Bringing buffalo back: A Native-led story of hope and healing
Once nearly wiped out, the plains bison, or buffalo, as they are often called by Native Americans, are returning to the Great Plains — and with them, a powerful story of cultural renewal, ecological restoration, and Indigenous leadership.
In this episode of Nature Breaking, WWF’s Heather Dawn Thompson (a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe) shares how Native Nations are leading efforts to restore buffalo populations, reclaim food sovereignty, and heal the land. From spiritual connections to practical conservation, this interview explores how buffalo are more than just wildlife — they are relatives, providers, and symbols of resilience. Learn about the Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration, the role of buffalo in grassland ecosystems, and how communities are working together to bring these iconic animals home. Listen in and be inspired by a story that’s still unfolding — one rooted in tradition, science, and hope.
Links for More Info:
TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Larson: Welcome to Nature Breaking a World Wildlife Fund podcast, focused on the news and trends affecting our natural world and the people and species who call it home. I'm Seth Larson. Did you know that July has been designated as National Bison Month? This iconic species is the official US national mammal, but it's been through some hard times. As we previously covered in an episode from 2023, plains bison, or buffalo, as the species is often referred to by Native Americans, once numbered in the tens of millions across North America, and they held a special place in the lives and traditions of Native Nations across the continent. By the late 1800s, barely more than 500 buffalo remained after decades of market hunts, sport hunting, habitat loss, and government led efforts to eradicate the species. Conservation efforts since then have helped the buffalo population rebound to around 20,000 where it still stands today.
The question now is how do we build on that progress to further restore America's buffalo population, while also delivering benefits to Native Nations in the form of food sovereignty, as well as cultural and spiritual healing? One exciting new initiative is called the Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration.
It's a partnership between WWF, other NGOs and tribal partners that aims to make big gains in the years ahead. Joining me today to talk about this is Heather Dawn Thompson, WWF's Vice President for Native Nations Conservation and Food Systems. Heather Dawn will talk about her personal connection to these issues and share the latest updates about our ongoing work to conserve the buffalo.
Before we begin, please take a moment to like this episode on YouTube and subscribe to our feed wherever you're catching this. We really appreciate any support you throw our way, and now here's my conversation with Heather Dawn.
Hey, Heather Dawn Thompson, welcome to Nature Breaking. It's so great to have you here today.
Heather Dawn Thompson: It is so great to see you, Seth. Thanks for having me.
Seth Larson: Yeah, I want to start today by getting to know each other a little better. You and I haven't had a chance to work very much together. You have a pretty unique role here at WWF, which I'll ask you to dive more into in a minute. But first, I wanted to ask about you and where you're from and how you grew up, and how that inspired your interest in nature.
Heather Dawn Thompson: No, it's a great question. So my mother is from South Dakota, from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and my father is from Idaho, so I've got deep western roots. And my father was an avid outdoorsman, and made sure that his children tagged along for all of it. He hunted and fished and camped well into his eighties.
And so I've developed deep personal, familial interest in nature with my family for my whole life. But in addition to that, on my mother's side, the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, we have deep roots in the bison restoration area, which I'm happy to talk a little bit more about.
So those sort of personal interests and historical interests have always intersected in my life.
Seth Larson: Yeah, that's so interesting and I think that's probably true for a lot of people in our line of work. There's always some familial or, experience that happens at a young age that sparks a passion for nature and sends us on this pathway to working for an organization like WWF. I've heard you talk before about your specific role since you joined WWF last year and how it merges our work streams on both wildlife conservation and sustainable food. It's actually embedded, it's embedded right in your title, and I know a point of pride and something that's really important for our organization as well to get some synergy between that work. I'm also struck that your role here merges the sort of background of traditional Indigenous knowledge with western science and legal expertise, all coming together with your role. And I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the role that you are playing here at WWF and how you see yourself at the intersection of all those things.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Such an interesting question.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Heather Dawn Thompson: It's true, right? I think from a Western perspective, we tend to be more siloed. I'm in charge of A and you're in charge of B, and that's how we're gonna get our work done. But from an Indigenous perspective, everything is integrated, everything is related, everything affects one another. And so it's really hard to segregate in that same manner and be effective. And so in particular, in the spaces that we're working in, we've got a whole wildlife conservation team, and we've got another team that focuses on food systems. And from the Indigenous perspective, they are one and the same.
