The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
Jason Baldes, founder of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative (Part 1): From Rock Bottom to Restoration
Last week's episode featured a special on-location recording with Jason Baldes, founder and ED of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, and VP of the InterTribal Buffalo Council. It has drawn some wonderful responses since (thank you!). And again, given the episode was a little over two hours, I thought to release it in two parts this week for those of you who prefer to tune in that way. All the more because the conversation sort of evolved into two distinct parts naturally.
So welcome to Part 1, from where we first meet Jason at the Initiative's HQ, and prepare to head out into the field with the buffalo. We're straight out of the gates with the breaking news here of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe officially and overwhelmingly designating buffalo as wildlife again, with its myriad and profound restorative ramifications - on culture, health, justice, spirit, other wildlife, rivers, land, through to notions of ownership and property. And when the engines are cut about ten minutes in, the air stills and the conversation deepens.
As always, you can browse a list of chapters and navigate that way if you like.
I'll have Part 2 for you in a couple of days, from right amongst the buffalo with some hilarious and profound encounters, from feeding Ruby the orphan buffalo and her little horse mate, to passing by some big bulls, to what ends up being an incredible time face to face with the herd.
Recorded 16 September 2025 at the Wind River Reservation, home of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Nations, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in current day Wyoming.
Title image by Olivia Cheng.
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Pre-roll music: Heartland Rebel, by Steven Beddall (sourced from Artlist).
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G'day Jason. How's it going?
Jason:How are you Good to meet you, man.
AJ:Nice to meet you. Yeah, how are you doing? That's my wife, olivia. Hello nice to meet you, nice to meet you. And that's Yeshi, that's Jason, hi, yeshi.
Jason:Hi, nice to meet you. How are you guys doing?
AJ:We're doing good man. How are you?
Jason:Thanks for these guys helping out.
AJ:Oh, AJ here for The RegenNarration, your independent, listener-supported podcast exploring how people are regenerating the systems and stories we live by. Welcome back to the Wind River Reservation, home of the Eastern Shoshone and Arapaho Nations, and the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, a tribally-led non-profit founded in 2023 here at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in current-day Wyoming. We left off part one of this series last week, just as we met the initiative's founder, jason Baldes, and prepared to head out on the plains to meet the buffalo and hear their and Jason's stories. All right, you got everything, everything.
Jason:We'll jump in this red one here.
AJ:Cool.
Jason:You can go in either one you want.
AJ:You want to come with us?
AJ:Yeah, I'll get the door for you.
AJ:You might remember, jason had just come to us from preparations for the coming Sundance, which reminded me it was in the lead-up to their Sundance, just two years ago, that the tribe sourced meat from their own buffalo on their own land for the first time in nearly 140 years.
AJ:That's all part of enacting a broader vision of buffalo living as wildlife, not livestock, once again protected under tribal law. And this vision doesn't stop at Wind River either. Jason is also VP of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, where 87 tribes and counting are currently involved in efforts to restore the buffalo and all that entails, from the reacquisition of land, the restoration of rivers and other wildlife, along with the health, language and spirit of many nations. So let's head out in. The side by side, we pull up and turn the engines off in 10 minutes or so to hear the brilliant story of what's happening here, including how it came close to never happening, and about halfway in we head over to feed the orphan buffalo Ruby and hear about the old Shoshone grandmas, before ultimately arriving back at the herd for an incredible, unexpected face-to-face encounter Right on, right on OK.
AJ:Thanks for having us here, man. Yeah, you bet Really appreciate it.
Jason:Yeah, glad to make fun. Yeah, thanks. This was going to be the original town when the reservation was opened up for homesteading. This was a hotel that was built in 1920, that was on the stagecoach route and this was subdivided into ten acre plots, and that church used to be out in the middle of the field. That swapped. If we didn't buy it, it was going to be subdivided into ten acre plots again. Oh my goodness. So we were really glad to be able to prevent that from happening.
AJ:Yeah, when was that? When was the port?
Jason:2019. Oh, pronghorn are out here too.
AJ:We like the pronghorn 2019.
Jason:Yeah, yeah, there's been some, so you can see them right there. Oh yeah, beautiful, they've been hanging out with the buffalo a little. They had twins. Some of them had twins recently.
AJ:I read some of this in some of the newsletter stuff. Hey, yeah. Even one you had to bring up because the mum didn't like.
Jason:Yeah, we had one last year and we got little bull calf and he's out with the herd. Now you can't tell which one he is, but the other one this year, she's five weeks old now. She's over at my house. I've also got a little orphan horse. Yeah right, so they're being bottle-fed together. Oh wow, and I just started integrating them back with another horse so he can start to learn about being a horse and then the buffalo can go up and see the calf too.
AJ:That's outstanding To the horse and buffalo going through this process. Do they connect?
Jason:Yeah, they're pals. If we get time we'll go over there and look at them. Cool, this is them the other night. Oh, that is gorgeous.
AJ:You've got to love it.
Jason:Yeah, I mean, you've kind of got to pinch yourself every day. It's pretty amazing.
AJ:I imagine the work's not always easy, but they're the rewards, huh.
Jason:Yeah, it's certainly challenging. There's some bulls there. Yeah, certainly challenging. You know, you wouldn't think that there would be the level of opposition to something like this that there is. It's overwhelming support. But you're just always kind of surprised by the people that don't support something like this. How can you not?
AJ:Where do you find that opposition and where is it surprising, I suppose, in that way.
