Anti-Extinction Parables

This is the time of year when I think the most about mortality. I think about the constant simultaneity of life and death every organism confronts, and the number of resurrections many of us experience in a single terrestrial lifetime. I also think about the ways the survival of those who’ve gone before us are imprinted on our genes, compelling us to in mysterious and unseen ways to endure threats to our existence.

The obsessive thinking itself is pretty easily explained by my own adaptive reflex: Retreating into my mind is almost certainly a learned response to trauma, as not everyone finds the solace I do in intellectualizing things. Learning what there’s a precedent for or, if it’s unprecedented, what’s been foreseen goes a long way in helping me accept inevitable demise and suffering—I understand that’s not exactly common. The seasonal flavor of mortality that the thinking takes on is explained (easily or with a grain of salt if you don’t think there’s anything to being composed of dead star matter) by the onset of Sagittarius season.

This annual freefall into disruptive weather, unforgiving outdoor surfaces, and cold nights that become increasingly arctic in length, all followed by the slow trudge toward spring, mirrors what I experience as a seasonal decline and slow resurgence in the weeks immediately before and after our winter solstice in North America. So, contemplating the resurrectionist energy of the seasonal shift, and how the start of my own life coincided with it now almost 31 years ago, is not out of character for me. I certainly think about mortality pretty nonstop (that and wealth inequality—which is why I am A VERY FUN PERSON TO TALK TO™), but less so about survival. That’s changing though. I’m probably more occupied with the concept of survival than I have been in many years.

When I moved back to Montana in June, it was for a job with the agency that serves survivors of domestic/intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and stalking in the tri-county area surrounding Helena. We focus on community education, too, with the understanding that teaching people about the root causes of our epidemic levels of abuse and violence is our best bet at heading off future instances of these crimes (I cannot stress enough that the three things that qualify people for our services are crimes that have a body count every day, and we should all be indignant that they are so normalized as to still be rampant, underreported, and seldom prosecuted). Since I work in a communications and fundraising role, I don’t work directly with survivors like most of my coworkers do. I do, however, bear some responsibility to communicate the impact of the partnership that exists between staff advocates and our clients for a public audience—usually in aggregate, but sometimes in a more individualized sense (minus any identifying information, of course). The upshot is that I’ve been made to think a lot more about survival as one possible outcome of a life-threatening situation.

It sounds so obvious when I say it that way that it’s hard to believe the notion of survival could ever exit a person’s mind. It’s what our bodies try to do on the cellular level every hour of every day we’re alive. I think my casual oversight just goes to show the cloud of defeatism that’s hanging over us. I’m strained to imagine anything beyond the eradication that awaits all of us in this current mass extinction event. Though, what’s interesting about the theme of survival now being overt in my day-to-day life is that it was so ubiquitous and well-integrated into the landscape of my childhood in a Yellowstone gateway community.

Where I grew up, it wasn’t uncommon to find random entrails of elk and deer outside houses, the organs still warm enough to melt the snow on the ground around them. Presumably, that sort of thing was left by some unseen predator trying to get through another winter—same as you and me. Each fall, Yellowstone’s northern range receives its annual visitation of testy (or should I say testes?) bull elk, their periodic bugles announcing their intention to spar and procreate at seemingly all hours in Gardiner and Mammoth. Every few years, one bear would exhibit behavior above and beyond even the erratic standards of entering hyperphagia. In a particularly bizarre and memorable stretch early in my senior year of high school, at least one bear foraging the residential pockets just off the highway north of town managed to get into not one but two vehicles. One was a CR-V (I want to say a 2005 model—not a large car!) that’s still owned and driven by one of my high school English teachers, the other was a Honda Odyssey van belonging to a family of five. If you know anything about Odysseys of the 2000s, you might be familiar with the sliding doors that open and close automatically at the push of corresponding buttons located discreetly behind the driver and shotgun seats. That feature apparently played a significant part in this bear’s interaction with the van because it managed to shut itself in after gaining entry. At least, that’s how the story perpetuated by the family’s neighbors went. I’ve never had a chance to ask the family if the prevailing account tracks with their own memory of the whole fiasco.

