With its return to the nickel
after 67 years, the bison bears messages that went unmentioned
during the coin’s recent unveiling. The new nickel was designed to
commemorate the government’s 200th anniversary of the Lewis and
Clark expedition — initiated by Thomas Jefferson —
whose face also appears on the coin. But although bison provided
occasional sustenance for the expedition, they contributed far less
to its success than did the American Indian, whose profile was
sculpted on the original buffalo nickel.
When James Earle
Fraser designed that nickel in 1913, he sought to create “a coin
which would be truly American, that could not be confused with the
currency of any other country.” But it was confusing in other ways.
The animal that became known as the American buffalo had come a
long way to get here, emigrating across the Bering Strait during
ice ages past. Yet it evolved into a beast more closely related to
the bison of Europe than to the true, humpless buffalo of Asia.
Zoologist William Hornaday dismissed the 1913 nickel as
“a sad failure as a work of art” because “the buffalo head droops
and it looks as if it had spent its life in a small enclosure.” The
image struck him as unsuitable for an animal that had abounded in
large herds roaming wide open spaces. But by 1913, the only wild
bison left in the United States belonged to a herd of about 60 in
Yellowstone National Park. Fraser’s docile model posed for him in
the Bronx Zoo.
The Indians represented on the flip side
of that nickel — which bore the motto “Liberty”— were
also descendants of free-roaming Asian emigrants who became subject
to the whims of a Euro-American culture that relegated most of them
to reservations. But some Indians held onto their traditional
beliefs that the bison was a vital source of sacred as well as
physical strength. In 1991, delegates from 19 tribes formed the
InterTribal Bison Cooperative, whose goal is “to restore bison to
Indian Nations in a manner that is compatible with their spiritual
and cultural beliefs and practices.”
Today, about 40
tribes raise bison, but most of the animals are in small herds on
fenced ranges where Indians respect them as livestock, not as the
wild creatures their ancestors knew. However, “defense of the
bison’s inherent right to prosper in the Yellowstone
ecosystem” is “intertwined with prophecies that portend the return
of the Buffalo Nation,” according to a Bison Co-op declaration.
If quantity were quality, prospects for bison would
appear bright. More than 4,000 bison now roam in unfenced
Yellowstone, probably more than ever did before the white man
arrived. The bison population in the United States is the largest
it’s been since the 1870s, and so is the Indian population, which
has increased especially in rural areas of the Great Plains, even
as the white population declined.
But nearly all of the
more than 300,000 bison in the United States are being raised
commercially or otherwise managed as livestock. A tribal elder told
Fred DuBray, the Bison Co-op’s executive director, “If
you’re going to bring these buffalo back, first you have to
ask the buffalo if they want to come back.” DuBray doubts
they’d want to, “if they have to stand around in a feedlot
for the rest of their life.”
In the Yellowstone
ecosystem, the bison’s “inherent right to prosper” as a wild animal
is now in jeopardy. The growing population has meant that more
bison roam across the park boundary. Those too wild to submit to
hazing may be captured and sent to slaughter, or injected with a
vaccine of dubious value because some bison are infected with
brucellosis. This disease, which causes cows to miscarry, is caused
by bacteria that emigrated from Europe in livestock. It’s
rarely transmitted to humans, but it results in economic losses for
ranchers if herds are infected, and it has been designated a
potential weapon of bioterrorism.
Many Indians, along
with many other wildlife advocates, believe the migrating bison
should be quarantined on tribal land or allowed to once again roam
freely in the national forests surrounding Yellowstone. There, they
could be hunted — as are the elk, which also may carry
brucellosis.
The buffalo that has returned on the 2005
nickel is a leaner, meaner-looking animal than the plump Fraser
model. It looks like a truly wild, American bison. It looks like a
bison that values the liberty so prized by other Americans.
Mary Ann Franke is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). She is a writer in Sedona,
Arizona.
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