Jason:Well, I suppose that it's from cattle industry, the cattle producers, and I think it has to do with competition for grass, it has to do with the idea that the West was won. There's still semblances of manifest destiny, and I guess that's understandable. You know that the racism is still out there, but we don't realize the own level of our own colonialism. If a tribal member is a rancher, he has a hard time recognizing that that was a lifestyle that was imposed on his grandparents and now he's embracing it. Okay. But if you understand history and you understand what was brought to our people here, it was to colonize us. It was to Christianize us. It was to assimilate us. It was to destroy our language. Our was to assimilate us. It was to destroy our language, our cultural ways of knowing and belief systems. And so it's a bit ironic when you have tribal cattle producers preaching about their livelihood in the cattle industry and not being able to recognize the irony in that.
AJ:Yeah, I guess all the more when it sums to opposition. It's not just okay. This is where I found myself. It's hard to switch over or whatever. And yeah, competition for grass and whatever, but if it does end up being a sort of I don't know what is it, we can't go back, or it's just been so embedded. I'll never forget Stephen Biko. In fact, this is relevant because you've got this transformative experience I heard you talk about in Africa too. But just thinking about Africa, because I remember as a young guy I came across this book by well, it was actually the testimony of Stephen Biko, so him under trial, an African bloke there and there was a passage that I never forgot. It was something along the lines of the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed, what you internalize.
Jason:Yeah, that's a good quote. I mean, buffalo restoration is foundational to who we are. It's in our songs, it's in our ceremonies. We even called ourselves the buffalo eaters, the Guchendika. But for the most part, most people still know that and actually, out of the two tribes there's 15,000 tribal members. Less than 5% are ranchers. So the majority of people, tribal people, support this. Yeah, it's a few loud ones, confused ones, that see this as some threat to their livelihood. Now, I get it For non-tribal people who don't have a cultural connection or understanding. How would they know? So you have to educate, you have to inform them, and we have a lot of support from non-tribal people, and that's because they maybe have a little better understanding of their own history. Do they have more compassion and empathy? I don't know, but we do have a lot of non-tribal members who support this. It does seem to be something that's changing non-tribal members who support this.
AJ:It does seem to be something that's changing.
Jason:Do you sense that? Yeah, I mean, this is the right thing to do. I mean, if there's very little to argue about this and I think people get that I think people are looking for something good or positive happening in the world and this meets that criteria. You know, with everything else going on, the world's in chaos, the country's in chaos, the country's in chaos. This is stability and hope and resiliency, and I think that's what people want.
AJ:I'm here with that too. Yep, this is really wet underfoot, huh we have the irrigation season, so there's a ditch that brings water.
Jason:Of course, this is agricultural ground and practices, and so when we bought the property, it already had the agriculture. We reseeded it with buffalo grass so that it's more preferable grasses over alfalfa or anything like that. So it is. It is um very green and lush. We've had a lot of rain. We're right in that time of year where we need that, so it's a good time to be here. It's going to dry out. August, late July. August is going to be brown.
AJ:Yeah, it gets hot. Here too it gets hot.
Jason:Yeah, well, relatively it's not. We only get a few days over 100 degrees, okay, 91, which was yesterday. That's really hot for us, is it Okay? We like 70s? Yeah, that's our ideal temperature. Yeah, like today, this is a great temperature here today.
AJ:Oh, it's beautiful, it's. It's funny. You know, jason, like even as a and as an australian, like what, in a sense, you could say, why would I feel this so strongly? Yeah, but I do. Yeah, there's something about it, and on these lands there's something else.
Jason:There's this there's, there's power in that. And the story getting the land restored, getting the relative brought home, yeah, I think people really relate to it. With the Shoshone tribe, you know, supporting the designation for these to be wildlife, that's huge, you know.
AJ:Yeah, when was?
Jason:that About two months ago. Finally, yeah, wow, I've been dreading that Really, the hardest audience to speak to is my own people. So you know, to take a topic like that in front of our people, it's like a firing line and people just vicious negative, wanna bring you down. The vote was 90 to seven. Wow, so overwhelming support. Wasn't even a question, and so the vote speaks for itself.
AJ:You didn't necessarily expect that. I didn't. No, yeah, some calves in there. It's beautiful, they're laid out. I think we have 28 calves 28 calves. So you started with just 10 in 2016. Yeah, and now there's 28 calves, just now, just this year.
Jason:So we're up to 140-something here that is outstanding. So we're up to 140 something here that is outstanding. So we're gonna pull over right here and we'll turn off our.
AJ:I know the vehicles are kind of driving by, but they're clearly at ease with you guys in these vehicles, even huh.
Jason:Yeah, we're out here about every day with them. We don't harass them, we leave them alone and they generally know that we're not out here to. Yeah, they're not habituated but they're acclimated. But there'll be a lead female that'll get nervous with our presence and she'll start walking off Really and then they'll kind of trail out behind you. Traffic jam around here.
AJ:Comes in bursts. Huh, yeah, it does.
Jason:I think it's because of the construction over by Riverton where they let them by.
Jason:And then they're yeah, we're 10. In 2016. We had the first calf born in 2017. We added kind of a new batch of animals that came from some conservation population. They started with the first ten from the Neil Smith Wildlife Refuge in Iowa and then some from the National Bison Range. We brought some from the Nature Conservancy City of Denver, Antelope Island in Utah, Soapstone Prairie in northern Colorado. It's tied to Colorado State University. So I think eight, seven or eight different batches of animals over the ten years, nine years, and then plus what's been born over 60 calves have been born here.
Jason:So if they've got an ear tag, they came from somewhere else. If they've got no ear tag, they been born here. So if they've got an ear tag, they came from somewhere else.
AJ:If they've got no ear tag, they were born here I'm so curious about that, in terms of when they come here, they I mean I've heard this elsewhere, that and it looks like it happens here that they know what to do that memory like because they come from everywhere. You might think there'd be conflict. You might think they might not relate to the land. Like that they might struggle, but there's memory.
