The Inspector General (IG) of the North East Frontier of Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Sanjeev Raina, on Tuesday inaugurated the Mopin Festival at Basar in Arunachal Pradesh’s Leparada.
The festival is celebrated for good harvest, health, peace and prosperity.
People also pray to Mopin Ane for her blessings.
Informing about the inauguration of the festival, the ITBP on its official Twitter handle on Tuesday stated: “Sh Sanjeev Raina, IG NE Frontier ITBP inaugurated Mopin Festival in Basar, Leparada Arunachal Pradesh. Celebrated for good harvest, health, peace and prosperity. People pray to Mopin Ane for her blessings.”
According to information, during this festival, locals smear rice powder in each other’s face to mark the start of the festival.
This is an important festival celebrated by the Galo Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh and it is celebrated during the month of April.
The women dressed in white perform dance on the occasion.
The Galo tribe actively participate in the festival which is celebrated to drive away the evil spirits.
An animal is sacrificed to please God.
Mithun is considered as the auspicious animal to offer God.
The festival is celebrated in Arunachal Pradesh for five days.
During this five-day celebration, the people chant folk songs along with an elegant dance known as Popir.
The people also enjoy locally-prepared rice beer called Apong.
Sh Sanjeev Raina, IG NE Frontier ITBP inaugurated Mopin Festival in Basar, Leparada Arunachal Pradesh. Celebrated for good harvest, health, peace and prosperity. People pray to Mopin Ane for her blessings.
Since the terrorist attack in Pulwama that killed 40 CRPF personnel and the subsequent military response, there have been two distinct narratives in the media. On the one hand is an uncritical group of people who constantly whip up patriotism and construct nationalism in a narrow sense. They are keen to reduce journalism to propaganda. On the other is a set of professionals who continue to retain their commitment to the core values of journalism and opt to report events instead of becoming a tool of war.
Reporting war and conflict
The reportage and headlines of The Hindu exhibit a commitment to facts as well as a desire to minimise tension between two neighbours. Here journalism is a public good and refuses to become an instrument of deceit. The headline of Feb. 28, “IAF plane shot down, pilot taken captive by Pak. army”, was both appreciated and vilified by readers. The people who felt that the headline was not patriotic enough drew their inspiration from many broadcast journalists. I would urge them to watch senior journalist Sashi Kumar’s video, “Parasites of prime time”, in which he clearly establishes how dominant TV channels have become cheerleaders for hate politics and intolerance.
My friend and the founder of the Ethical Journalism Network, Aidan White, never tires of pointing out a simple fact: that journalists who work in or near a conflict zone see first-hand the brutal and inhumane consequences of war. The act of bearing witness helps them refrain from promoting propaganda based on what he calls “skewed notions of romantic patriotism or tribal allegiance”. There is a huge corpus of literature on war and conflict journalism. One fact emerges from such literature and from war reporters — from the time of the World Wars to my colleagues who have covered more recent wars in the neighbourhood: those who bay for blood are far removed from the sites of violence and do not have a sense of the loss and pain experienced by families. In his insightful book, The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley gives us an important warning: “The sad truth is that today government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skilfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that hero war correspondents once did their best to provide.”
Fact and fiction
Soon after India’s air strikes in Balakot, Pakistan, many TV channels citing anonymous sources claimed that the attack across the LoC killed 300 terrorists. However, when the official version was put out, the government spokesperson refused to speculate on the number. Meanwhile, international media persons, who have access to Balakot, visited the site. Their findings made a mockery of many of the tall claims that were being made from India’s TV studios. In this newspaper, a sober and responsible analysis was made much before Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman’s capture. For instance, in his comment piece, “India’s options after Pulwama” (Feb. 19), Happymon Jacob examined the option of using strike aircraft to carry out precision strikes in locations across the LoC. He presciently warned: “But such air incursions are likely to be detected and intercepted by Pakistani radars and air defence systems. If an aircraft is shot down or pilots are captured, it could become a bigger headache for the government. Pakistani retaliatory strikes cannot be ruled out either.”
Writer Namita Gokhale made an important observation recently: “One of the greatest life learnings of the ever-contemporary Mahabharata is the lesson of the Chakravyuh and the consequences of entering it without full foreknowledge.” Her tweet doesn’t apply only to governance and military affairs, but to journalism too. The very act of verification that differentiates this profession from all other forms of communication tells us not to be an Abhimanyu, one who knew the entry strategy but not the exit one.
