If you’ve ever rushed to class through the first floor of Building 7, a giant portrait of our University’s namesake, Dr. Grant MacEwan, stood in your periphery. All it takes is a minute of pause to look closer at the details of what he loved in life: MacEwan University’s iconic clock, a jar of peanut butter behind a hat on a desk, a painting of a farm behind him, and his right hand resting on one of his books, Buffalo Sacred & Sacrificed. 

Of all his books, why should MacEwan’s students pay attention to this one? 

No matter which word you use for these animals, you can not deny the species’ history and importance to the land that supports our university and Turtle Island.

Published in 1995 by the Alberta Sport, Recreation, Parks & Wildlife Foundation, MacEwan’s book follows the timeline of the arrival of the bison, the  “Patriarch of the Plains,” to Turtle Island,  the colonizing settlers’ rampant hunting that made the once “supersize herds” walk the line of extinction, to the faltering herds bred in captivity and passed between (mostly) white men with money, and into the beginnings of our long road to the species’s conservation. 

MacEwan’s library only has one copy of the book, which includes MacEwan’s signature and a Grant MacEwan Community College stamp on page 3. MacEwan was only alive to see the book’s impact for a few years. 

Despite MacEwan’s expertise in agriculture and interests in Canadian history, readers should never forget that the novel was written three decades ago by a man with a settler heritage. While some parts of the novel stand the test of time, by the end of the 207-page book, it’s impossible to put the knowledge you’ve gained back on a dusty bookshelf. That’s because (while I appreciate MacEwan’s efforts in outlining the bison’s chronology) his book leaves any curious reader with a metric bison-shit-ton of questions on the expansive history of bison, and the animal’s relationship to the people who have been here since time immemorial. 

Overall, MacEwan’s sources were from other settlers. In the more rare occurrence that MacEwan added a quote from a First Nations person, it was always that of a male chief and almost always documented by the penned words of a settler writer. 

Without a doubt, the best source of information on the history of bison is the people who have lived alongside these species since their arrival. But, the book’s overall theme of imploring Canadians to understand the bison’s history and to be actively involved in its preservation will never expire. 

How did the bison get here? 

On page 13, MacEwan says that the bison have been on this continent for an estimated 10,000 years or more, coming from Siberia to North America when glaciers retreated, which exposed a land bridge called “Beringia.” According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the bison actually came across Beringia twice, 195,000 to 135,000 years ago and 14,000 to 10,000 years ago, evolving into the subspecies of the plains bison and wood bison. However, many of the humans sharing the land in these times had their own origin stories of the bison’s arrival. MacEwan writes, “The buffalo grazing ground extended, at one time, to fully half of the continent.” 

So, how many bison were on the continent before colonization? Well, that number was never pinned down. MacEwan describes the first attempts of a settler writer to estimate the bison’s numbers on the continent before 1870 at 50 million. MacEwan says the writer could have preserved his credibility (and been a bit funny) if he estimated “50 million buffalo-plus or minus 45 million.” An unnamed Assiniboine Elder, spoken to by said writer, apparently said, “You could not count them all. You would run out of figures.” 

Where numbers weren’t solid, visual accounts do well to describe the bison’s presence in the plains, like entire snowy fields turned into a mass of brown movement. 

What about the bison’s history in these lands before they were called “Alberta”? 

In a chapter on pemmican, MacEwan writes about an unnamed Assiniboine elder who described the bison as “a special concession from a merciful Great Spirit to the prairie tribes…” 

You’ve probably heard the name Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump, which is a UNESCO heritage site. But, MacEwan writes, “The Province of Alberta identified at least 150 buffalo jump sites, principally in the southwest where foothills and plains meet.” 

In areas without sharp enough cliffs for buffalo jumps, First Nations peoples, like the Cree and Assiniboine, also practiced “pound” slaughters, where bison were herded down a “funnel” made up of wood and trapped in large enclosures to be killed with bow and arrows. 

MacEwan describes these mass slaughters as “hideous” and that the pound slaughter, in particular, had, “no order or formality”. Here, I will inform you that MacEwan was a vegetarian and also remind you that MacEwan used letters written by settlers describing the events as facts, including a few second-hand conversations with First Nations Elders. So, take what he says with a grain of salt. MacEwan also uses the same, if not much more, bitter disdain for the wasteful, mass slaughter of bison by the settlers. 

Here’s a quote MacEwan includes from Canadian “explorer” J. Dewey Soper, “For centuries, aborigines of the plains utilized the meat and hides of the buffalo without making the slightest impression on their fabulous numbers. This was left for the white man to accomplish. Peak of the slaughter was reached sometime after the middle of the past century (in 1850’s) – a crescendo of such sadistic butchery of a big game animal as the world has ever known. Millions were wiped out in a few decades.”  

What happened once colonizers came?

To say that greed overtook the settler bison hunters would be an understatement and the easy way out. Passing the guilt of the bison’s destruction onto the concept of greed undermines the fact that settlers made a choice to kill with each shot. Whether it was for the fleeting trade of buffalo “wool” in the early 1800s by the Selkirk settlers in Manitoba, for a a head to hang back on a wall in a British mansion across the ocean, for the pemmican trade, which nourished the First Nations peoples and settlers alike, for the prolific hide hunting in the 1870s, for a piece of a tongue or a tenderloin, or even for the fun of it,  each shot was a deliberate choice, and they added up fast. 