Jason:They have. You know it's innate for them. You know it's ingrained genetically how to be what they need to be. It's not like livestock that's been genetically made dumber and more reliant upon man. They don't need man.
Jason:One thing we always do in bison conservation is if you're starting a herd or you're bringing in new animals, is that you only bring in yearlings or two-year-olds or three-year-olds because they're matriarchal. The young ones will integrate into an existing population if they're young. If they're older, they're going to want to go back to what they know, and there's been a. You know, you hear about buffalo breaking through fences and running off, and that's probably a 7 or 8, 10-year-old animal that's just trying to find its way home. Whereas if you start with a young population, they're going to learn what's available to them, grow and mature and know where the water sources are and the plants are, the minerals and the dirt are, and so then they become part of the landscape and, as you like, for here, as we acquire more ground, we can open it up and they learn it. And so, incrementally we've grown from 300 acres to now 2 000 acres for these animals and then at some point, you know thinking beyond that opening, opening it up to a larger landscape, they'll learn it and they'll utilize what's available to them.
Jason:But these animals have nowhere to go back to. This is what is home to them, so that's why it works. We don't really have breaches of the fence, because they have food, they have water, they have the mineral needs and they have each other. Main thing is each other. They're a herd animal, so they need that. However, the bulls you know the satellite bulls will hang off by themselves and the main herd will kind of roam around, but as they grow and mature they're gonna start developing family groups.
Jason:And because none of these animals are really over 12 years old, this is still a young, growing population and we maintain a natural female to male ratio which is about 60-40 or 50-50. And that ensures that during the rut, during the mating season, that the buffalo themselves are the ones choosing who who breeds. Therefore not genetically manipulated by any of our needs. You know we don't. We don't have a reason to selectively breed for anything. That's their job. That's them as wildlife, having the ability to exist as buffalo without our intervention. And that's part of that paradigm shift of thinking differently not of buffalo as livestock, buffalo as livestock and buffalo as wildlife, wildlife where they can exist as such, and you know they don't need our help. All they need is the land, space and ability to exist.
AJ:Yeah, man thinks they got to control everything, and then we make things hard for ourselves. Arguably.
Jason:Yeah, it's like why would you want to do that? Why make it harder for yourself? These guys don't really need all that much help. It's way easier than cattle production.
AJ:There's even Aboriginal folk at home I've heard say don't plant trees, let nature plant the trees. But yeah, create the conditions where nature can plant the trees, yeah, and don't be stripping them out or whatever. Yeah, but yeah, the ways we think, even in solving stuff, that we have to fix it. That it's on us to fix it. Just seeing the pronghorn dash across the field, oh yeah. Yeah, it's a beautiful sight too. I've seen that. It's been a really distinctive feature of Wyoming that we've seen, Not in other states as much, just Pronghorn.
Jason:This is Wyoming is the last place for Pronghorn.
AJ:Is that?
Jason:right, yeah, and we had a pretty drastic winter two years ago where, in the state, over 200,000 deer in Pronghorn died because of the snow. Well, had Buffalo been there, they'd cut the trails through the snow that allow the deer and pronghorn to be able to eat in conditions that are like that. So another example of how buffalo could have prevented, been preventative to that. But yeah, in my father he was a biologist. Well, well, he's a retired biologist, he's 83 now. When I was growing up there were no pronghorn or bighorn sheep on this reservation, so he worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He was in a unique position as a tribal member but alsoa federal employee working to uphold trust responsibility for tribes. So as a biologist, he was working to protect fisheries, water, wildlife.
Jason:And in the 80s it was controversial then too was to create a game code that would protect or create seasons and bag limits for hunting. Now, indigenous people, we always hunted year round, that was always how we fed ourselves. But you put us on a limited land base. With modern tools and technology, we drastically reduced the number of wildlife. So the game code was to set seasons Controversial, but what was predicted would happen did, and that would be that our wildlife populations would increase and we'd have better hunting opportunities and easier ways to sustain ourselves with management, and that's what happened. We now have significant exponential increases in deer pronghorn elk. So I was a little kid and got to witness and participate in the gathering of pronghorn and bighorn sheep, and then we brought them back to the reservation and released them. My dad told me that I'd be able to hunt a pronghorn in 10 years, and they did so. Well. I was able to kill my first one eight years later and I've harvested a pronghorn ever, every year. Since how old?
AJ:were you then 11.?
Jason:but the buffalo was always missing he always told me if you're going to work on buffalo, make sure you bring him back as wildlife and not livestock. Told me, if you're going to work on buffalo, make sure you bring them back as wildlife and not livestock. They should have been brought back in the same way. Pronghorn and bighorn were that you get that wildlife in their habitat and you bring them to their new habitat. We had to start on 300 acres with these because they were seen as competition for cattle production. So unless they have that classification or status above livestock, then that's how we can prioritize ensuring they can exist, because the cattle production. Those are individual cattle producers. These are the tribe's buffalo and so why doesn't the tribe have a priority on how lands are managed over the individual?
AJ:And so it's that paradigm shift. Yeah, did your dad consider it was a bridge too far to deal with the buffalo back then?
Jason:No, he tried Really. Yeah, towards the tail end of his career he did a habitat assessment of the entire reservation which basically showed this reservation has more habitat for buffalo than Yellowstone does Really. Basically, animals bison in the late 1800s were forced into Yellowstone and they were so isolated that they were hard to get to. That's why that population grew there Out here they were millions of them but they were wiped out. So towards the tail end of his career he worked on that.
