Tribes welcome home more than 1,500 buffalo in 2025
More than 25,000 buffalo are managed on Native land, the most in over a century
Twenty-two tribes returned more than 1,500 buffalo to their ancestral homelands last year, according to a news release from the InterTribal Buffalo Council. Today, more than 25,000 buffalo are managed by tribal nations, which InterTribal Buffalo Council board president Ervin Carslon called “a profound act of cultural healing and Tribal sovereignty.” The InterTribal Buffalo Council and its 89 member tribes across 22 states help coordinate the restoration of buffalo populations to tribal land.
“Buffalo remain central to the spiritual, cultural, ecological, and economic life of Native Communities,” he said in the news release.
Buffalo are a keystone species in the Northern Great Plains and are essential to the health of grassland ecosystems. An estimated 30 to 60 million buffalo used to roam North America, but fur traders, hunters and the U.S. military wiped out buffalo as a means of erasing Native communities. By the early 1900s, there were less than a thousand buffalo. Now, tribal buffalo populations are larger than they have been in more than a century.
