Nature perspective series: bison
Image from Google
We often view history from a purely human perspective, forgetting that the events that shape our story do not happen in a vacuum. In this series, I explore the often forgotten perspective of nature during major historic events. Here, we get a small glimpse into the quiet, pained view of the spirits of nature in the North American landscape as it witnesses the transition from Indigenous communities, through colonialism, and into present day.
For thousands of years we were the dominate species in these lands, our numbers so vast, we stretched from coast to coast. No other animal could adapt as well as we did, our very existence is so connected to the land that there did not seem to be a time when we were not roaming across it. Our strength and resilience allowed my ancestors to blanket the prairies and survive the various conditions they encountered, creating a powerful and plentiful herd that appeared unshakable. The thunder of millions of hooves echoed across the wide-open landscape for generations, living side-by-side with the Native men who valued our existence enough to appreciate the sacrifices we gave to them.
Then, what existed for thousands of years suddenly changed with the appearance of pale men with guns. There was now the thunder of horse hooves and echoes of gunfire that spread across the prairies in every direction leaving piles of my dead relatives in their wake, their corpses left to rot in the sun. The pale men then turned the Native men against us and encouraged them to betray their respect for us by taking part in our ruthless extermination, even though our survival was inevitably tied to theirs. Where there once were countless numbers of us, was now piles of sun-bleached bones scattered across the land, everywhere we turned was a man with a gun carelessly aiming for any left standing. Decapitated heads of my relatives hung on pale man’s walls to glorify the slaughter of a majestic species whose demise they were causing. Like an ocean drying up, we shrank down to a puddle in less than a hundred years with only a small group of us left clinging to survive before the damaged was fully realized. Now our numbers have been allowed to slowly regenerate and we can finally be free from persecution, and although we will never see our herd return to its original glory and range, we will continue to serve as a reminder that greed and carelessness almost eliminated the most dominant and majestic species this land created.
Image from Google