Jason:But for him and during that period of time the elected leaders of the two tribes were comprised of cattlemen who directly benefited from the management of the two tribes, were comprised of cattlemen who directly benefited from the management of the reservation being prioritized for cattle, and so he had a very difficult time convincing leaders that buffalo were somehow important on the reservation, even though they were a small contingent of the population. They had really say over how lands got utilized. So despite the conservation success stories like the very first wilderness in the United States, the game code in the 80s, protecting wolves and bears in the 90s Buffalo's wildlife is not that much different Fighting the longest-running court battle in the history of Wyoming over who controls water on the reservation. So we've got a long history of fighting for land, water and wildlife, if we can elect the right leaders and if we can navigate the federal trust responsibility part.
AJ:Yeah, how's that going now? Oh dude, yeah, how's that going now?
Jason:Oh dude, yeah, not very good Really. We got a meeting. I'm on the board of the Intertribal Buffalo Council as well. We got 87 tribes across the country. So we've been working on some legislation that would help codify the trust responsibility the Indian Buffalo Management Act. We were very close in the last Congress, but the new house rules and the people in that administration make it difficult. But we got a trip over there in two weeks to meet with the acting assistant secretary of Department of Interior, which is a meeting that we've been trying to get for a while. So we'll see. Okay, I don't know how, I don't know if we have to just ride this out or something happens. It seems like something's got to break, you know, yeah.
Jason:I think it did yesterday with the largest protest against Trump in the history of the nation today yesterday. Largest mass protest in the history of the country was yesterday.
AJ:It does feel that this isn't a country that would roll over no, so we'll see what happens, I think, the I think the good will prevail so you know, what I found really interesting is listening to the people who voted for him, at least the ones who, but these haven't been hard to find who are thoughtful, and some have even said things like I, I feel and this is going back a bit right, it's going back to around the election maybe and then up to 100 days, in the first 100 days thing they were still saying really thoughtful things like including empathetic, like I hate the thought that my countryman, fellow countryman would be, would think I've unleashed something. That scares them. You know things like that. So I've been really interested. That scares them. You know things like that. So I've been really interested in listening to them and to hear how they might change as things roll out. I haven't heard much of it yet. I mean, these poles are diving, so they've got to be out there.
AJ:But it does make me wonder. In your experience and then growing up with your old man, it seems like it's been part of your life too that you've found yourselves in situations that are politically tough and you've had to find ways to navigate that deftly. It makes me wonder. I mean, arguably that's the skill we need most right now in the world is how do we deal with each other without ripping each other's throats out when things get tense or when we're confronted by something? What have you internalized in that? I mean even to get a 97 vote like how was that achieved in bringing people together like that?
Jason:Well, most Shoshone people know that how important Buffalo was for our grandmas and grandpas. You know, we went through the boarding school era. We went through the reservation era. We went through the reservation era. We've gone through multiple eras of history with the United States government and personally I've kind of invested in understanding a lot of that history and was fortunate because through my dad's work I had to familiarize myself with why things were the way they were for him. So I've been a bit of a student of history and trying to understand that. And on the surface it's easy for Shoshone people to know that buffalo were important to us. But most of us are not ranchers. Most of us have been subject to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, subject to corrupt leadership, subject to these things. But foundationally it's no secret that buffalo were that important. The 90 to seven vote it was surprising, but not unexpected Like I knew. It was there and we just needed people to show up, the right people to show up and, as it is, be the same way for the Northern Arapaho tribe too.
AJ:I was going to ask.
Jason:Yeah, we come from Buffalo people. Most tribes did, and so if we still have the songs, if we still have the ceremonies, that's the foundation for it, and most of our people participate and still practice those ceremonial belief systems. The ranchers don't, and so this buffalo is providing a voice to a demographic of our tribal members who've never had a voice. It's big, isn't?
AJ:it.
AJ:Yeah, you know, I've often observed and I'm talking a whole decades long journey of my own, but even just this decade, with the podcast going around Australia and now here and beaming in occasionally other parts of the world is that it's not felt trite to say that the wind's at your back when you're doing stuff like this, partly because of what you're saying before, like the buffalo, do the work, just let them.
AJ:But also there seems to be a bigger thing at play where that and you're talking about here, I think, with ceremony and songs that are remembered that there are bigger forces. You could even say power, powerful forces. That well, you know, we'll just take that 90 to 7 vote as a as a touchstone for this, but could talk about a range of ways it manifests. But that where the ways that people can be reached in really powerful ways that they themselves feel and don't need to be coerced or convinced or whatever, that when you're tapping that, well, arguably that's the key to tap that domain. I wonder what you think about that. That if you are just fighting on that, I don't know more rational, superficial level, there's an inevitable war. But if you can get under it to human instinct, buffalo instinct, where they connect that there's more on offer.
Jason:We call it the great mystery, the power of the unknown, the power of creator, the spirits however you want to call it that there is energy in the cosmos and our ways of knowing and our belief systems. It's all in those ceremonies. It's in what those ceremonial leaders say, it's in the way that they've been told to carry on specific protocols. All of our ceremonies have some level of suffering that you have to endure in order to achieve and it's that reciprocal relationship. You don't take without giving. It's why we pray before we take a buffalo, or it's why you put tobacco down when you take a plant, or if you're going to go and ask somebody for a favor, you give something. This idea of relationality and reciprocal relationship is evident in what we are taught in those ceremonies. You know, for me I had to dig down very deep to find my own level of healing and I looked to ceremonies to find my pathway through that and I've come to understand a bit more about meeting your prayer halfway. And you know also be careful what you ask for. And you know also be careful what you ask for, because I prayed very hard for my own healing. I suffered for several years through fasting and finding my pathway through those protocols. So for me, this is grounded in ceremony, but I had to be willing to meet my prayer halfway first in what I've learned about how everything ties together.
