(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Q&A: The Connection Between Buffalo Restoration and Native Liberation [1]
['Ilana Newman', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2023-12-08
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Elsie DuBray is a young Oohenunpa Lakota, Nueta and Hidatsa woman currently working on a Master’s degree in Community Health and Prevention at Stanford University. DuBray brings together her upbringing on a buffalo ranch on the Cheyenne River Reservation with her interest in Indigenous public health, combining traditional knowledge with Western science.
I heard DuBray speak at a screening of Gather, on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation. Gather follows Indigenous people across the country working to reclaim their foodways. The film was released in 2020, and filmed even earlier.
Much has happened in DuBray’s life since the film, where she was shown winning a high school science fair with her research comparing buffalo lipid content to beef lipid content. DuBray’s work has grown and evolved over the years, and in our conversation we focus on her investment in buffalo restoration, bringing a Native identity to higher education, Indigenous public health, and where she hopes to take her work in the future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ilana Newman, The Daily Yonder: First, can you introduce yourself and tell me about where you’re from and a little bit about the work that you’re doing today?
Elsie DuBray: I’m going to introduce myself in my own language first.
Han mitakuyepi! Cante wasteya nape ceyuzape ksto. Mahpiya Ile Win emaciyapi na wasituya micaje kin Elsie DuBray. Oohenunpa Lakota na Nueta na Hidatsa hemaca, na Wakpa Waste Oyanke hemantanhan.
Hello relatives, I greet you all with a good heart. My name is Mahpiya Ile Win, which in English roughly translates to Blazing Cloud Woman. And my English name is Elsie DuBray. I am Oohenunpa Lakota, Nueta, and Hidatsa from the Cheyenne River Reservation in what is now known as South Dakota. I am currently a Stanford University student. I just completed my undergrad in the spring of this year, and then for some reason, I decided to stay and I’m now doing my Masters here as well.
DY: Tell me about the work that you’re doing now around public health and food sovereignty.
ED: So a lot of what I’m doing in school currently, or at least up until this point has been very related to the work that my family does at home on our buffalo ranch. When I got started here at Stanford, the work I was doing was biochemistry scientific research into lipid analysis of buffalo fat and beef fat and trying to kind of look into the biochemical pathways of a shift away from a traditional diet to a modern diet, and some of the reasons behind the disparate outcomes in native youth and type two diabetes. I went down that hard scientific and Western scientific rabbit hole a bit and found it harmful for me and not ultimately satiating my interest in any way, nor contributing to what I believe to be my responsibility to my community and myself.
My understanding of science and my interest in science was not at all independent of my identity as a Lakota woman. Attempting to distill and compartmentalize those things was very painful. And I found that in the manifestation of an eating disorder that really peaked and became most dangerous my freshman year at Stanford, when I was wrapped up in the fast-paced scientific rigor of it all, all amidst this major life transition from being at home on the rez in South Dakota to then coming to Stanford and experiencing so much more homesickness and culture shock than I ever imagined.
I took so much for granted at home. I always knew home was beautiful and incredible and that I was so lucky to grow up on my homeland. Still, I was excited to run away to California for a while. And then immediately upon arriving in California, I couldn’t wait to run away back home. And I got home and had this kind of whole new outlook and this whole new understanding of just how important home is to me. My physical removal from home takes a toll on my physical body and then my mind and my spirit. Elsie DuBray. (Photo provided)
And then in November 2020, my little brother passed away to suicide. And that absolutely rocked my world and everything I thought I knew to be true. And all of the healing that I felt like I had experienced was all kind of pulled out from under me. I felt untethered for the first time in my life. Through whatever hardships I experienced before that, I always felt so grounded in a sense of purpose and responsibility to the buffalo, and yet losing my brother just really rocked me.
Through that grieving process, there was a real awakening that shook me enough to parse through all of the hesitation and fogginess of what I wanted or what I was interested in. It showed me the urgency with a kind of stinging clarity I needed to not be distracted or dissuaded by the institutional Western push towards this hyper-medicalization, hyper-STEM application. I’m making up words now. But the focus on the research and the STEM and the bureaucracy and the institutionalization of it all, I couldn’t do it anymore.
I became very adamant that my interest in the holistic health and well-being of my community deserves to be honored in the way that my community sees fit and that our life experiences dictate, not the syllabus of a chemistry class.