We can serve, right? We can serve and we take care of our wildlife because they take care of us. They provide a food source and then we make sure that we take care of them in balance. And so it's really difficult to be able to do one without the other from the tribal and Indigenous perspective.
So that was a really significant conversation when I came on board, and they said, okay, you're gonna go to this silo. And I said, 'ah wait, oh you're', okay we'll put you in this silo. I was like, 'ah, wait'. And so I'm actually across three different programs. So I am on the wildlife team where we have our buffalo work in the Great Plains. I'm on the food systems team, because many of our tribes are invested in the food systems for buffalo, and I'm on the oceans team because we have a lot of tribal partnerships in Alaska and the Arctic, in that space as well. And so I think just having my name and my title be different, which is Vice President, Native Nations, Food Systems and Conservation, which is a mouthful. But it said, we're gonna bridge these gaps, we're gonna incorporate this Indigenous values into the work. And it's been coming to fruition in that way. It really has bridged those conversations. We just came back from a trip, we were in South Dakota, we had both the food systems team there and the Great Plains Wildlife team, and we had an entire conference that we put together on getting more buffalo meat into the school systems. So we merged our Wildlife Buffalo Systems team and our Food Systems team together in one week.
Seth Larson: Yeah, that's great. I've heard our CEO Carter give, tell a story a few times of going into the Amazon with Tom Lovejoy, who was WWF's first chief scientist back in the 1970s and passed away a few years ago, but was really one of our early foundations in terms of science and our mission. And he took Carter, our CEO, into the Amazon once for a trip and talked about the importance of seeing the whole, and not just...
Heather Dawn Thompson: Yeah.
Seth Larson: ...the trees, or the river, or the species. You have to look at all of it and how it comes together and I know that's a perspective that Carter really took to heart and has been trying to incorporate into our work wherever we can. And it seems like that's exactly what we're talking about here, right?
Heather Dawn Thompson: I think that's right.
Seth Larson: It's all connected and we need to be looking at that whole big picture, and breaking down those silos where we can.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Yeah, it's interesting because in Lakota, which is my tribe and my language, we end every prayer with a saying, Mitakuye Oyasin, which literally means everything is related, so you end every prayer with that worldview. We're all related, we're all integrated, we're all dependent upon each other.
Seth Larson: I absolutely love that. That's so perfect. So pivoting to talking a little more about buffalo and the impetus for this conversation. I mentioned in my intro that buffalo populations were intentionally decimated throughout the 1800s. It's an incredibly tragic story. And I know it was particularly traumatic for Native Nations, I don't know if everyone really understands that connection and understands that story. So I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about that and tell our audience about that deep connection between Native Nations in the buffalo and what that means to Native Nations.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Yeah, it's interesting because it's both a spiritual connection and a practical connection. And every tribe is different, so I can only speak on behalf of my tribe. But for the Lakota, buffalo is a relative. We are literally the same people. So I know some religions you've got the Garden of Eden, and where humans emerged from. For us, it's Wind Cave in South Dakota and we emerge, that's our emergence story, but we emerge together. We are the same beings. And when we emerged, some of us became buffalo and some of us became humans, and so we are very tightly related to one another. And we are interdependent upon one another. We as humans have a responsibility to ensure that they are well taken care of and in return they take care of us. And a lot of folks are very familiar, of course, with food, buffalo provide food. But it was much more comprehensive than that, it was an entire economy. It's food, it was clothing, it was your bags, your containers. It was your home. Literally, your tepee was made out of buffalo robes. Your home, your tools out of bones. And it was an economy. It was your trade, it was your trade resource as well to develop your economy. And so it's interesting from a modern perspective, studies have been done that show that tribes that were buffalo economies, that were dependent on buffalo, have had a much harder time resurging and reemerging than other tribes that didn't have a buffalo dependent economy after that destruction.