Jason:And so for my foundation, for my belief systems, my values, what I'm trying to put forth, it's grounded in ceremony, it's grounded in prayer and the importance of our belief systems and values and language and songs and ceremony. It isn't monetary, it isn't superficial. For me, it goes something much deeper and that, I think, is what they provide. Everything we have here is because of them and what they've done. And I don't know if they came to help me in a dream or came to help my uncles or my grandmas or my grandpas in dreams, but this is a result of prayers that have been cast well, well before we ever got started, and that is that reciprocal relationality of our connection to the cosmos through ceremonies. People very, very long, long time ago prayed for this and somehow it works itself out.
AJ:I'm curious then did you, was there a time in your life where you really got that, I suppose.
Jason:So I think I was, uh, probably about rock bottom and alcoholism and drowning, my shame and sorrow and guilt or whatever it was I was carrying around by the bottle and, you know, sitting in the back of a cop car, you know, getting thrown in the slammer. Yeah, this, a lot of all of this, was really close to never happening because of my own choices in drinking and alcohol and that pathway. So, yeah, all of this was really close to never happening and I thought to myself you know, I'm in a very lucky, fortunate position to be able to work on buffalo restoration. Yeah, I worked very hard for it through academia. But here I am talking about how buffalo are healing and how much we need it, and I'm not willing to accept that myself. So I had to dig down real deep and do what I needed to do and find the help that I needed. That was about eight years ago now, so it was right around the time we brought the first ten.
AJ:I was struggling with my own stuff.
Jason:They were bringing the medicine and I was confronted with some pretty tough decisions. But I was able to find the help through ceremony to get myself where I needed to be, in sobriety and recovery.
Jason:And then the blessings just keep coming yeah, there you go and here we are 140 buffalo grown from 300 acres to 2,000, but actually adding 17,000 across the river over there. So you know 300 acres to 20,000 acres and over 250 collective buffalo. Now the two tribes, with a decision by general council to move towards wildlife, continuing to raise funding to buy fee lands back so they can go back to tribal ownership. Yeah, we've come a long way in nine years yeah, we're there.
AJ:I really want to talk more about those, all those bits and pieces too. But were there when you came to ceremony like that and made that choice? Were there people around you that you could turn to, that guided you through?
Jason:Yeah, there's a gentleman who was an elder and he had been passed down the bundles of medicines from the old timers that carry with them the protocol and the knowledge and songs and things that he's a healer. So I went to him and told him I needed help and him and his son who's since been passed that way the old-timer he passed away a couple years ago. But yeah, I went to that family and to that father and son for help and I go to ceremonies there at least once a week now sometimes twice a week. I help now in part of those ceremonies. I know the songs. So because I've gone through some of those protocols, then some things will be passed to me.
Jason:But that's really not. It was never my intent. I just needed help and what happens is when you seek help, you eventually become the helper and I never knew that wasn't my goal or intention at all. But now others need that similar type of help. You know Someone's trying to get you right. Oh yeah, my phone's been blowing up all this while the ceremonies. There's a Sundance getting ready to happen down there, so everybody's looking for buffalo meat.
AJ:There we go. Yeah, that trip you did to Africa then that was as a late teen. Yeah, it was in between being a young that was as a late teen. Yeah, it was in between being a young kid and this moment in time that we're talking about now.
Jason:Yeah, I was 18.
AJ:You were 18.
Jason:So your dad had work over there or something. Huh, he's a photographer. He really liked to photograph the wildlife and he had as a biologist. He kind of gained some allies fighting for water rights here. He joined the board of the National Wildlife Federation. He was one of the longest serving members of the national board members of National Wildlife Federation and actually the first tribal member, and so now I think there's five tribal members on the board of National Wildlife Federation. Now I think there's five tribal members on the board of National Wildlife Federation. So he made good connections and good friends and contacts. So he'd been there several times.
Jason:And then when I was 18, you know I liked to do art and I played football and liked to do woodworking and auto shop I didn't have any intention of going to college. When I was in high school I actually had the afternoons off but we played in three state championships in football. So I thought I was a good football player and was a good artist. But I didn't have any intent to go to college, especially not for science. I understood the importance of it because growing up with my dad, I knew he was a biologist and was always hunting, fishing and knew things about the rocks and the landscape and that was always an interest to me. But it wasn't until.
Jason:We got over there, traveled around a bit together in Kenya and Tanzania witnessing the wildebeest. It was the light bulb moment. It was kind of my life's epiphany probably. Yeah, wow, realizing that we could travel that far in amongst this herd of wildebeest and that was less than 5% of what the bison was here. That blew me away. Oh, it blows me away, because we drove for over 100 miles and as far as you can see in every direction is wildebeest. Yeah, that seems like a lot. But for that to be less than 5% of what the bison was here, for it to be so systematically exterminated from 30 to 60 million to less than 1,000 on the continent in less than 100 years, that is disgraceful, that is awful.
Jason:And when I can look at these buffalo right now and I can have a relationship with them, I can raise one up and integrate it back into the herd and for that to have been purposely destroyed, that's what gives me the fuel, that's what gives me the fire to keep going. And because that's an incredible thing to have a relationship with an animal like this, that sheds light on the millennia-old relationship that we had living alongside this animal and for it to be nearly annihilated as a means to take our lands. That makes me sick, and so, in order to take that energy and turn it into something good, we have to continue this. We have to continue to show our young people what that means. Continue to create opportunities for more of our tribal students that are going into academia. Make sure that our ceremonial leaders have access to this animal for conducting those ceremonies. That we get it into our diet again to help curve the rates of diabetes and other diet related issues that plague our communities. It's like this is the solution for all of our problems.
