest counties.
With today's falling beef prices and rising land values, a profit margin isn't trivial for any of the people of the West. As a rule of thumb, raising a bison costs about half as much as raising a cow, a fact that should come as no surprise to students of ecology. Bison coevolved with the American grasslands, which once covered about 40 percent of the nation's surface. Before European settlement, bison ranged across most of what are now the 48 states, including even woodlands on the eastern seaboard. The great hooved hordes described in the history books, however, were concentrated on the treeless grasslands stretching from the Mississippi to the Rockies and from Mexico to the Yukon.