More comparatively mundane than a hyperphagic bear shutting itself into a van was the sight of bison—their herd size numbering from a few dozen to a couple hundred—making their way out of the park to graze in lower elevations every winter. Gardiner’s unique school detention activity of clearing the football field of bison shit memorialized by Laura Cote Gundlach in a 2020 documentary about former Lady Griz basketball coach Robin Selvig isn’t a parlor trick. Grazing patterns can fluctuate, so I don’t know if this is still the case, but the bison (and their byproducts) were a fixture around the school, further north in the Gardiner Basin, and around the sagebrush flats of the Gallatin foothills just outside the park’s north entrance (see header image captured by Jim Peaco in 2006 for reference).

A North American Holocaust by Gunfire

Despite being a common sight and among the most abundant of large mammal species in Greater Yellowstone today, I wouldn’t say any locals take bison for granted. Every Gardiner fifth-grader—at least back in my day—spends almost a full school week at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch every fall. As part of that education program, I believe we were at least basically aware of the role that site had in aiding the rebound of the park’s free-roaming bison population. I doubt that we had capacity to understand the ethical and ecological questions around breeding some of the last wild bison on the Plains with the semi-domesticated bison raised at the Buffalo Ranch, or the feeding program that continued some years after the last bison were released to the open range. But I think we knew the basic storyline that the North American bison had been brought back from the brink of extinction, and Yellowstone played a part in that.

What I’m sure we couldn’t grasp at that age—and is still even difficult for me to conceptualize as an adult—is the scale of slaughter this North American keystone species was subjected to. These late Pleistocene beings that evolved alongside humans for the last 12,000+ years roamed our once-vast grasslands by the tens of millions prior to the 1800s. The 220 years since are practically the blink of an eye for people with something like 600 generations of family history and cultural memory on this continent. By 1885, the great herds had been reduced to an estimated 1,000 animals—almost all in private herds with a handful of free-roaming bison left.

The living legacy of the single largest herd of bison at that time (known as the Pablo-Allard herd) is the Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation in northwest Montana. The original six orphan bison calves that became the foundation of this herd were brought from the eastern side of the Continental Divide back to the Flathead Reservation by a Pend d’Oreille man named Latati. Not unlike the history of the Flathead Reservation itself, the history of the Bison Range is fraught with broken promises, theft, and government allotment of lands set aside by the 1855 Hellgate Treaty for exclusive use of the tribes. As of 2022, the range is fully owned and managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, but it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the long road back to CSKT control since the last of the Pablo-Allard herd was sold off in 1907. When the U.S. government decided to establish a National Bison Range in 1908, they basically moved some of the same bison (or their descendants) that were sold off back to the reservation and seized the land from the tribes where the Pablo-Allard had previously grazed to create a wildlife preserve under federal control.

It’s not a stretch to call the carnage that played out on the Great Plains between the arrival of the railroad in 1870 to the last gasp of commercial bison hunts in 1884 a holocaust by gunfire. What images and primary accounts we have from the period evoke, at least for me, a horror akin to what I feel when I see images from the Holocaust that took about the same amount of time to claim the lives of millions of European Jews less than a century later. We should face the calamity, but we should never be able to palate the depravity of willful, systematic murder of any species.

There’s almost nothing more depraved to me than industrialized annihilation for commercial reasons. With the bison, it’s believed that four animals needed to be killed to get a single hide to market. Imagine innumerable thousands of carcasses littering the Plains throughout the year, in various stages of decay—many intact, others stripped of their hides with the heads, hooves, and 600-800 pounds of meat left to spoil. The stench was said to be unbearable to all, save insects and the canine, avian, or rodent scavengers of the Great Plains. In a subsequent wave of industrialization, the bones would become a hot commodity for use in fertilizer, fine china, and the process of refining sugar. After the indignity of their slaying, instead of being left to decompose and nourish the soil and vegetation the bison had grazed, aerated, and fertilized for millennia, their bones were removed and brought to factories. The mass slaughter and grave-robbing are nauseating to think about.

I hope the magnitude of unnecessary death and extraction of the North American bison is never forgotten as long as this little blue dot is habitable. In this memory is what I’ve heard described as a “de-extinction parable.” Everything I’ve recounted here and more about the near-eradication of a quintessential North American mammal is chronicled with aplomb in Ken Burns’s latest documentary series, The American Buffalo. It’s a good one, maybe even some of his best work. But to be clear, it’s not perfect. How could it be? Even with the most carefully considered effort to tell this story, a four-hour project could never come close to exhausting it. For comparison, my favorite series by Ken Burns about baseball, jazz, and country music each get more like 20 hours of screen time. Do I think those ones should’ve been scaled back? Not in the least—they’re extraordinary and I perennially want to rewatch every minute of them. Nonetheless, the disparity is striking when we know how many millennia of history bison and humans share.