AJ:It's another symptom of call it war, where rations were the order of the day in Australia too, right. Yeah yeah, and just crap, essentially to survive on, to find a way to survive on Flour and sugar and salt. Yeah, so the layers of it so powerful and with that ceremony aspect, right, you've got a mobile processing unit too, yeah it allows us to be able to culturally field harvest.
Jason:You know when we're going to take an animal. We come out here and take it like right here. We don't round them up into a corral and put them on a trailer and ship them off to I mean, imagine how stressful that would be.
Jason:So the cultural field harvest trailer allows us to bring it out. We have our prayer, we have our ceremony right here. Generally a buffalo will present himself. That's the one we take and then that allows us to to process that buffalo right there in the grass, with grass still in his mouth, no stress. One bullet, one kill and then in when it's hot. You know they're so big that you got to get that hide off and you got to get them into a cooler and cooled down. So that cultural field harvest trailer makes that possible. And for tribes, that's how we want to be able to have. That reverence and respect for that animal is to take it right there with its grass in its mouth, with no stress and with its family. You know that's the way it should be. And they don't. You know it's not a hunt, it's a harvest. We want to come out and take one. We pray for it, we take it. They don't run after. That's what I was curious about.
AJ:They don't run off it's not like you break the trust.
Jason:No, yeah they don't have a reason to run off. They actually mourn and, like elephants, they have a ceremony of their own to honor that one that passed. They're trying to help it up. They have compassion, empathy and love for one another that we sure as heck could emulate, and that's how we used to do it, and that's why our societies were matriarchal after the buffalo. That's why we gathered in August so that our babies would be born in May. That's why we have the stories and the songs and the teachings that you can see and witness right here in front of you now, that we haven't been able to for well over 100 years, unless we went to Yellowstone. It's not like this.
Jason:So, yeah, we have to relearn a lot of that, yeah, and we've got to see it and witness it and bring the kids out and show them how we use the hair, the hooves or the horns and understand their matriarchy and how they raise up these little ones and how the bulls are protectors.
Jason:It's like the circles of life, and there's a whole lot of metaphor we can put into that, but it's like the little calves are in the center of the circle, and then it's the mothers, and then it's the elders, and then the outside circle is the bulls.
Jason:And if you think about that in terms of our own societies, how the boarding school era, how our bulls, our men, were taken away and then the children were taken away, it was like the, and then they were brought back but didn't know.
Jason:It's like our elders and our children are barely making it together and our parents and our men are gone and so those circles have been broken and that's why we see, you know, the high suicide rates, the high high school dropout rates, low life expectancy, the chemical dependency, the emotional spiritual damage, the emotional spiritual damage, those circles are broken. So, this buffalo, as we bring them back and we come to understand and learn and reintegrate, we're putting those circles back and we're building our men up and we're trying to bring our young women, to bring those life givers back, protect our elders and bring our men back to be warriors and that they're the providers and the protectors of our people and not these Hollywood notions of BS that is out there providers, protectors, and it's like them, buffalo, bulls. So we have lots to learn about how we reintegrate those things and ideologies again.
AJ:I'm really tuning into that. That's a really powerful way to put it, I think. How have you observed that that's going to the next generations? In that context of difficulty, can I feel it too?
Jason:On a case-by-case basis. We have to create more of an opportunity to do that and there's this nonprofit over on the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and they're called Medicine Fish and we helped get Medicine Fish some buffalo and they've started a herd there and then they are also working to take down dams and restore the sturgeon. And part of the way that they are helping these young young men heal is by connecting them with song, ceremony, culture, spirituality, but it's through fly fishing and so they're connecting these young men and helping them become leaders. And many of these young men have had the hardest stories and backgrounds that you can come from. But because they've been given opportunity and shown love and shown appreciation and respect, they've really created a way to heal these young men. So we've been partnering with Medicine Fish for a couple of years and want to be able to integrate more of what they're doing here and perhaps more of what we're doing here and there, and share and build. We're trying to heal our communities. We're trying to heal our young men. We're trying to heal our young women. We're trying to heal our communities. We're trying to heal our young men. We're trying to heal our young women, and what they're doing there we're trying to implement here.
Jason:So we've got a couple different youth opportunities youth camps, youth leadership, where we bring our ethnobotanists and our scientists and our hydrologists and give students an opportunity to understand what those things are. We had a culture climate youth camp the last couple of years where it's a three-day event. You have elementary and middle and high school that come out and then in a couple of couple weeks we're doing another camp with ronan donovan, who's a nat geo explorer and he's a photographer and he's for the couple last years he's worked with some of our tribal youth and getting them engaged with photography and then culture. So we're bringing medicine fish. Ronan donovan is coordinating a youth photo camp and and we're going to utilize our, our ground up in the mountains to give, give those those young guys, kind of a triple approach type of an opportunity to just get better, see more of what we have out there.
Jason:For me, I got the opportunity to grow up with my dad and as a biologist he spent a lot of time in our wilderness area understanding the lakes and rivers and streams, so I got to be up there a lot of the time on horseback and so part of the nonprofit here I've been trying to build a horse program so that we could take our young leaders into the wilderness for week long pack trips on horse, because horse culture goes hand in hand with Buffalo culture and if we're trying to heal with relationship in in buffalo, we can also integrate horse, horse, uh culture into that. And being able to take kids into the wilderness and have experiences like I did might help formulate some more ideas and opportunities for them, which is why I do what I do, and so I think that's an important aspect of having a non-profit that is doing work like this is that we can bring a unique perspective and opportunities to our communities that really wouldn't happen otherwise.
AJ:Yeah, and the non-profit is only what? A couple of years Opportunities to our communities that really wouldn't happen otherwise. Yeah, and that's the non-profit is only what.