Seth Larson: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As I mentioned this in my intro as well, but the population was up in the millions at one point and dwindled all the way down to something like 500, I think around the turn of the 20th century. Just an incredible loss and a severing of that connection that thankfully we've been able to start to work to bring back and we'll get to some of the more recent efforts in a minute. But while I, while we're on this, I wanted to ask as a follow up, I've read somewhere that two of your distant relatives actually played a role in helping to protect some of the last remaining buffalo. Is that right?
Heather Dawn Thompson: That is correct. It is a tragic story from the 30 to 60 million down to 500, it's almost unimaginable. And if you haven't seen Ken Burns' The American Buffalo, it's really worth your time to really understand the history behind that. But interestingly, when I was watching his documentary, all of a sudden my family photo popped up and I thought, oh my gosh, where did he get that? That's my family's photo. Yeah it did because, my own family is one of the handful. There's four or five different families that are credited with helping save those last 500 buffalo. And then my grandfather, Fred Dupree and my grandmother Mary Good Elk Woman, were one of those families and my grandfather gets a lot of credit.
He's what's, who's written about a lot and is highlighted in the documentaries, but like buffalo, Lakota are matriarchal. And it was my grandmother who woke up one day and said, enough is enough. You need to get the boys and get out there and make sure that we help save the legacy of the buffalo.
Seth Larson: So what did they actually do? Did they find sort of one of the final herds and do something to protect it? Or what did that actually look like?
Heather Dawn Thompson: So it was actually very tragic during this time period because the, the army and the hunters, they killed all of the adults. And so you had small calves essentially running without parents.
Seth Larson: Geez.
Heather Dawn Thompson: And so they went out and rounded up a group of small calves that had been orphaned.
Seth Larson: Wow, ugh. That's amazing. I mean that's awful that it came to that, but I'm, I think we can all be grateful that they took on that responsibility on their, on themselves, and took that action.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Absolutely. It was interesting just last week, we were with some of our teammates and our partners at The Nature Conservancy out on a ranch that we're working together to help preserve, and there was a beautiful herd out there and the babies had the zoomies, the little buffalo calves had the zoomies. And they were just running around like crazy and running up to their mother and then running to their father and then zooming with the other babies. And I started to just cry. Because I just thought, wow, how full circle we've come, when they were abandoned and orphaned by themselves and now they're back and thriving with their families.
Seth Larson: Oh, that's so inspiring. I've actually never had the chance to see a buffalo in person I'd love if you could share a little bit more about your experience of what, about what it's like to be in the presence of those animals when they're in their native habitat, and like to stand in a grassland where these animals are roaming around and what they sound like and...
Heather Dawn Thompson: Right.
Seth Larson: What other, what, besides getting the zoomies…
Heather Dawn Thompson: See if I can do a buffalo grunt.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Heather Dawn Thompson: We'll have to find that and put that on your podcast. We'll have to get you out there, Seth. It really is an amazing experience. They are so much bigger, and stronger than I think people realize. As evidenced by, and they're very fast…
Seth Larson: Huh.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Right?
As evidenced by a lot of tourists in Yellowstone every year that underestimate their swiftness. They can run over 30 miles an hour. They can jump over seven feet tall. There's not a lot of fences that can hold them in. There's not a lot of things that they can, they can't outrun and I think people don't realize that. So you really feel that power when you're near them and their grunts are really deep and guttural. You feel it in your chest. But I think even more than sort of the, how impressive they are as an animal, it's very moving how powerful they are spiritually, and you can feel it. And they communicate with each other. They communicate with you. They're incredibly intelligent. They're, they are our relatives.
And I'll give you one example that's related to the food piece. Tribes really are careful with their animals, with their relatives. They don't want to send them to feed lots, right? They don't want to put 'em in a big cattle mover and send 'em to feed lots. They want to take 'em down in the field, on the prairie where they've lived their whole life, in a very respectful manner. And there was a non-native buffalo herd manager and he brought out some tribal leaders who were gonna harvest a couple buffalo.