Suffice to say, I’d been looking forward to The American Buffalo, but was also prepared for omissions given its relatively compressed length. That said, in terms of conveying what Burns himself dubbed in an October interview as a “de-extinction parable,” I would say he and his series cowriter Dayton Duncan were successful. Do we learn about 50+ Plains peoples’ unique mythologies and oral histories around the bison? No. Do we hear any mention of an Indigenous technology that revolutionized bison hunting on the Plains? No—we hear about the reintroduction of horses to North America via the Spanish, but nothing explicit about Métis Red River carts. We get one explicit mention of the Métis and several allusions, mostly in identifying on-camera appearances by Dr. Rosalyn LaPier, a Blackfeet and Métis historian and ethnobotanist who was heavily consulted for the series.

We get definite representations of Métis people and their camps; I feel confident in saying that because their calling card—those Red River carts—appear in artwork and several archival photos used to tell this story. But still, the lack of interpretation around the Métis presence is deafening to the point of distraction. When I say I was prepared for omissions in The American Buffalo, the relative absence of the Métis story was probably the biggest one. I have none other than Montana’s newest Poet Laureate Chris La Tray to thank for that.

Shedding the Settler Beer Goggles

Back in June, after hauling most of my belongings from Port Townsend to Helena, I was in need of a vacuum before making my final trip across the Columbia River and back. Unsatisfied with the options at pawn shops and secondhand stores in Helena, I headed south for a lecture Chris was giving at Museum of the Rockies for the Extreme History Project, and hoped I might find a suitable vacuum at one of the pawn shops in Bozeman. For the record, I ended up finding a Hoover at Great Northern Pawn that has served me dutifully. However, I must say that if there were anywhere close to as many vacuums as there are firearms in Montana pawn shops, boy howdy, my options would’ve been far more robust.

In the course of Chris’s presentation, which was partly about the way the Métis economy was structured around the bison, he spoke about some of the hype building around the forthcoming Ken Burns documentary. There’s a long history of his people, the Métis, being excluded from the dominant narratives of the North Plains. After more than a century of essentially proving their existence, many of the descendants of the Métis who left the Red River Valley to settle and even found some communities up and down the Upper Missouri, Musselshell, and Milk River Valleys (including Lewistown and Deer Lodge by way of the Grant-Kohrs Ranch) finally received federal recognition as the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians in the final days of 2019. That background is meaningful because Chris sounded like he was prepared for the Métis to be overlooked yet again in The American Buffalo. The aforementioned Dr. Rosalyn LaPier—a friend of Chris’s—had apparently confirmed for him sometime last spring that his anticipated disappointment was warranted.

Now that I’ve had a chance to watch and rewatch the series, I can see that the problem is not that the Métis are underrepresented in the material the documentary covers. There’s no shortage of Red River cart cameos on the screen; there’s just no explanation of what they are for folks who don’t know to look for those Easter eggs (which is most people thanks to the long tradition of erasure of the ancestral Little Shell community). That erasure, or more accurately, that failure to name what’s in plain sight and always has been, is almost worse than not being represented at all in my opinion.

It’s disempowering and demoralizing to not have your story told when the evidence of all that has happened is right there, readily available. That’s a point that I want to come back to, but first, I’d feel remiss in not mentioning one of the most influential (and dense) books I’ve read this year—namely, Nicholas Vrooman’s “‘The Whole Country Was… ‘One Robe’”. It’s considered the definitive history of the Little Shell Tribe in Montana, and even though it’s a tome, it is from what I understand a synthesis of many more thousands of pages of documentation the tribe had to produce over the years in their struggle for federal recognition. After hearing Chris cite Vrooman’s book in presentations for a few years, I finally got my mitts on my public library’s copy of this apparently rare volume in July (recently returned to Helena from an interlibrary loan trip to Maryland, which I thought was cool). Since finishing it in September, I see evidence of the Métis—presumably ancestors of today’s Little Shell members like Chris—all over the place in Montana history.

Imagine with me cart trains numbering up to over a thousand—whole villages on wheels—criss-crossing the Plains multiple times a year, and overdubbing that scene with “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys…because that’s what pops into my head when I think of how effectively the ancestors of today’s Little Shell navigated this rugged and vast bioregion that spans both sides of the Continental Divide. Chris is fond of saying the Métis invented car camping, which is an apt analogy! They were accomplished travelers and many of the roads we use in the Northwest today were built over established Red River cart trails.

