The echo of the bison (Encore)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Hello, Indicator listeners. We'll be back tomorrow to tell you about the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Today is Indigenous People's Day, and we're re-airing our show from 2023 It's about the near total destruction of bison herds by the US military and white settlers in the 19th century, and the dire consequences for Native populations who relied on them.

You'll hear our host Darian Woods in this episode. He's been on book leave, but he'll be back with us in a few months. Enjoy.

Don Fair (0:29)

NPR.

Darian Woods (0:35)

Right at the top of Montana is a stretch of land bigger than Delaware. It's the Blackfeet Reservation, and it's bordered by the Rocky Mountains shooting up on one side, and wide open plains on the other.

And it's there that Irvin Carlson lived on his grandparents' cattle ranch in the 1950s and 60s.

Irvin Carlson (0:53)

I grew up ranching. It taught me to work hard, to be able to work hard and for a living, and work ethics was a good way of growing up.

Darian Woods (1:03)

But across the reservation, across Blackfeet Nation, work was scarce.

Irvin Carlson (1:08)

I didn't see a whole lot of jobs. There was a lot of unemployment here, not a lot of opportunity for all of our people here.

Darian Woods (1:16)

And new evidence has found that the persistently high unemployment in Blackfeet Nation is particularly severe among indigenous nations that once relied on one animal.

This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. Today on the show, the devastating story the numbers tell us about the people once reliant on bison.

Don Fair is an economist at University of Victoria in Canada. And a few years ago, Don was working with a couple of other economists on a research project that involved trying to estimate how well off indigenous North Americans were in the 19th century. But economic data was pretty hard to come by for that time. One measure of economic well-being, perhaps a proxy for income, was how tall people were back then.

Don Fair (2:06)

We knew about this data that was collected in a very ambitious initiative by Franz Boas, who's a famous physical anthropologist on the biological height of about 15,000 Native Americans across North America. So we found it, the data, and required it. And when we started to do the analysis, that's when we saw major declines in height. So that is when it started to really hit us that this was a disaster.

Darian Woods (2:32)

The disaster was the loss of bison. For over 10,000 years, many peoples in what's now known as North America had relied on bison.

30 million of the creatures stretched from Canada all the way down to Mexico. And to people like Evan Carlson's ancestors, the bison or the American buffalo were family. It was a part of their way of life.

Irvin Carlson (2:54)

Buffalo were, they were everything to us. Actually, our economy, buffalo was our lodging, our clothing, our food, tools, parts of our ceremonies. That's how we survived.

Was on buffalo and with buffalo.

Darian Woods (3:11)

And when Don Fair looked at that height data, they saw that the people who hunted bison had a massive height advantage in the 19th century. They're among the tallest people in the world, taller than Europeans or other indigenous groups who weren't reliant on bison.

Don Fair (3:26)

About two centimetres on average taller.

Darian Woods (3:29)

About an inch. About an inch taller than the European counterparts.

Don Fair (3:32)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. No, no, no, these were very tall people.

Darian Woods (3:36)

That height was because of good nutrition in their childhoods, but those advantages started to slip dramatically in the 1870s.

Don Fair (3:44)

In 1871, there was a change in European tanning technology that all of a sudden made bison hides commercially viable in Europe when they hadn't actually been before. So this change in technology created, I mean, you might have heard of a gold rush. Well, this created a hide rush. And settler hide hunters flooded to the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain regions, where the bison were in the thousands and slaughtered the bison in the millions. There is really horrific stories, and I'm sure many people have seen classic images of settlers standing next to a pile of bison skulls, far taller, three times taller than they were. And in some areas of the country, there was more violence. So you might know the Indian Wars.

Once the US military realized what was happening to the nations when they were losing the bison, the American military started to participate in its slaughter as well. And then it became an intentional destruction.