And the non-native herd manager said, you know what, I got it. I got you covered. I picked out these four bulls, they got ear tags, we'll go out there and find them. And the tribal leader said mm-mmm, we're gonna sing and pray and they're gonna let us know.
Seth Larson: Wow.
Heather Dawn Thompson: And the tribal leaders started drumming and they started singing, they started praying. And you've got the matriarchs, who were right there. You usually don't take down the matriarchs.
Four bulls came through the matriarchs all the way from the back of the herd and presented themselves.
Seth Larson: Wow.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Same four bulls that he had picked out.
Seth Larson: Wow. Really?
Heather Dawn Thompson: Changed his life, completely understood the real spiritual and relationship connection with buffalo.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That is incredible and gives me goosebumps just hearing…
Heather Dawn Thompson: Same.
Seth Larson: …and not even being there.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Same.
Seth Larson: Speaking a little more about the relationship between buffalo and not only people, but also the land. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the role that buffalo play in restoring the health of the grassland ecosystem that they're a part of. I read this when I started working for WWF and it really surprised me that it's actually good for the grasslands for buffalo populations to rebound and to have larger herds. In my mind that was counterfactual because it's these are massive animals. Surely they're eating all the grassland and trampling down different parts of the ecosystem that might be beneficial to other animals or whatever, and be disruptive, but I could not have been more wrong, I've come to learn.
And I'd love for you to explain that a little bit, just that, that connection between buffalo and, the role they play in restoring and shepherding the land in a really positive way.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Yeah, it's such a, it's such a good question. It is such a broad misconception. I think, as a population we've heard a lot about deforestation, which is not good, right? Taking down trees in order for grazers to exist in order to put cattle there. And so we associate, grazers with negativity, and that is true in that context, right? You don't want to be deforesting for grazers. But in grasslands they're dependent upon grazers. They are more successful with grazers. They evolved jointly with grazers, right? With antelope and elk and buffalo and so the entire ecosystem is dependent upon them. And so we actually have a cattle program in our Great Plains region as well because cattle are also grazers and if managed correctly, can also benefit the grass. But buffalo are the best.
At Kansas State University, they did a 30-year study. It's a very long study for this space, and they compared grass that was left alone -- so what you're thinking, Seth, let it be, let all the rest of the ecosystem happen -- grass that was grazed by cattle in a good way, and grass that was grazed by buffalo. The grass that was grazed by cattle had a 50% increase in biodiversity compared to grass that was just left on its own. Grass that was grazed by buffalo had an over a hundred percent increase in biodiversity. And the reason is their behaviors, buffalo behave differently than other grazers, than cattle, than other grazers. One, they don't graze all in one place, so you have some grazers like sheep I think, they go and it's all an even graze buffalo don't do that. They meander as they graze, so they create different lengths of grass. Which creates different little micro ecosystems.
Seth Larson: Oh, that's interesting.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Right? So different animals need different lengths of grass. So they do that, they wallow. So you've probably seen the buffalo rolling on its back. They're so heavy. They actually create indentations in the prairie and it creates little water catchments. And there are certain animals that are dependent upon those water catchments and plants that only grow in those water catchments.
And then their fur. There are certain animals, cattle, other animals, they don't have fur. They've got hair, bristly hair. Buffalo have big, fluffy fur. And there are certain animals that are dependent upon collecting their fur for their nests. And then finally one of my favorite examples is prairie dogs. A lot of folks don't love prairie dogs. They're actually my favorite animal. They're all, they're my favorite because they're underestimated, right? Their value is underestimated. There are 150 species that are dependent upon the prairie dog for survival. There's birds that eat them. There's other, like black-footed ferret, they can't make their own burrows, right? So they have to use prairie dog burrows and they also eat them.
Seth Larson: Interesting. That's, thank you for that explanation. That's I think the best sort of end-to-end explanation I've heard of all the different benefits. I've heard of the wallows and how that creates the little pools and everything. But that's amazing, the array of benefits that they have. And it makes sense because they evolved with that ecosystem like way before any of us were here.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Right.