Indian journalists have made some of the most incisive arguments against the pernicious idea of embedded journalism (the practice of placing journalists under the control of one side’s military during an armed conflict). The difference between journalism and propaganda lies in the language that is used in reports. Ethical journalism will report the killing of a soldier as the killing of a soldier and refrain from using loaded propagandist words like martyr.
A.S. Panneerselvan is the Readers’ Editor of The Hindu and an adviser to the Ethical Journalism Network. This article has been republished with permission. Read the original here.
The Western Hoolock Gibbon, the only wild ape found in India and also among the most endangered primates in the world, has found a safe haven thanks to the people of Meghalaya.
It is estimated that only about 3,000 Western Hoolock gibbons are left in northeast India today. These gibbons are listed among the 25 most endangered primates in the world. The species is classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and as a schedule 1 species by the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.
Over the last three years, the people of Hima Malai Sohmat are working proactively to conserve the gibbons and in the process, they are saving their forests too.
“Our forefathers believed that as long as you can hear gibbons calling, we are still within the boundary of Hima Malai Sohmat. This is true even today to a certain extent,” says Tyngshain Dewkhaid, from Phlangwanbroi village in the East Khasi hills of Meghalaya.
The village of the 42-year-old school teacher along with four others forms the ancient kingdom of Hima Malai Sohmat. The villages are located close to the world’s wettest region Cherrapunji and the forests that adjoin them is also one of the last vestiges of the Western Hoolock Gibbon, a fast-disappearing ape that has witnessed a 90% decline in its population in the last four decades.
“When we realised that gibbons are found only in a few regions in the world, including our forests, we decided to protect them. Since gibbons live in the forest, we realised that we need to conserve the forests too for gibbon conservation to succeed,” Dewkhaid says.
While the survey to determine the number of gibbons in the Hima Malai Sohmat is under process, conservationists feel the villagers’ efforts are reaping rich rewards.
“We see the Hima Malai Sohmat as a group of villages that can really spearhead a movement that can massively enhance the chances of gibbons surviving in the region,” Divya Vasudev of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said while speaking to the Hindustan Times.
WCS, an international conservation organisation, is assisting Meghalaya’s villagers and the forest department in gibbon conservation.
“A large proportion of land here is community owned and they have decided to not encroach on the forests. They are also running awareness campaigns for villagers, informing them that hunting gibbons is illegal,” Vasudev adds.
The Western Hoolock gibbon is found in all the northeastern states as well as in parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar. A species that requires contiguous, wet, closed-canopy forests for its survival, it is among the major casualty of deforestation for agriculture, tea estates and other commercial plantations.
“The need of the hour is to check the habitat loss and further fragmentation of their habitats and start at war footing the restoration of their habitats,” Narayan Sharma, an assistant professor in the department of environmental biology and wildlife sciences at the Guwahati’s Cotton University, says.
Sharma has been studying gibbons for the past 16 years.
“Community participation is a must for the conservation of Hoolock gibbons. I have also found that local communities don’t hunt gibbons, citing their ‘human-like families’ and resemblance to humans as well as their harmless nature. Having said that, what we need is sustained conservation efforts to make sure that gibbons survive for a long time in northeast India,” Sharma adds.
Gibbons form monogamous pairs that remain together for years. They are also famous for their emotive calls that echo across long distances in the forests and is used by individuals to attract mates.
The next step for the community is to monetise on their conservation through sustainable eco-tourism.
“A master plan committee has been constituted in our region to balance the needs of tourism with gibbon conservation work. This will help to maintain a green environment in the area, and mass tourism is not a priority for us,” Phlangwanbroi village’s Dewkhaid says.
As part of their eco-tourism, a few homestays have been set up and later this year, the villagers will also be organising guided gibbon tours inside the forests. For now, creating a safe haven for the gibbon is the priority.
“Such initiatives taken by local communities have ramifications not only for their lands but for the country as a whole. I believe such steps could turn the fate of gibbons from a species that is facing a steady decline in numbers, to becoming stable,” Vasudev says.
For many years, US corporate media have consistently failed to adequately inform audiences about the Palestinian right of return.
