Blood Memory

Mass extinctions are tragic, but when they are shown as a policy in the quest for land and power, it becomes horrendous. This book is about the buffalo and is a companion piece to Ken Burn’s PBS documentary. The book features beautiful and compelling photographs and illustrations along with this reprehensible story. To learn that ten thousand pounds of buffalo tongue and seven hundred and fifty thousand robes were in one shipment to the East defies credulity. One quote within the book says “We commodified nature.”

In addition to the demand for buffalo product, the government felt that by destroying the buffalo, they could drive Indigenous peoples from a hunting to an agrarian economy. However, Native Americans were spiritually identified with the buffalo and interdependent with them and their common land. Therefore, the extinguishing of one resulted in a loss of human life as well. The book does shift to the rebuilding of buffalo populations, initially to support the sport hunters, and then with realizations of the interdependence with all have with nature and these beautiful and powerful animals.