Rosalie Little Thunder is a long-time Native community and environmental activist. Of the Sicangu band of the Lakota Nation in South Dakota, Rosalie has been on the frontlines to save the wild herd of bison that roams Yellowstone National Park.

I spoke with Rosalie over the phone yesterday about her activism for the new year. There’s a deep trail between her home and Yellowstone. Here’s Rosalie…

Can you talk about your work as a Native community activist? And is it your full-time job or do you have a separate job(s) that pays the bills?
Activists don’t get paid. [Laughs]

I know. It was wishful thinking.
Yeah, [Laughs] wishful thinking. [Laughs]

So, what’s your average day like?
A lot of times activism is usually not by choice. I would say natural leadership is very reluctant leadership. It’s usually some kind of injustice that has been there for a while and sometimes it will peak and come to a head. And when everybody steps back, you find yourself out front because you didn’t step back. [Laughs] Not always, but that’s been my experience.

As a Native American most challenges are about everyday things like your rights. One issue that is emerging and has been emerging over a number of years is the prison population. We are about 6 to 7 percent of the general population and our prison population is about 70 percent. That is huge. I personally, being Native American and being in a Native community, can’t buy the stereotype that most folks have that we are flawed. I’m not buying that.

Sometimes the prison populations are complicated by the poverty that Native people live in. Local leadership, whether it be state legislatures or city councils or local school boards, whatever, have this attitude that poverty is a choice. People treat it like a choice. “Well, those people. Those people.� Poverty to me is very deliberate. It’s imposed. It’s by design. Our reservations are the poorest counties in the nation. And right across the border in Nebraska is the wealthiest county in the nation. Something is very deliberate about that.

A foundation called me one time for a gathering, “We’re trying to figure out the root causes of poverty, and to develop programs to address the root causes of poverty.� I told him, “You don’t have to spend a lot of money to bring me in to help you figure that out. The root cause of poverty is wealth. What can you do about that?� The disparity between wealth and poverty is pretty obvious.

Are you still working to preserve wild bison in Yellowstone?
Yes. Very little has changed. I thought we could change this bad policy in two or three years. Well, two or three years passed by. Now I’m thinking five or ten, but it could be a lifetime. You have to at least anticipate that you’re not going to make changes for all the effort that you expand. That’s the reality. You might not make changes, but you brought attention to it. You made noise about it in front of people saying, “OK, look, this is an injustice that we shouldn’t forget.�

I know many activists. I serve on the Alston-Bannerman Fellowship for activists of color and I am real honored to know so many activists scattered across this country who take on challenges that very few people are willing. Some people step back because of their personal lives. They have to make a living. There’s not always so many hours in the day—activists have a tendency to really put in long, long hard hours without pay. There’s a lot of activists, but there’s not resources out there to support them. There’s no salaries. A lot of them operate out of their homes. But most people work and do this on the side. That’s been my problem. I have to work two jobs. I’ve been working two jobs for a while so I can support my family and still work on…We’re taking the buffalo issue onto a different level now. The government is hard to move and motivate. The livestock industry dominates and that is in opposition to the existence of the buffalo.

Are the buffalo shot and killed? Or do cattle eat all their grass?
Here’s human thinking: We think we can know how many buffalo Yellowstone can support. So, the government put a cap on how many buffalo can be here, and if they have more than that they’ll kill them. Prior to that we had the brucellosis [disease that can infect livestock and can affect humans if livestock is not vaccinated] scare which didn’t hold any water. Brucellosis was brought by dairy cattle that the army brought in the early 1900s. They were probably transmitted to the buffalo by confining them. Brucellosis is transmitted by [carcasses] or in breeding. But breeding a cow with a buffalo is like breeding a cat and dog. It’s unlikely. The transmission has only happened through experiments.

The first round of killings [because of this disease] was in the mid-1990s. But it didn’t hold any water. Scientists were saying, no, no. My dad is a cattle man and I asked him, “What if I brought a bull from Yellowstone back and put it in your herd?� “Nothing.� He said it’s no threat. “I’ll just vaccinate my cows.� It was really a smoke screen. Right now the killing is still happening. Brucellosis is not the hysteria that it was before. But now human beings are saying Yellowstone can’t sustain the buffalo. We’ve reached 3,000 and we’re going to kill them.

When you spend months and years working on this, it just seems like there’s something more behind it. But the bottom line for me is that the public lands around Yellowstone have very cheap grazing allotments. They lease them out for cattle grazing. But if the buffalo cross the border between national public land and national public forest, they get shot. I was there when they were doing that.