Even though the refugees are a crucial reason that the issue of Israel/Palestine remains unresolved, only a small portion of the coverage addresses the right of return. I used the media aggregator Factiva to search the databases of three major US newspapers: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. In a combined search of these three publications, Factiva returns results for 45,285 pieces that mention the Palestinian issue over the last ten years. Of these, only 624 contain the phrase “right of return.” In other words, since March 2009 these outlets have published 44,661 articles that bring up the Palestinian question while omitting a phrase that is absolutely integral to it, and one of the main reasons that it remains unresolved.
To put it another way, only 0.01 percent of coverage of Palestinians or Palestine in the last ten years in the Times, Journal and Post informs its audience about the right of return or even mentions it at all. That these are US media outlets writing for largely US audiences underscores the seriousness of this hole in the coverage, because US tax dollars are used to prevent the Palestinians from exercising this right.
When the right of return is mentioned in media, pundits and other journalists often baselessly call its legitimacy into question. In the Wall Street Journal, Michael Weiss (2/1/11) referred to it as the “Palestinians’ so-called ‘Right of Return.’” The Post’s Jennifer Rubin (10/2/14) opted for the same formulation, criticizing Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, because he wouldn’t “give up the so-called right of return.”
Weiss and Rubin are lying to their readers. Using the qualifier “so-called” is a way of saying that the right is illegitimate, but UN Resolution 194, adopted in 1948 by a 35–15 vote after at least 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled from their homes, could hardly be clearer: It says that
refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property.
A 2014 editorial in the Journal (3/24/14) said that Abbas wouldn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state “because doing so means relinquishing what Palestinians call the ‘right of return.’” The phrase “what Palestinians call the right of return” makes it sound as if the Palestinians are the only ones who think the right is genuine. In reality, UN Resolution 3236 (XXIX), passed 89–8 in 1974, reaffirms
the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.
the West Bank and Gaza have permanent residents, but there are also many Palestinian refugees in other countries who claim a disputed right of return, while many Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and assert their country’s sovereignty there.
Missing from this sentence, which purports to be part of a neutral Q&A on Israel/Palestine, is any indication of who is doing the disputing and on what basis, or of whether the settlers’ claim has any merit. A more accurate phrasing would be
the Palestinians have a UN-backed right of return that Israel and the US have prevented them exercising, while many Israeli settlers living in the West Bank assert their country’s sovereignty there in defiance of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Jennifer Rubin (Washington Post, 12/26/16) called John Kerry “intentionally obtuse”–or worse–for not denouncing the Palestinian right of return.
When then–Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech at the UN outlining the US’s decision to abstain from voting on a resolution critical of Israel, Rubin complained in the Post (12/26/16) that Kerry and the resolution
do not demand, for example, Palestinians give up the right of return. He is either intentionally obtuse or lying about the resolution’s predetermination of key issues between the parties.
She doesn’t even bother to explain why she thinks Palestinians should be told to give up this right; to her, it seems, Palestinian rights are simply bogus ipso facto.
Another Post article (2/28/18) said it is “justifiable” that Israel considers the right of return a “deal breaker” in negotiations with Palestinians. No further explanation is offered; apparently the authors see it as self-evidently justified to keep ethnically cleansed Palestinians from going back to their homes.
Another way the right of return is distorted in media coverage is when its exercise is cast as an act of violence. The Post’s Colbert I. King (5/15/17) wrote that:
More than 5 million Arabs and their male descendants, now living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, count themselves as refugees from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence with an “inalienable right” to return to the homes and property in the area that is Israel. That claim is fundamental to Palestinians. It is, however, a nonstarter in Israel. For Israel to recognize and allow implementation of the “right of return” claim—with the millions that would flood in to Israel—would be, as Israeli leaders fear, an act of national suicide by the Jewish state.
The routine twisting of the facts is happening here: We’re not talking about “5 million Arabs” who “count themselves as refugees,” but the 5 million Palestine refugees from 1948 who are registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. 1948 was not the only time that Palestinians have been made refugees, but King overlooks these populations: According to Badil, a resource centre for Palestinian residency and refugee rights that has special consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council, a further 2.25 million Palestinians have become refugees since 1948, and 718,000 more are internally displaced.
King also transforms Palestinians returning to homes from which they were expelled into an act of aggression: They would be “flood[ing] in to Israel,” wrecking everyone and everything in their path, as floods are wont to do.