Jason:A couple of years, yeah, February of 23,. So, yeah, very young.
Jason:Yeah, and yet so much has happened just in that period of time I was fortunate to have that platform with National Wildlife Federation and then built out a network of a support base that could bring resources pretty quickly for land acquisition, because NWF can't own land, and so it was necessary to not only start a nonprofit that could, but also it needed to be tribal-led. You know, national Wildlife Federation is a predominantly white large conservation organization. The Nalai Federation is a predominantly white large conservation organization. This is the showcase for how NWF can work with and engage tribes on conservation. So this is a keystone project for NWF.
Jason:But what that did was allow me to tap into some resources that otherwise wouldn't have been there to get it up and off the ground. And then key folks like Xavier and Taylor and Pamela and Albert and our team, once we kind of got off the ground, we were ready to hit the ground running. We've got a lot of fundraising to do for land acquisition and now keeping uh, some sustainability and longevity into to what we're building. So there's, there's, uh, the work's just beginning yeah, we're just getting we're just getting started talking about the land acquisition.
AJ:It's a great story in itself in many ways, but I think I even heard you say it once that it's land that was stolen that you're having to buy back. So there's still that. There's still that thing about it isn't there. And I have seen back home and I know this happened over east here a bit as well in this country where land has just been given back, bequeathed or donated even ahead of dying, just given back, and that the movement of that in in australia is people have spoken about that like we all die, like what's your life gonna have stood for? Yeah, and so they set up structures where they could still have access themselves, but they're given that ownership for want of a better word that tenure, tenure back. Is that an option here? Have you seen that? Could it be the people you've worked with? Can that be broached?
Jason:Not. Well, I'm an optimist so I won't say no, but I think that there are levels of difficulty. You can come across an individual landowner who loves your idea, knows that he's going to be passing on and he wants to do something meaningful with his land. I've had several people like that want to have a conversation about it, and actually a few I need to follow up on even. But they're not contiguous ground and out here these like priority is contiguous ground, so you can have a neighbor who's very supportive or you can have a neighbor who could give a crap about what you're doing, and so there's obviously that spectrum.
Jason:Then you get to the local government and agency level and here that's like Fremont County, the commissioners, or you got Riverton City Council or you got the Bureau of Reclamation, which is a federal agency but has no track record of really working with the tribes.
Jason:Bureau Reclamation could change a lot of the problems that we're having right now with a stroke of a pen, but they won't because of the non-native influence at the legislative level. You know, you can kind of take a picture like this and you go all the way towards Riverton and you got Pavilion and Kinnear and these are the white farmers and ranchers that are out here. They don't consider themselves part of the reservation, even though they are within the exterior boundaries of the reservation. So even this land right here that we're on was one of those pieces that was privatized and opened up to homesteading in 1902. So everybody out here would argue that the tribes have no stake in it. Now you go over there 20 miles that way to our tribal communities and that conversation is flip-flopped where tribes are like that's stolen ground and you're selling it. So these lands go for about $55,000 to $7,000 per acre and they're 160, 300-acre parcels and so that makes it pretty expensive when you're trying to piece back a few hundred acres.
Jason:I mean that's a pretty good price tag. Tribes don't have the money to buy that, and so this was the mechanism that I found to get land back, because buffalo restoration is land rematriation, which is a form of reconciliation. People can literally buy into this. Now, they're not going to want to buy land and just give it away to the tribe. They want to give land to buffalo and they want to see Buffalo restored for its importance to the people and the land, and that brings much more credibility and their ownership into wanting to support something like this, and so I think that that's part of the reason why we're generating revenue is that, and support is because it's not just about the buffalo, it's about the land and it's also about the people.
AJ:Yeah, fascinating. I remember in one of the short documentaries that's been made here there was an old white guy is his name tom doherty, maybe tom doherty, yeah? And he said something like that he basically learned through this work what it was to be with the tribes and to see it from that lens. So he, he got it.
Jason:Yeah, at the other end of it, he was one of the only guys who did see it Really Early on. When my dad was fighting the state and the feds on the management of the river during the water rights case, he was looking for help out there with other NGOs, other organizations, other states. Nobody would help him. Tom Doherty was the guy who stepped up and he was the president of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation at the time, which is an affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation, and that's how my dad was able to get connected to more support and that was because of Tom Doherty, and Tom is probably my dad's closest friend even today Just goes to show.
AJ:hey, like not to get too down on the knockbacks, because you'll find a connection and so much can come of it.
Jason:Yeah, I mean, you just have to be willing to take that step and Tom Doherty was willing to take a step when no one else would. Those two and many others who were supportive of tribes and sovereignty and self-determination and in-stream flow to protect fisheries or the wilderness, or wolves and bears or buffalo as wildlife. Those are big concepts, those are big challenges and we still got a lot of battles to fight. And buffalo as wildlife is like one step closer to helping us undo a little bit of that manifest destiny that was thrown at us. Like you, play a big step. Allows us to take some fences down.
AJ:And, you know, in an Australian context this lands big time right now. From a very interesting angle, right now in Australia what's become a really big story is a station, as we call them, a ranch, in the north of Western Australia, 200,000 acres. It's interesting too, right on multiple levels, because this is a guy whose literally had to flee family, had to flee now Zimbabwe, old Rhodesia, when there was the revolution happening there. So he finds his way to the Kimberley, the region we call north of Western Australia, and ends up on this station. What's interesting from multiple levels is that he was part of the Savory School. He really latched onto Alan Savory, whose epiphany came from watching the wildebeest. So it's interesting that whitefellas, as they get called in Australia, whitefellas and Indigenous folk coming back to the same source, through the source, through actually observation of these animals. And then what's happening in this place is that he's gone. Okay, the old megafauna in Australia is gone. Yeah, he's managing some cattle out there. Sure, he's gone. That's not enough.