Seth Larson: It makes sense how synergistic it all is. I want to pivot now just a little bit to the other part of that dual portfolio or tri-portfolio that we talked about earlier with your work here and a term we've used, once or twice, and I know I, I mentioned in my intro is food sovereignty, which is so important for Native Nations. And I'm not sure that all of us, myself included, really understand what that term means in the context of Native Nations, and how buffalo restoration in particular, can support that.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Right.
Seth Larson: I wanted to ask you to speak a little bit to that side of things.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Yeah, you bet. Essentially food sovereignty is the ability to not be dependent upon external resources in order to feed your own people. It's really important, frankly, for us as a nation as well, right? We think about this as well with we, we see all these breakdowns in the supply chain. And for tribes it is particularly emotional and has a lot of historical connections. So for the buffalo nations, as you discussed in the beginning, Seth, there was a very purposeful campaign, to destroy this as a food source in order to force Indigenous people to become dependent upon the federal government to come into compliance with their behavior, right? And stop fighting the westward expansion. That is a similar story for other tribes as well, with the salmon, right? Prohibiting access to the salmon. A lot of the east coast tribes, they, they were more agrarian and their farms were burned. Their fields were burned, and there's a very specific form of war in order to control access to food. A very common tactic in any war.
But what happened was the result was this really complete destruction of local Indigenous foods. And local Indigenous protein sources, and the replacement with largely federally provided foods that were very poor at the time. They've improved dramatically, very poor at the time. Fat, lard, flour, things that Indigenous bodies were not accustomed to. And you saw diabetes rates go through the roof, obesity go through the roof.
And so there's been a movement for quite some decades now that really took off during COVID when we all saw the supply chain issues break down, where Indigenous communities said, this is crazy. We need to restore the foods that our bodies are used to eating. Alaskan tribes have a high fat, they have a keto diet, right? Essentially they're eating whale blubber and salmon, and we're replacing that with flour. So we've gotta get back to the Indigenous foods that our Indigenous bodies are accustomed to eating.
And for a great swath of the tribes in the Great Plains, that is highly dependent upon buffalo and other, other edible foods that buffalo promote in the grasslands, like wild prairie turnips, et cetera. And so that is why our buffalo work that is really conservation focused also has this huge food sovereignty focus for restoring tribe's control over their own diets and their control over their foods of choice and their ecosystems that support that.
Seth Larson: So jumping off from there, I want to dive into this initiative that I mentioned in my intro that is really advancing a lot of work, both on the food sovereignty front, and on the buffalo population restoration front. It's called The Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration, it's a really exciting new partnership and it's doing a great job at advancing both those work streams. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about exactly how that collaboration is working and what sets it apart from prior conservation efforts.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Such a good question, we're really excited about the collaboration here at World Wildlife Fund. Our other partners are The Nature Conservancy, the InterTribal Buffalo Council and Native Americans in Philanthropy. Those are the four main partners, but then we have several other subsidiary partners, like the Coalition of Large Tribes, Tonka Fund, et cetera.
And one of the things we really realized, and the tribes rightfully raised with us, they said, you know what? We've been doing this on our own. We've been on our own for a hundred plus years. I told you the story of my grandparents and tribes formed the InterTribal Buffalo Council, some 30 plus years ago. And they've been working on, with pennies, trying to do the best they can to conserve and restore buffalo herds. The conservation organizations like World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy really approached initially buffalo from a strictly ecological perspective, from a conservation perspective for all the reasons I shared with you earlier about how fantastic buffalo are for the ecosystem.
And we realized, you know what? Kind of like what you're saying, Seth, it's not a silo. It's a much more holistic perspective. And we really need to take the Indigenous and the tribal lead in this space and that's really what the collaboration is. It says we've all been working together and our silos for so long and we need to come together. We're much stronger together. And together through the guidance of the tribes and their buffalo herd leaders, we picked four focus areas that we're working on.
The first one is just support the work they're already doing. They said to us, don't come in here and try and mess up our formula and tell us what to do. We've been doing it, give us five bucks and we'll distribute amongst ourselves. Equity was really important. There's 70 plus tribal government herds and equity was incredibly important to them. So our first focus area is just getting additional funds to the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
Our second, focus area is infrastructure.