For Bret Stevens (New York Times, 5/16/18), marching for the right of return is a “grotesque spectacle”
When he endorses the view that the right of return would be “an act of national suicide by the Jewish state,” King is referring to how Palestinian refugees returning to parts of historic Palestine that include what is currently the Israeli side of the 1949 armistice line would alter the present demography and and make it so that Jewish people are no longer the majority. In the Times, Bret Stephens (5/16/18) took an analogous position:
What is the ostensible purpose of what Palestinians call “the Great Return March”?
That’s no mystery. This week, the Times published an op-ed by Ahmed Abu Artema, one of the organizers of the march. “We are intent on continuing our struggle until Israel recognizes our right to return to our homes and land from which we were expelled,” he writes, referring to homes and land within Israel’s original borders.
His objection isn’t to the “occupation” as usually defined by Western liberals, namely Israel’s acquisition of territories following the 1967 Six Day War. It’s to the existence of Israel itself. Sympathize with him all you like, but at least notice that his politics demand the elimination of the Jewish state.
Notice, also, the old pattern at work: Avow and pursue Israel’s destruction, then plead for pity and aid when your plans lead to ruin.
One way to look at Palestinians realizing their UN-guaranteed rights is as “national suicide by the Jewish state,” as King does. Or as, in Stephens’ terms, “the elimination of the Jewish state.” Note that both columnists, from virtually opposite ends of the establishment media spectrum, are embracing a version of what Adam Serwer (Atlantic, 4/19) offered as a defining trait of white supremacism: “that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony.”
Alternatively, one can adopt a perspective that prioritizes democracy and international law, and says that finally allowing the refugees justice will enable conditions in which the present dynamic of ethnic partition, occupation and Levantine Jim Crow, which depends on the denial of Palestinian rights, can be replaced by Jewish and non-Jewish people living with equal rights in a one-person/one-vote system across all of historic Palestine.
To Roger Cohen (New York Times, 4/20/18), standing up for the right of return is part of the “insanity.”
Taking the supremacist approach, Roger Cohen of the Times (4/20/18) asserted:
There’s no point mincing words: The right of return is flimsy code for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. It’s consistent with the absolutist use of “occupation” as defining Israel itself and with the view that the sea is a pretty good place for Jews to end up.
Here Palestinians exercising rights afforded to them under international law, and by any coherent sense of justice, is the same as driving Jewish people into the sea. This equation does not seem to be made by anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, who decline to see Palestinians as bloodthirsty savages who will upon being uncaged immediately commence the slaughter of Jewish people.
When news outlets ignore or deny the Palestinian right of return, they are saying that Palestinians matter less than a supposed right to dispossess and oppress them. This leaves Palestinians with no right to live in their homeland as anything other than second-class citizens or, most often, disenfranchised subjects of military occupation in a Middle Eastern bantustan.
Featured image: View of Jerusalem (cc photo: Etienne Valois)
New Delhi: Close to 54,000 employees of the state-owned telecom operator BSNL are likely to lose their jobs once the Telecom Ministry seeks approval from the Election Commission to move its Cabinet proposal to offer voluntary retirement scheme.
The board of the company has accepted the proposal for the layoff and is waiting for elections to get over before taking the final call, a report by Deccan Herald said on Wednesday.
The telecom ministry will seek approval from the Election Commission to move its Cabinet proposal to offer voluntary retirement scheme for MTNL and BSNL employees, a government official said Wednesday.
The Department of Telecom (DoT) is preparing a Cabinet note recommending the voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) for BSNL and MTNL employees above 50 years of age.
“The DoT is preparing a Cabinet note for seeking its approval to grant VRS to BSNL and MTNL employees. The Department is going to immediately approach Election Commission for its nod to approach the Cabinet,” the official, who did not wish to be identified, told reporters.
The ministry has to seek approval from the Commission since the Model Code of Conduct is in place for Lok Sabha elections.
BSNL has 1.76 lakh employees across India and MTNL has 22,000. It is estimated that 16,000 MTNL employees and 50 per cent of BSNL staff will retire in the next 5-6 years.
The VRS for BSNL and MTNL could have a revenue impact of Rs 6,365 crore and Rs 2,120 crore, respectively.
The DoT plans to fund the VRS through issuance of 10-year bond. The bonds would be paid back by lease revenue that they will get from land asset monetisation.