I joke with myself that every effort to learn some of the particular histories of Indigenous people on this continent has been like pulling off another layer of settler beer goggles. The bigger story gets incrementally broader, less blurred, more layered, and more nuanced as you read and research. That only feels right; our landscape holds millennia of people’s memories and stories. Nicholas Vrooman himself (who wasn’t Little Shell, but was a tireless advocate for their fight for recognition and a careful documenter of their history) is on record saying something to the effect of a dozen professional historians could do a lifetime of work focused on the North Plains and never bump into one another. It’s true. And it’s also why I think these living microcosms where so many people’s histories do bump into each other—even revolve around—are so substantial. The North American bison story, the story of it still being here notwithstanding every attempt to eradicate it from the landscape, is so potent. And we can’t forget that the cooperation of people—many with emphatically fucked-up politics, self-serving agendas, and a fundamentally anthropocentric hubris—helped bring this species, this avatar of respect in the Seven Grandfather teachings passed down by Chris’s Ojibwe people, back from the brink.

We have to face the depth of the horror and wanton destruction of life that unfolded here to truly absorb the gravity of this de-extinction parable. And I think we have to hold these stories and parables close through this Sixth Mass Extinction event—another manmade ecological disaster by all objective criteria. To me, survival in the Anthropocene shouldn’t be measured in whether or not we keep the planet habitable long enough for my generation or the next to be able to fantasize about dying of old age (though, if possible, that would be a great achievement). Any long-term survival in the terrestrial sense feels improbable at this point. But survival in the spiritual sense? I think there’s something worthy to strive for there. I’m inclined to measure survival by our capacity to remember, and to let that memory instill in us a sense of respect for our place in the living world.

I want us to remember that we’re all descended from hunter-gatherers whose lives depended on knowing their relationship to the lives around them, and having respect for the power of what they couldn’t know or explain. Every single one of us—no matter the continent of origin—have this in common: Our ancestors were successful at surviving existential threats from predators and environmental conditions difficult for many of us to imagine…and then stringing together enough days, weeks, months, and years of that survival streak to bear young and, still more astonishing to me, MAKE ART. Even under unspeakable duress, people have always made art. I can trip out on that fact forever. We all come from pretty incredible stock and we can only say that, not because humans are the strongest and smartest species on the planet, but because we’re creative and we learned to work together, sometimes even with other species.

Validation & Solidarity in the New Gold Rush

Our creativity and solidary has enabled the unthinkable—both good and bad. And this is where I want to return to that notion of having all the evidence of your existence, of your survival, overlooked or misinterpreted. What Chris has been talking about in variations of his “The Day That Finally Came” presentation for a few years now—about the story of Métis on this side of the U.S.-Canada border going unrecognized for so long—reminds me of something that I hear a lot about on the interpersonal and more systemic levels in my line of work now.

To be clear about the “systemic” part I’m talking about here: It’s a falsehood to discuss intimate partner violence and sexual assault as isolated instances of private violence—there’s an entire culture of antiquated racism, classism, and gender norms that foment violence and degradation against our most vulnerable. Power and control is at the core of all abusive behaviors; the loss of either is the most intolerable feeling imaginable for an abuser. These are general truths across the board, but even so, everyone who’s survived disempowerment and harm at the hands of an abuser—often somebody they loved and trusted at some point—has a unique story.

Survivors don’t need to be pitied or rescued. Their life is their own to reclaim on their own terms, and they are better prepared to do that than anybody else. Even if how they’ve gotten to where they are looks unskilled, spineless, uninformed, and servile from the outside, the fact that they are alive should be taken as evidence that they’re already survival experts for their own set of circumstances. They don’t need anybody to tell them what to do—they know how to stay alive. However, starting their journey back from the brink of their own extinction is a one-step/one-day-at-a-time process, and they do need to know what their options are given the drum-tight safety and resource constraints they have to work within, where a single misstep can be lethal. In other words, survivors generally need what all of us need: validation and solidarity.