Seth Larson: Okay.
Heather Dawn Thompson: Talk about buffalo, how fast they run, how high they jump. You've gotta have strong shoots, you've gotta have strong corrals and you've gotta have strong fences for buffalo herds. They're not the same as cattle and other livestock. The third area is land. Buffalo grow. They reproduce. And you need more land in order to expand those herds. And then the fourth area is the food sovereignty that we've been talking about. And in that area, we're really focused on new infrastructure for food. As I shared with you, they don't want to go to the feedlots. They want to be able to process in the field. And so we've gotta have mobile meat processing units for that.
Seth Larson: Yep. Now I know one piece of WWF's work that goes back as far back as, I think like maybe 2017, probably even earlier than that, but at least for my time here, we've been involved working with Native Nations and other groups to reintroduce adult buffalo populations to areas that they have been extinct from, for lack of a better term, for a long time. And basically working with partners to secure the land that those buffalo would need to survive, and then bringing populations back and releasing them into these places, and that's been really inspiring. I'm wondering if this new collaboration is supporting that work, continuing that work, or complementing it in a different lane?
Heather Dawn Thompson: Yeah, both. I think we're supporting that work. That includes the land, right? That includes the infrastructure, and expanding upon it. And one of the reasons why World Wildlife Fund was invited to this game, if you will, to this team, to this party, was that we have been working with tribes for so long, much longer than a lot of organizations, and really have been at the local level taking their lead already…
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Heather Dawn Thompson: …built that trust and built that reputation, that good reputation for partnering with tribes, and the whole goal is to put more buffalo on the land. So all of those four focus areas, right, the goal is to bring more of those buffalo back, Seth, to put more of them on the land. And as you said, you haven't been out on the field to see 'em yet. A buffalo release is when you need to go. Like that moment when the grandmother and the kids see that buffalo come back on the land, there's, no comparison.
Seth Larson: I've seen some of the videos that our teams have put together from those events, and boy, they just seem, a, what an uplifting, heartwarming moment. It's just something makes you feel good about it.
I'm mindful of time and I don't want to keep you for too long, Heather Dawn, but there's just, one last question I wanted to ask you. There's been so much progress on this front, and it's great to hear that buffalo populations are, have rebounded so, so much from where they were, but obviously there's still a long way to go and there are so many areas of the Northern Great Plains that used to have buffalo that still don't, and there's still so much work that we need to do on the food sovereignty front. What are some of the biggest challenges we face going forward in restoring buffalo populations and restoring that connection between Native Nations and buffalo?
Heather Dawn Thompson: Us.
Seth Larson: Us.
Heather Dawn Thompson: People. We were the cause of their demise, and we are the impediment to their restoration. And so I think, just this, people educating themselves, becoming more open to buffalo, more understanding, more supportive, goes a really long ways, because it is challenging in western states where they were purposely eradicated. There's a lot of deep feelings still, about it. And being that supportive when that extra acre of land gets purchased, being supportive, when those buffalo get brought back in, in the trailer and people are showing up, being supportive, when you see a buffalo meat for sale and buying that and supporting that economy.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Heather Dawn, thank you so much for all the work you're doing on this front. Thank you for your leadership and thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with us today on this podcast. I really appreciate it.
Heather Dawn Thompson: It's great to see you Seth. Thanks for having me.
Seth Larson: Thanks again to Heather Dawn for joining the show today. As we close out, I hope you come away from this conversation both inspired to take action for buffalo, but also educated about the important role that they play in the lives and livelihoods of Native Nations and in sustaining the Great Plains ecosystem.
For anyone who wants to learn more, I'll include a link in the show notes with more information about the Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration. I hope you'll take a look at that. And this July, for National Bison Month, let's all do our part to keep building a more sustainable future. Thanks for listening.
Update: September 18, 2025
InterTribal Buffalo Council has decided to step away from the Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration. Our shared commitment to bison restoration remains unchanged.