Jason Baldes is restoring the keystone bison on Tribal lands

On what he recalls as a memorably chilly evening on Nov. 1, 2016, National Geographic Explorer Jason Baldes corralled 10 bison into their new home at Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. For 130 years, here, there were none.

“I still remember the sound of their hooves hitting the ground,” says Baldes, an Indigenous ecologist. “When you see that footprint, it’s kind of a realization that they’re back, and they’re never going away now.” A member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, Baldes is the senior buffalo program manager for the National Wildlife Federation, the vice president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council and the founder and executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative.

On that night 10 years ago, a man by the name of Fred DuBray arrived in the middle of the night with the 10 shaggy animals after a long drive from Iowa. DuBray, who is from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, a colleague of Baldes and a former board member of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, transported the bison from Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge. For the first time since the 1800s, when bison were nearly killed off to extinction, the animals were set loose on these Tribal lands, restoring a prehistoric species to the North American Plains it had inhabited for millennia. 

For Baldes, the moment was a culmination of academic rigor and a lifetime of ancestral memory. Perhaps what Baldes recalls most vividly is that it was a shared victory with his father, a retired biologist who spent his career on Tribal water rights, restoring fisheries and wildlife species, including the restoration of pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep, which were extirpated from the reservation prior to the Tribal Game Code of 1984, to these same lands.

“We come from the Gweechoon Deka, the buffalo eaters, and we distinguished ourselves by the foods that we ate,” explains Baldes. “There was a band of Shoshones that lived at high elevation — they were sheep eaters. Over the mountain were the fish eaters, and so on.”

Communities in and around the Wind River Indian Reservation like the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, or the Crow, Northern Cheyenne and the Blackfeet, have had a profound relationship with bison, also referred to as buffalo. “Each of those Tribes have their own name for buffalo in their languages. ‘Buffalo’ is the more common term we use to refer to them in Tribal reservation communities, rather than ‘bison’,” Baldes explains. “Buffalo for us was historically our life’s sustenance. Their decimation was the loss of our food and loss of a lot of connection to our homelands.” 

After bison disappeared from the area, what they once provided in the form of clothing, tools, toys, shelter, and food had to be passed down through fragmented song and story for more than a century. “That is if we were lucky,” Baldes notes. “Much wasn’t passed down, and we lost that knowledge. Wolves and other predators were also extirpated. It was primarily elk and deer, for a period until they were gone too, then it was reliance on the federal government for rations and our lands and territories were whittled down to what wasn’t desired through westward expansion.”

Their steady comeback is a revival. It’s fodder for kindling wider recognition of bison as the ecological and cultural necessity they are regarded as by the communities who have lived alongside them for thousands of years. 

“There’s the memory, there’s a remembrance, there’s an interaction that’s still in there. And we can invigorate that. We can revive that.” 

Return of a relative

Through the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, his efforts bridge environmental conservation with community healing. Practically, this looks like raising funds to buy back lands for bison habitats, while simultaneously running educational programs that help youth ground themselves in relationships with nature — from integrating bison meat back into their diets, to experiencing spiritual reconnection by bringing bison back into sacred ceremonies. 

In Wyoming, state law considers the animal livestock, not wildlife and not a relative, as regarded by many Tribal people. Historically, land use and resource management legislation have prioritized cattle over bison, a trend driven by the dominance of cattle consumption since westward expansion. But that’s not true for the Wind River community, and cattle ranching is not how they’re earning their living. “Today less than 3% of Tribal members are ranchers, however cattle ranching is still encouraged and prioritized for cheap on 50 out of 54 range units on the reservation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA),” he says. Baldes and Tribal communities have been advocating for their reclassification as wildlife to help restore their habitats and natural migrations.

“More land means that bison can essentially be buffalo and we would be able to one day hunt and harvest buffalo the same way that we hunt and harvest elk, deer, moose, bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope,” says Baldes. “Getting buffalo to the community is part of addressing dietary needs that we have, but it also fulfills really that missing relative part, bringing part of our identity back into our homes, back into our individual selves, and back to our ceremonies.”

The BIA divides reservation land into managing systems called range units to organize livestock production. The Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative and local Tribal leadership have had success in changing the management priority on one range unit of the 54, officially designating it as a dedicated bison habitat. 

As keystone species, bison are expert grazers that possess behavioral and physiological traits that support a wide variety of other wildlife. “They are patchwork grazers, and primarily feed on grasses and leave the forbs which contribute to the increase in biodiversity,” explains Baldes.

Their movement is a form of land cultivation, an ecological necessity that preserves the vitality of the ecosystem. 

“I think oftentimes about the old days, how the people used to have buffalo in their lives from birth to death every single day,” he reflects, “because our lodges, our homes, our clothing, the food we ate, the tools we utilized all came from buffalo.”