But we’ve been introducing a thought, and we’ll be bringing that campaign soon through the Seventh Generation Fund. We’re initiating a campaign to protect sacred species. That’s a whole different thought; not to Native people. They are sacred to us. They are a sacred species. Scientists will agree with that because they’re keystone species. They’re very key to the ecosystems in which they live. Most sacred species of the indigenous people are keystone species: the buffalo, the bear, the salmon. Different kinds of plant species, like the cedar or redwood [trees].

So, our strategy is to gather indigenous people and get them to say what [species] are sacred to them, and what legends. Then determine the status of those sacred species and strategize a way to protect them. When all the information is collected and gathered, we hope it will be the basis of an international treaty to protect sacred species. It’s a huge ambition but we want to get it started to keep the attention on sacred species. And who would know that but indigenous people? Our culture still has it in its memory. I think all human beings have sacred species but some cultures are more removed from that, more industrialized. We live in houses now and we’re oblivious to where the moon rises or the behavior of the birds. Humanity is becoming more oblivious. We’re trying to say pay attention to the sacred species because those will tell you what’s going on with the planet.

We already know that the natural world is very threatened. Every human being knows that. So, what do we do? Do we keep consuming? We need to raise the alarm. It should have been raised generations ago. It is now coming into the consciousness of most human beings, the condition of the natural world. But I know some ecologists will say that some of the ecosystems are in irreversible decline. But our legends say Mother Earth heals herself. She has that capability of healing herself but she will also cleanse herself.

Are the buffalo in Yellowstone the last wild herd?
There are some herds but they are very small in number. There are some in Canada, the Wood Bison.

There’s a lot of buffalo in this country, but they’re all domesticated now. So, if you turn one of these domesticated buffalo out into the ecosystem, it would probably behave like a cow. Do nothing, not be a part of the natural world. They’re domesticated and their instincts are pretty much bred out of them.

We need to put them back on the land because the land needs them more than we need to eat them. The wild buffalo are a threatened species. The Yellowstone herd, I think there was 23 left when the huge, huge herds were slaughtered—50 to 60 million buffalo—and were almost wiped off the face of the earth. What does that do to the earth, the absence of a keystone species? I’ve always said we probably don’t even realize the damage from that yet. We can’t see it. We’re not sensitive to it. And now they’re saying Yellowstone can only sustain so many. Well, excuse me, that’s nature’s decision how much buffalo can be sustained there. But it’s the only herd from that original 23 that survived that massive slaughter that has been consistently free roaming. Their instincts are still in tact.

I like the Crow herd. The Crow tribe keeps a herd. They keep human beings away from them and they let them roam free. They keep their herd at a 1,000 because they only have so much land. It’s not like Yellowstone with millions of acres. At Yellowstone, tourists are always around taking pictures of the buffalo and the buffalo have not yet developed a fear of humans. They don’t run. While the Crow herd shies away from human beings.

My daughter asked me a question one time, and I keep that thought in my head. She said, “Mom, if there was only one buffalo left on the face of the earth would they kill it?� She was probably 8 or 9; it was a very innocent question. And I said, “Yeah, they would.�

Do you vote regularly?
I didn’t used to. More recently I would say, in the last decade or so. I have run for state legislature. But I live in a gerrymandering district where the Native people’s vote is very diluted. It’s in a J shape, it’s weird. Most voting districts are square or all in one place but we’re not. We’re kind of stretched out around the city. I’m involved in voter registration and getting voters to the polling site. Even if the polling sites move we find them. [Laughs]

Do you have any presidential hopefuls?
That’s still taking shape. I don’t know who’s going to really emerge as a candidate. I don’t have a preference. We’ve had some good years, in terms of different presidents who have held office, but they keep getting assassinated. Kennedy was hopeful for us as Native people. Those were good years. We had hope that we wouldn’t have this steep poverty and all of these injustices. But then he got assassinated. Then our hopes were on his brother. Then he got assassinated. Actually, our best years were Nixon years. We got a lot of our programs funded—some very basic programs—health and education. He was good for Native people. And Ford. But we haven’t had anybody recently.

And we vote. Native people are a deciding factor. All the candidates run around Indian country because we’re the deciding vote. Not that we’re huge in numbers, but when it’s neck and neck, it’s usually our Native vote that determines who’s going to be our next congress[person].

1 Comments

January 8, 2007 10:57 AM

[0+]  KeepAskingWhy said:

Good luck with all your efforts, Rosie. Don't know a lot about the buffalo situation so can't comment on that. I'm in North Dakota and know that much, much work remains in achieving equal rights for Native Americans and wish you all the best.

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