Validation, to me, looks like the opposite of sugar-coating anybody’s situation or chances of survival. I think validation is being insistently clear-sighted about the seriousness of a situation because that’s the only way to face what you’re up against honestly. Solidarity, to me, is simply reminding each other that we’re all in this together—even and especially in the face of very real threats to our safety and existence. As far as I’m concerned, these are the two hallmarks of any de-extinction parable worth its salt.

I live by the James Baldwin maxim that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So, you can probably imagine my impatience with people who are uncomfortable talking about some of the biggest threats to our existence. As far as widespread contemporary threats go, wealth inequality is a huge one—especially in the Mountain West and hyper-especially in western Montana. It brings me no pleasure to make that observation, but it brings me even less to say that people are deeply uncomfortable calling a spade a spade when it comes to this issue at the root of our present livability challenges. People are far more comfortable with terms like “housing crisis” that obscure the underlying cause. The term isn’t entirely misplaced, but it decouples the effects from the perpetrators in my opinion, and that allows the wealthy and the developers that cater to their interests to flout accountability. My feelings on the galvanization around the term “housing crisis” are best summarized in what I’m convinced is one of the defining sentences of our decade, written by journalist Joseph Bullington in an absolute barn-burner of a story on this topic:

This is no more a ​“housing crisis” than the fracking boom was an ​“oil crisis” or the gold rush a ​“gold crisis.”

Since reading the story that line appeared in earlier this year, I’ve been emboldened to correct people who fall back on the comfortable words “housing crisis.” I remind them that there’s no shortage of land or housing being bought and sold. It’s more or less Montana’s stock and trade these days, along with smothering levels of tourism and recreation. It’s just that rank and file people are absorbing the blows of displacement and extraction in this particular resource boom, this 21st century gold rush.

This might feel like an onslaught if you’ve read this far. In about 4,000 words, we’ve traversed the industrial slaughter of North America’s signature mammal and the very real extinction threats we all face from every angle today—the causes of almost all of which are overwhelmingly manmade. Seen another way, though, this onslaught is about memory as a playbook for survival, a parable antithetical to extinction. For my part, even if I could, I would never take my eyes off what we’re up against.

I’m reminded of something one of my then-future coworkers emailed me back in April. She was one of three people who agreed to answer some follow-up questions from me after I was offered my current job. In response to something I asked about navigating burnout while regularly wading through second-hand trauma, she conceded that working with survivors is no walk in the park, but it would be harder to know what she knows about violence and abuse and do nothing, or work at some other job. Like me, she’s a Sagittarius. Her conviction for bearing witness and walking alongside people through some of the worst days of their lives is that conscious solidarity that I swear begets survival.

Even if my demise—if our demise—is certain, I feel one of my greatest responsibilities to the living world is to bear witness. I don’t know whether I hang my hat on any bigger cosmology or prefabricated conception of spirituality these days, but I do believe that my atoms, and whatever form they reconstitute as after I’m gone, will carry with them some kind of adaptive wisdom from whatever they’ve survived in previous assemblages of life, including this one.

That wisdom, that epigenetic, epi-material sense of memory inheres a familiarity with extermination. Of being endangered. Of staring that threat of eradication down, and knowing its perpetrators with clarity. Of taking seriously my role in validating our shared struggle of survival, and being part of it.

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Featured image: Bison on school football field in Gardiner, MT, Electric Peak in background; Jim Peaco; January 26, 2006; from Yellowstone’s public domain photo collection

Further reading, viewing, listening recommendations if you vibed with this:

• True West, an excellent new book by Betsy Gaines Quammen about the myths that have defined the American West and the opportunity we have to deconstruct these fictions and mend our communities
• Uprooted, a 2021 book by Grace Olmstead about how growth and suburbanization in southern Idaho is swallowing up the once-rich farmlands and close-knit rural communities of the Emmett and Treasure Valleys
• “To Honor All Creation,” an August 2022 edition of Chris La Tray’s newsletter, An Irritable Métis. This is about the 2022 Yellowstone Revealed tipi village at Madison Junction and a visit from capital-B Bizhiki, the Ojibwe avatar of Mnaadendimowin, or Respect.
• The Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians: Métis Buffalo Hunters of the Northern Plains, a recording from Chris’s June 2023 lecture for the Extreme History Project
• “How an Avalanche of Wealth Is Displacing Workers in Montana,” a March 2023 story by Joseph Bullington (a White Sulphur kid!) about our new gold rush, republished by Montana Free Press in April 2023
• In the Spirit of Atatice, a 2019 short film about the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ relationship to the Bison Range and its herd