The revenue to wage ratio in case of MTNL has swelled to 90 per cent while in the case of BSNL it is around 60-70 per cent.
Both telecom firms have requested the government to grant VRS for employees on the Gujarat model.
Under the Gujarat model, an amount equivalent to 35 days of salary for each completed year of service, and 25 days of salary for each year of service left till retirement is offered.
When asked about the number of employees to be covered under the proposed VRS, the officer said it will cover all employees above 50 years of age.
The exact number cannot be determined as it is a voluntary scheme and cannot be forced on employees, the official added.
Monsoon rains in India are expected to be below normal this year, the country’s only private weather forecasting agency said on Wednesday, dampening prospects of higher farm and economic growth in the $2.6 trillion economy.
“The Pacific Ocean has become strongly warmer than average. The model projections call for 80 percent chance of El Nino during March-May, dropping to 60 percent for June to August,” Jatin Singh, managing director of Skymet, told reporters.
“This means, it is going to be a devolving El Nino year, though retaining threshold values all through the season. Thus, monsoon 2019 is likely to be below normal.”
The monsoon season delivers about 70 percent of India’s annual rainfall and is key to the success of the farm sector in Asia’s third-biggest economy.
In February, Skymet said monsoon rains in India are expected to be normal this year.
Indian’s top government weather official said last month that monsoon is likely to be a robust and healthy one this year provided there isn’t a surprise El Nino phenomenon.
India’s destruction of one of its satellites has been labelled a “terrible thing” by the head of Nasa, who said the missile test created 400 pieces of orbital debris and posed a threat to astronauts onboard the International SpaceStation (ISS).
Jim Bridenstine was addressing employees five days after India shot down a low-orbiting satellite in a missile launch that it says elevated the country to the elite tier of space powers.
The satellite shattered into pieces, many of which are dangerously large but too small to track, Bridenstine said. “What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track – we’re talking about 10cm (six inches) or bigger – about 60 pieces have been tracked.”
The Indian satellite was destroyed at a relatively low altitude of 180 miles (300km), well below the ISS and most satellites in orbit.
But 24 of the pieces were going above the ISS, said Bridenstine. “That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” he said, adding: “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”
“It’s unacceptable and Nasa needs to be very clear about what its impact to us is.”
The US military tracks objects in space to predict the collision risk for the ISS and for satellites. It is tracking 23,000 objects larger than 10cm. That includes about 10,000 pieces of space debris, of which nearly 3,000 were created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007, 530 miles above the surface.
As a result of the Indian test, the risk of collision with the ISS has increased by 44% over 10 days, Bridenstine said. But the risk will dissipate over time as much of the debris will burn up as it enters the atmosphere.
India’s ministry of external affairs said at the time of the launch the test was done in the lower atmosphere to ensure that there was no space debris. “Whatever debris that is generated will decay and fall back on to the Earth within weeks,” it said.
The missile test was celebrated in India but also drew criticism because it was announced by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, while the government is supposed to be in caretaker mode before elections starting this month.
There are estimated to be about 900,000 pieces of debris larger than a marble in orbit around the Earth, according to statistical models cited by the European Space Agency. There are about 34,000 objects circulating that are larger than 10cm.
Even collisions with tiny objects can be catastrophic in space, largely due to the pace at which spacecraft are moving in orbit, a minimum of 7.8km per second.
On 5,000 hectares of unploughed prairie in north-eastern Montana, hundreds of wild bison roam once again. But this herd is not in a national park or a protected sanctuary – they are on tribal lands. Belonging to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of Fort Peck Reservation, the 340 bison is the largest conservation herd in the ongoing bison restoration efforts by North America’s Indigenous people.
The bison – or as Native Americans call them, buffalo – are not just “sustenance,” according to Leroy Little Bear, a professor at the University of Lethbridge and a leader in the bison restoration efforts with the Blood Tribe. The continent’s largest land mammal plays a major role in the spiritual and cultural lives of numerous Native American tribes, an “integrated relationship,” he said.
“If you are Christian and you don’t see any crosses out there, or you don’t have your corner church … there’s no external connection, [no] symbolic iconic notion that strengthens and nurtures those beliefs,” said Little Bear. “So it goes with the buffalo.”
Only a couple of hundred years ago, 20 million to 30 million bison lived in vast thundering herds across North America. They were leftover relics of the Pleistocene and one of the few large mammals to survive the Ice Age extinction.