AJ:And then we'd see there are all these wild herds of animals that were domesticated, brought to australia, domesticated, but then let go when we developed the train and the car or whatever. So I'm talking donkeys, for example. Yeah, but there are camels and there's tons of others too, so the meaning of this has has massive reverberations. So what he's managed to do is get back in relationship, trusted relationship, with these donkeys. So they're not domesticated, they're not fenced, but they're doing the work of grazing the upper ranges so that fire doesn't get them, and all the land benefits to that. They're re-socializing into herd, so all the benefits for them, yeah, and the whole thing's working really beautifully. Except the donkeys are still designated as feral pests that have to be shot and it's the station's responsibility to do it if it's on their land.
AJ:So this has now been going through a state mediation process for years and it continues. It keeps sort of coming up to Judgment Day, but adjourns and adjourns, and adjourns. And I think because it's such a paradigm shift, because what if you can work with wild animals? You don't have to make them domesticated, right, but they're managed in some kind of way. So whatever language you want to put on it, they're still free to be what they are and they're doing amazing things for the whole community, including the humans in the space. So when I saw that you'd done this, this designation as wild, I thought, wow, the ramifications of coming up against that paradigm change? Basically isn't it? But I'm so curious then how it's. Well, a then we've heard a bit about how it's come about and happened here, happened here, but what's the practicality for you then on the ground in having that happen, in bringing down fences and in negotiating the perceived threats in others?
Jason:Well for me. I'm a member of the Shoshone tribe and getting that designation through the Shoshone tribe was easier for me. It's harder for me to make that kind of influence on the Arapaho tribe, so I need allies in the tribe that can be advocates at leadership level, and what that means is that once we have that 17,000 acres out there fenced off, that we could essentially let out family groups from the Shoshone tribe, from the Arapaho tribe and grow a population out there that has a distinction as wildlife. Arapaho tribe hasn't made that decision yet, and part of the reason why we need that wildlife designation is not only for the purposes of trying to keep them as wildlife, but it also has practical reasons in that these are the tribe's buffalo, not an individual's, and right now people see them as they're somehow mine or the organization's, or this is somehow my personal project or something.
Jason:These are the tribe's buffalo project or something, and these are the tribes buffalo. So we're caretaking the these animals so that they can be come the seed population for the wildlife that will essentially become the reservations Buffalo. So if they didn't have that distinction as wildlife, they would be seen as competition for individual cattle producers and they may also be subject to a permit system under Bureau of Indian Affairs because they would have livestock status. It doesn't make any sense for the tribe to pay Bureau of Indian Affairs to graze its own buffalo on our own tribal land, to graze its own buffalo on our own tribal land. So having that distinction and designation means that BIA can't impose some kind of permit on the tribe Interesting and working with the Arapaho, then how's that going?
AJ:Is there interest?
Jason:Yeah, but there's a couple of cattle producers that are on leadership and they kind of undermine or question the legitimacy of some of our asks because they see buffalo as a threat or don't understand or have misconceptions or are just not supportive. You worked in the past Tuhate with some water rights stuff, misconceptions or are just not supportive.
AJ:You worked in the past Touhei with some water rights stuff, with the Arapaho and you were in some kind of position where you were trying to reach that common ground Wind River.
Jason:Alliance? Yeah, we had, and my dad was involved with that too. Yeah, we've always thought we need to challenge the whole court, the whole legality of that court case and what. Just how wrong it is you know we're talking about. This is right. That whole water case is wrong. Like there's holes all over that damn thing. That it makes no sense, and makes no sense to people who are even on the other side, once they understand it.
AJ:It's, it's just a bad, bad court case, and this is still ongoing yeah, the river still gets diverted um.
Jason:They dewater the entire wind river there's. There's places you can walk across it, not get your feet wet really geez, this echoes aust, echoes Australia's situation with our main.
AJ:So they take all.
Jason:Non-Indians take all of the water for high-water-use crops like alfalfa and sugar beet, almost out of spite, because the state says all water in the state is for ag. And the tribes are like, well, wait, what about all the other uses is for ag? And the tribes are like, well, wait about what about all the other uses? And yeah, it's a just a just a ridiculous, ridiculous case. That should have never went the way it did. When was that?
Jason:The state of Wyoming filed suit against the tribes in 77. And then a case was essentially decided and there was kind of a couple it was Bighorn, adjudication 1, and there was Adjudication 2. Essentially, 92 was the final decision. Right, yeah, that's a whole other can of worms. Yeah, but the land that we're buying back is within an area below the diversion dam which was put in by Bureau Rec in the 30s, or in the Midvale Irrigation District. So we could essentially begin to question water rights and use by Midvale Irrigation District in the BOR once these lands can be restored to tribal status, and so Buffalo are going to make it possible BOR, once these lands can be restored to tribal status, and so we're Buffalo are gonna make it possible for us to take on the water rights case at some point. I don't know how and I don't know when, but it's inevitable.
AJ:Yeah, it's interesting. They should lead back to that. Yeah, but sort of obvious when you think about it.
Jason:It's just to us.
AJ:Yes.
Jason:You guys. Good, are we in a tight frame.
AJ:I don't think so.
Jason:You guys are looking at me like we got somewhere to be. No, we can do the loop around if you want. Oh, yeah, I want to go check out the rest of the ground. Yeah, I probably may have to feed the two knuckleheads, but Okay, the little ones.
AJ:Yeah, knuckleheads, but the little ones.
Jason:Yeah, we'll come for that, you guys want you got time for that yeah, I think we do too. All right, let's go do that, yeah.