Richard Baldes, his father, worked for years as a fishery and wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, upholding trust responsibility to the Shoshone and Arapaho Tribes. He encouraged a Game Code on Wind River Indian Reservation, which Tribal leadership approved. “Essentially Tribal law to protect wildlife, especially tied to pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep,” he explains. The successful introduction of the law allowed for the restoration of those species following their extirpation from the Reservation. 

It was Baldes’ father who helped him cement his relationship with wildlife. As a kid, he took his son fishing for halibut along Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. And when Baldes was 18, the son and father journeyed to East Africa together. It was there, on the Serengeti plains, that Baldes observed 1.5 million animals spread over hundreds of miles. 

“It was an epiphany sitting in the middle of the wildebeest migration and realizing that was less than 5% of what the bison was here less than 200 years ago.”

Baldes continued his journey throughout East Africa on his own for six months after his father left. He met Michael Keigwin, founder of the Uganda Conservation Foundation, and an English researcher interested in what was at the time an understudied subspecies of forest elephants in Tanzania and Uganda. They tracked elephants into the forest. One experience led to another.

“I came home different. I wanted to pursue an education,” he recalls. He earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in land resources and environmental sciences, and partnered with the National Wildlife Federation to build resolution-based agreements with the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone Tribes. Following the historic 2016 return of bison to the Eastern Shoshone, the reintroduction expanded in 2019 when the Northern Arapaho Tribe received their first 10 animals. Baldes eventually formed his nonprofit, the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. It’s been nonstop growth and expansion of the project to get more bison and more land since — an endeavor supported by the National Geographic Society’s Wayfinder Award, which he received in 2024.

Part of his work includes a horse culture education program. Right now, he’s preparing a string of horses for backcountry pack trips so youth can learn from the Tribe’s leadership and “to see what we’re trying to protect, to see what little we have left,” says Baldes. “Horse culture and bison culture go hand in hand,” explains Baldes. Horses have historically been “a relative for the Shoshone people.” They were transportation. They have helped facilitate hunting, racing, and in recent years, rodeos. He’s hoping to help usher in the next generation of Tribal conservation and cultural leadership.

“The goal would be to take some youth that are going through our leadership development program on a summer pack trip into the wilderness, like I used to get to do, and take them fishing and camping and connect them to not only the horse, but also our wilderness, which is really the crux of what we're trying to protect — the fisheries, the wildlife, the habitat, the connectivity, our role as stewards and caretakers,” says Baldes. 

“I believe that if we expose young people to some of those experiences, we’ll see the type of leadership that we need in the next couple of decades.”

Weathering the storm

Looking out from his porch, Baldes can spot between 18 and 20 bison calves in the field. They are part of a larger success story: He estimates around 350 bison are now thriving between the Shoshone herd and that of the neighboring Northern Arapaho Tribe, with whom he closely collaborates on herd management.

“I think about how the Māori are bestowing rights of personhood upon their rivers, their connection to the power, the abalone and the eel and the sea urchin. Their connection to how food transitions from water to land. There’s a holistic recognition of the parts of the whole. You remove one part of several parts, things can get out of balance.”

The National Bison Legacy Act, signed and enacted in 2016, designated bison as the official national mammal. Currently, the Indian Buffalo Management Act, Baldes cites, is moving through Congress. It would direct the Department of the Interior to consult and collaborate with Tribes on bison restoration and recognize it as a Treaty right. It has nearly passed before. “This is the third iteration through Congress and is now called the Don Young and Doug Lamalfa Memorial Indian Buffalo Management Act, in commemoration of these two lead sponsors for the legislation previously,” he explains. 

Baldes is watching closely, and notes the Act is crucial in upholding the federal trust responsibility and honoring the government-to-government relationship with Tribes, emphasizing that bison restoration is fundamentally about food sovereignty and cultural healing.

Bison instinctively face storms head on, pushing through rather than turning away. It’s a metaphor he returns to often. 

“I think we have to weather this storm right now, push through like the buffalo. We weather the storm and come out on the other side and be ready to think long-term.”

For the annual Shoshone Indian Days Celebration and Wind River Indian Reservation Powwow this year, there will be a bison as part of the community feast — an event that feeds hundreds of people. They will use the entire animal. “We’ll tan the hides and then provide those to various events where we want to honor or celebrate somebody.” 

A local five-day school program is also helping educate and inform young Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho students about their relationship to bison. The first day focuses on the harvest, the subsequent days on bison and bison activities. Baldes hopes a five-day program can turn into 365, where bison are part of everyday life again.

“We are still hunters and gatherers and fisherpeople. That’s what my dad was showing me,” Baldes says. “Catching fish throughout the year and into the winter, hunting deer and elk in the fall, harvesting berries in the summer. That’s how we live.”

Hear more from Baldes at the National Geographic Museum of Exploration on July 2.

ABOUT THE WRITER For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Manager of Digital Content for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.