A handful of large, shaggy bison group together in a pen in the foothills outside Denver as snow falls fast and hard. Sam Diswood watches from a platform above.
"They love the snow," he said. "They have fine hairs, so it doesn’t really bother them."
Diswood is a member of the Navajo Nation and the tribe's fish and wildlife manager. He also manages the Wolf Springs Ranch in southern Colorado, which the Navajo Nation has owned since 2017. Today, he’s here to bring nine of these animals back with him. He'll pick up two more later in the year.
Four tribes or nonprofits received 34 bison this year as gifts from Denver, which has managed two herds for conservation in its mountain parks since 1914.
"This is my absolute favorite day of the year, when we get to send the buffalo home," said Shannon Dennison, director of Denver’s Mountain Parks division.
For decades, the city auctioned off surplus animals to ranchers. But six years ago, Denver started donating them to tribes instead. Since then, more than 170 bison have gone to at least a dozen tribes and nonprofits across the region. Some tribes sell meat commercially while others raise the animals for conservation or educational purposes.
Dennison said the donations are part of an effort to repair relationships. Many tribes consider bison sacred, even relatives. But the animals were nearly exterminated by hunting and U.S. government policies.
"The city and county of Denver is doing what we can to try to take small steps to make that right, and this is a really important part of it," Dennison said, "not only of the transferring of the buffalo themselves, but also this opportunity to gather and acknowledge how significant that is."
The donations also help address another problem: there are only so many conservation bison free of cattle DNA.
"There's less than 25,000 buffalo that we consider conservation buffalo," said Jason Baldes, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and the vice president for the InterTribal Buffalo Council. "Because there are so few animals in isolated populations, it's important to diversify your gene pool so that you have a healthy population."
Several tribal representatives receiving bison said the animals from Denver's park would help strengthen the genetic diversity of their herds, in addition to growing their numbers.
The InterTribal Buffalo Council has helped about 90 tribes restore or start their own herds. And Baldes said momentum is growing.
"Even though the buffalo has been absent for well over 100 years, for many of these communities, the reverence, the respect and the admiration of this animal is still there," he said.
At the Denver transfer, Robert Simpson smiled in the snow as he waited for animals to be loaded onto trailers. He’s a council member with the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Montana, which received 10 bison in the transfer.
"To take them to a place where they're going to be in a 15,000-acre pasture, where they're going to be happy there, makes me happy," he said.
A few years ago, his tribe started more actively managing its herd. Since then, Simpson says he’s seen benefits to the land – and his people.
"A lot of our people are sick from the food that we're eating nowadays," he said. "So, now that we start utilizing these traditional foods, people start getting better."
Inside a nearby barn, attendees gathered for a ceremony. People were asked to turn off cameras and recorders out of respect. Around a large drum, members from several tribes sang healing and gratitude songs and offered a prayer for safe travels. Lewis TallBull, with the TallBull Memorial Council who works for the city of Denver, described the meaning behind the ceremony.
"The Bison represent so much," he said. "They represent the water and the fire and the thunder and the clouds and the snow. They represent all that. But at the same time, they represent us as Indigenous people."
Later, Diswood addressed the crowd. He said his tribe, the Navajo Nation, has plans to start a food sovereignty program to provide bison meat directly to tribal members, including elders and school children.
"As I always tell my crew, wealth comes from our land and our animals, so let’s take care of them," he said.
Then, he was wrapped in a ceremonial blanket.
"There was a lot of emotions, there was a lot of things that I wasn’t prepared for, but I felt," he said after the ceremony.
Outside, in the snow, trailers carrying bison pulled away, heading through the snow back to tribal lands.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
