People of all ages gathered on the Wind River Reservation on Indigenous Peoples Day to learn and build community at the Wind River Tribal Conservation Summit. The event was put on by the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative and the Wyoming Outdoor Council Tribal Conservation Team, and included a full schedule of sessions focused on Indigenous conservation, traditional ecological knowledge and reciprocal relationship.
One of the workshops invited attendees to roll up their sleeves and try their hand at making chokecherry patties. Before the group got to work, Northern Arapaho two-spirit tribal member Big Wind Carpenter passed around a bag full of the maroon-colored fruit to sample.
“ For the Arapaho people, this is like the best berry of all,” they said. “It has cultural properties, it has spiritual properties. We use the chokecherry in our ceremonies and it provided sustenance for our people for a long time.”
Carpenter works as a tribal engagement coordinator at the Wyoming Outdoor Council and shared that it’s becoming harder and harder to find chokecherries and other traditional medicines on the reservation. On top of that, they said making chokecherry patties in particular is becoming more infrequent.
“ It's important that we continue this tradition because it's becoming lost as we've had freezers and whatnot. A lot of people are just freezing the chokecherries and then discarding the seeds, but the seed is crucial to carrying on that tradition,” said Carpenter.
With mortar and pestle in hand, attendees tossed in a handful of chokecherries and got to grinding to make what Carpenter called the “original energy bar.” The goal: to make the pits as small as possible, and pummel until the mixture started smelling nutty and turned purple.
“Inside the pit there's a nut, and inside the nut are the fatty acids, right? On the exterior of that is this precursor to cyanide, essentially,” they said. “Macerating it is what creates that smell. You get hints of vanilla and all these things, the more you just keep going.”
After grinding, the next step was to transfer and spread the paste onto a brown piece of paper to dry into a hardened, flat circle.
Central Wyoming College student and event volunteer Summeri Bass helped people with the transfer process.
“You could tell there's some people very determined in their patty making and I’m really enjoying the effort,” she laughed. “I like how someone said, ‘Don't even feel bad about how it looks. You are just doing it right now and you're just getting in there.’”
After the day of workshops and speakers, more people arrived to celebrate the third annual Buffalo Bash: a night of music, food and a sunset tour of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative headquarters.
It’s the first bash since both the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and Northern Arapaho Tribe passed resolutions to reclassify buffalo as wildlife rather than livestock, a change that’s happened within the last year. The Eastern Shoshone Tribe voted to make the switch this spring, while the Northern Arapaho Business Council signed a resolution this summer.
“A great accomplishment for the Northern Arapaho Tribe from NABC [the Northern Arapaho Business Council] for the continued conservation efforts of our Buffalo herd,” said Dennis Oneal, director of traditional resources of the Northern Arapaho Tribe and the Northern Arapaho buffalo manager, in a press release shared by the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative.
The next step is to get the change added into the two tribes’ shared game code, to create more protections and opportunities for habitat expansion.