I still graduated with a B.S. in Human Biology, but I made my concentration the holistic health and well-being of Indigenous communities. I completed my Native Studies minor, and then I decided to pursue honors in the Center for Comparative Studies and Race and Ethnicity, which is the center that houses Native American studies. My honors thesis became this real kind of reflective think piece about my family and myself. So there are no graphs in my thesis, there are no lipid levels or percentages. There are stories that my dad told me, there are stories of my life, of his life. There’s narrative, there’s spirits, there’s even some poetry.
I feel like this is so far removed from the question that you even asked. But it is deeply informative of how I’m approaching things now and how I came to understand the concept of food sovereignty as a tangible reality, as an embodied personal experience — away from this abstract conceptual textbook. I feel it in my body. I work towards it daily.
DY: You grew up on a buffalo ranch on the Cheyenne River Reservation and buffalo, and buffalo restoration, are at the heart of so much of what you are doing now. Can you tell me about how your relationship with the buffalo has developed over time?
ED: It’s the greatest honor of my life to be able to have been raised at home in the way that I was. Part of that was being around buffalo my whole life, which is a pretty uncommon experience. I think my brother, before he died, may have been the only other young person who has been able to grow up from birth to the present, surrounded by the buffalo. Every day, I began to understand more and more how much of a privilege that is. I grew up thinking it was normal to be able to eat buffalo meat every day. What an absolutely incredible blessing. I think about how all of that from a cellular level, nutritional level, and psychological level has helped me become the person that I am today.
I cringe when I think about myself as a kid, and about not wanting to go check the buffalo with my dad because it’s too hot outside or I’m scared of snakes. In the last couple of years, I’ve been a lot more intentional about spending time outside watching the buffalo.
I’ve been so fortunate to be thinking about buffalo restoration my whole life, in a state where there were buffalo. Buffalo restoration was about growing the numbers. I didn’t think about the very real kind of implications of if something happened and there wasn’t any buffalo anymore or what happens if there’s a real threat to the buffalo. That’s what happened when we lost 300 animals to a cattle disease, Mycoplasma bovis. It has a very high mortality rate. I took for granted the fact that we were out where we had this many buffalo. But what happens when we lose them? And that took a huge toll on me as well. I hadn’t ever had to directly experience the loss of buffalo like that. We can’t be people without the buffalo, but I’ve never had to think about it that way because the buffalo were already there for me.
DY: Can you speak about why the buffalo are so important, both to the land and to the people?
ED: To my people, buffalo are everything. Buffalo are at the center of our creation story. That’s something that no one can deny and no one can take away from us. When you are so deeply connected to an intertwined with someone else like that, like our people and the Pte Oyate, the Buffalo Nation, you can see and understand the centrality of them to our culture. If something is the center of your creation story, it’s going to be the center of your culture and the way you see the world and the way you interact with it and each other and the way you organize and the way you structure yourselves and the way you treat each other. It is because of the buffalo that we have the values that we have. They are the topic of so many of the stories that have been passed down since time immemorial. And you can’t take that away from somebody and expect them to be okay. The attempted extermination of the buffalo was a very intentional attempted extermination of my people. And it goes beyond just the warfare tactic of attacking somebody’s food system and understanding the damage that that does to a people. It was going to be more than a starvation situation. It was an attempt at genocide and ethnocide in the fullest of the term. It was to eradicate, or attempt to eradicate, who we are beyond physical bodies getting in the way of conquest.
Buffalo restoration is food sovereignty for Lakota people. And food sovereignty is where all of these social justice efforts meet and intersect. To me, it is a tangible mechanism for this radical reconceptualization of what public health looks like. And that’s what buffalo restoration means to me. And that’s why I see buffalo restoration as being so important to our people.
You can’t have Land Back without Buffalo Back. People are becoming increasingly aware that Land Back and Native people’s access to their traditional homelands and stewardship over those lands is a mechanism for combating climate change and cultivating ecological well-being. Part of that is buffalo restoration.
Prairies sequester more carbon than a rain forest does and I’ve seen more and more literature coming out about the importance of prairie restoration. Well, how do you think you’re gonna restore the prairie without the keystone species of this country? It all comes back to the buffalo and not just for my people, not just for my family, but for the connected liberation of all Indigenous communities.
DY: Yeah, that all makes sense. Is there anything else you’d want to share?
ED: I just hope I generally give a message of hope and empowerment and encouragement as opposed to a victim narrative because I don’t believe that to be true at all. I think that this is possible, and I think this is possible because of what I’ve seen. This futurism is a tangible one and I’m committed to working towards it with my peers, my friends, and my family.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Get Path Finders By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/qa-the-connection-between-buffalo-restoration-and-native-liberation/2023/12/08/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
