The National Bison Range Returns: One Hundred Thirteen Years

The bison were already gone from the Flathead Valley when the federal government decided to establish a refuge to protect them. In nineteen oh eight, Congress carved nine square miles from the Flathead Reservation, land that had been promised to the Salish, Pend d'Oreilles, and Kootenai peoples by the eighteen fifty-five Hell Gate Treaty, without tribal consent, and established the National Bison Range at Moiese. The stated purpose was conservation. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, whose reservation the land was taken from, managed none of it.

For more than a century, the range was administered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The bison thrived. The tribes, who had their own deep relationship with bison as a central part of their culture and economy before the herds were destroyed, watched federal employees manage their ancestral land.

In December twenty twenty, after more than a decade of legal action, congressional advocacy, and sustained political pressure by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the federal government formally returned management of the National Bison Range to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. It was the first time a federal wildlife refuge in the lower forty-eight states had been restored to Indigenous stewardship. That precedent matters: there are dozens of other federal conservation areas established on land taken from tribes in similar circumstances, and the Bison Range return is the case that advocates in those disputes now cite.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes bring a specific understanding to managing the land they are now responsible for. They are not newcomers to this ecosystem. Their territorial knowledge of the Flathead Valley predates the federal government by centuries. The bison on the range today are, in one sense, returning to a people who remember what it was to live among them.