In 1876, the Government of Canada was trying to negotiate a treaty with the Plains Cree, holding negotiations at Fort Pitt and Fort Carlton in Saskatchewan. At Fort Pitt, MacEwan writes, “There, the quiet little man, Chief Sweet Grass, instead of obeying the Chief Commissioner’s instructions to restrict discussion to the proposed treaty, ignored everything he considered of less importance than saving the buffalo.” His efforts helped get the ball rolling within the colonizers’ views that the Bison’s conservation might actually be important, even though the ordinance with rules against wasteful buffalo hunts that came out of these negotiations didn’t last. MacEwan writes that in the late 1880’s, “…Canadian authorities concluded that the sooner the buffalo were destroyed, the sooner their Indians would accept reservation life.” 

It’s easy to think of history as something that happened far away. But really, what might have actually been yours or a classmates’ great-great-grandfather might have literally chosen to shoot a Bison just for its tongue right on the land of MacEwan’s campus. The bison’s blood fed the wealth that lined the settler’s pockets and sustained the growth of settlements. These are the same pockets we reach into today. It’s money, power, and control over all else. 

Once colonizers figured out how to glean money from bison bones for fertilizer and filters, those  too were all scavenged off the land. The market for bones lasted as long as the supply, starting in 1883 for close to another ten years. As the Canadian Pacific Railway expanded with new railroads, MacEwan writes, ”new supplies of bones became available for industrial use.” Bone collectors burnt prairie fields, so the stark white bones were easier to find against the dark smear of burnt vegetation. When there weren’t enough train cars to ship off the bone collections, they would be piled up by the railways, some piles with the skulls stacked neatly as “walls” and all the other bones thrown in. One store operator in the bison bone business, James Leslie, estimated 3,000 to 2,500 train cars of bones out of just one point in Saskatoon. Each train car could fit about 250 bison skeletons, making the average around 750,000 bison skeletons. 

The beginnings of conservation 

There were a lot of major players in the bison’s conservation going forward. Of note for us Edmontonians is James McKay, born in 1828 at Fort Edmonton to a Scottish father and Métis mother. From the late 1800’s to now, small bison herds, some reared from only a few orphaned bison calves, were passed around like hot potatoes between men and their farms in Canada and the U.S. MacEwan, showing his background in agricultural and animal husbandry, goes into a whole lot of detail in this regard, which I’ll leave for you to read on your own. But I’ll give you the Cliffsnotes of some poignant moments. 

The Government of Canada officially purchased the Pablo herd, grazing in the Flathead Reserve in Montana, from Michel Pablo on Feb. 25, 1907. Thus began Pablo’s year of herding two shipments of over 400 smart, stubborn, big, and strong animals into reinforced train cars. Their journey by rail extended from Montana, through Calgary, to Edmonton for the “official transfer”, then to Lamont, Alta. There, the bison got off to be herded into Elk Island National Park, about 50 kilometers away from MacEwan University. 

Pablo’s herd was initially supposed to stay at Buffalo National Park in Wainwright, over 200 kilometers southeast of Edmonton, but the fencing wasn’t ready until 1909, whereas Elk Island National Park was already fenced off in 1907 for the original intent of Elk preservation. Once the fence was ready, about 400 bison were herded up from Elk Island to ship down to Wainwright, however, some bison remained at Elk Island National Park. Between 1907 to 1910, Pablo sent 620 bison total across the border. 

In 1916, the Wainwright bison were subject to “the catallo research project”, where “domestic” cattle were bred with bison. Why? You guessed it! Money! 

MacEwan said the research project was, “the most important part of the National Park program” in hopes of achieving more efficient beef production. Spoiler alert, the genetic process of producing non-sterile catallos was a success, but the breed didn’t really take off.

Two parts of this chapter are a bit funny to me. One, the fact that the cattle were called “domestic”, even though they were a few generations from the cows that survived crossing the Atlantic ocean. It makes me wonder how the real “domestic” bison felt about their alien matches. Two, that the catallo research project produced hybrids with, as MacEwan describes it, an “evil disposition.” One such hybrid, named Quinto Porto, “treated all fences as if they were not there.” 

Over the 1900’s, using the bison in agriculture became the next big thing. By 1992, a few years before MacEwan’s book was published, Alberta had 100 privately licensed game farms with a total estimated population of close to 10,000 bison. 

So, should you read Buffalo Sacred & Sacrificed? 

I’m not going to say you need to read this book. It’s outdated and obviously doesn’t tell the full story of the bison on these lands. As MacEwan says in the first paragraph of his book’s introduction, “Canadian experience with the bison- or buffalo as most people continue to call the species- is not a pleasant story.” But by “Canadian” experience, he means the unpleasant story of colonization. Regardless if you read this book or not, please be curious about the bison’s story as it is intertwined with colonization’s roots in these lands and what it means to be a “Canadian”. 

Bison brushed extinction. At MacEwan University, we have the privilege to be so near to the around 400 plains bison and 300 wood bison at Elk Island National Park. But their millions of ancestors are a part of our foundation, in the soil of the plains on campus and across the continent. Whether your ancestors have been here with the bison since time immemorial, a newcomer with sore legs from being squished on an airplane, or if you’re about five generations away from an immigrant stepping on this land with sea legs,  as soon as you step on these lands, the bison are beneath you. 

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Artwork by Tyra Delver.