The near-extermination of the buffalo devastated Plains nations partly as deliberate strategy

Evidence

The buffalo was the foundation of Plains life — providing food, shelter, clothing, and tools — and was honored as a sacred, willing provider (recall White Buffalo Calf Woman, selection 1). The deliberate near-extermination of the buffalo by white hunters in the 1800s (tens of millions reduced to a few hundred, partly as a strategy to destroy the Plains peoples’ independence) was one of history’s great ecological and cultural catastrophes, devastating the Plains nations. — , A Year of World Stories, 10112

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the buffalo as the foundation of a whole way of life before giving the specific casualty numbers.
• XREF: connects to: Low-cost bioweapons manufacture destroys the logic of deterrence; Generational trauma makes 1997 buffalo slaughter replay 1855 massacre — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 778; Land allotment and dam flooding drive current Lakota social pathology — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 747 (+2 more)

Related

• U.S. forces slaughtered buffalo deliberately to starve Native peoples into submission (similarity 0.87)
• Buffalo were reduced from 50 million to 26 in the US (similarity 0.81)
• Buffalo slaughter protects only about 3,000 cattle on wildlife-designated public land (similarity 0.81)
• Buffalo decimation caused the Lakota’s spiritual and ethnic death (similarity 0.81)
• Montana slaughtered over 2,500 Yellowstone buffalo in three years (similarity 0.80)
• Buffalo restoration is tied to restoring Native social and political structure (similarity 0.80)
• Domesticating buffalo degrades their social structure and the land (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Low-cost bioweapons manufacture destroys the logic of deterrence #exemplifies (0.30)