Bison in the snow Photograph: Neal Herbert/Yellowstone NPS
But less than 400 years after Columbus’ direful voyage, white settlers pushed their way west into Native American territory in so-called manifest destiny. And the US government made the fateful decision to cripple the Native Americans through whatever means necessary. One of these was the bison: the government viewed slaughtering the great herds en-masse as a way to starve and devastate Native American tribes.Advertisement
Within just decades, the bison went from numbering tens of millions to within a hair’s breadth of extinction. “Fort Peck was the first to stand up and say we want to help. We want to restore these important bison back to their historic Great Plains home,” said Jonathan Proctor, Rockies and Plains program director with NGO Defenders of Wildlife, who has worked with the tribes for years to bring the bison back.
To do so, the tribe looked to Yellowstone’s bison herd. After the slaughter of the 19th century, 23 bison survived in a remote valley in Yellowstone. Today, the herd is 4,000 strong and is seen as a vital population because it has never been domesticated or interbred with cattle, maintaining genetic purity. While so-called pure genetics of the bison are often important to scientists and conservationists, Kelly Stoner – who heads the bison program at the Wildlife Conservation Society – said the issue is more complicated among tribal groups.
Yellowstone National Park Bison Herd grazing as a storm rolls in Photograph: Jacob W Frank/Yellowstone NPS
“You’ll find that amongst Native Americans … the predominant attitude is ‘if it looks like a buffalo and smells like a buffalo, it’s a buffalo’. The deep, personal relationship between Native Americans and buffalo exists, and is relevant and important, whether or not a particular animal has 8% cattle genes or not,” she explained.
Still, in 2007, Fort Peck Reservation eyed Yellowstone’s herd as a potential source to build a cultural herd. Fort Peck, and many other tribes, already had a commercial herd – used for economic purposes – but now they wanted to build a second herd with conservation in mind.
But getting bison from Yellowstone national park would prove far harder than Fort Peck initially thought. Although pure bred, Yellowstone bison carry the disease brucellosis. The Yellowstone bison originally contracted the disease from cattle in the early 20th century and now ranchers and state officials fear a return. Although scientists have never recorded brucellosis jumping from bison to cattle, it is theoretically possible according to lab research.
“It’s really difficult [to pass]. It’s passed through the placenta,” explained Proctor. “You’d have to have cattle mix with bison in the spring when the bison would potentially abort their calf because of brucellosis and the cattle would have to lick [the aborted placenta]. It’s not likely.”
Still, cattle ranchers so fear the disease that they have pushed for hundreds, sometimes even more than a thousand, bison to be slaughtered every year in Yellowstone national park to keep the animals from roaming outside the park boundaries and potentially mixing with cattle. Yellowstone elk also carry the disease, but are spared slaughter since they are seen as less of a risk.
The brucellosis panic almost stopped Fort Peck from ever getting Yellowstone bison. Over six years, the tribes had to battle anti-bison legislation from the Montana congress and legal battles. The case went all the way to Montana supreme court, which the tribes won unanimously.
“The biggest roadblock is the politics in Montana,” said Robert Magnan, director of the Fort Peck tribes’ fish and game department and the buffalo program. “They don’t understand what we’re trying to do out here.”
TheTatanke Oyate, Buffalo Nation, Singers from the Fort Peck Reservation in Poplar, Montana, sing a welcoming song for bison arriving from Yellowstone National Park on Monday, March 19, 2012. Sixty-four bison from Yellowstone National Park were shipped to northeast Montana’s Fort Peck Reservation on Monday Photograph: Richard Peterson/AP
The first Yellowstone bison finally arrived in 2012: around 60 animals in all. “There was a huge celebration; many, many people from the community came out,” said Proctor. “It was just thrilling to see.”
Two years after their arrival, Magnan said that the bison had already begun to rejuvenate the land.
“We’ve seen the ecosystem revive. Grassland birds have returned, native grasses are thriving. We welcome and look forward to the buffalos’ continued benefits to our tribal lands.”
Since then, several more deliveries have been made and the Fort Peck herd – at 340 – is among the top 10 conservation herds in the US.
But the work has only begun. In 2014, two years after the bison came to Fort Peck, 13 tribal nations – representing eight reservations both in the US and Canada – signed a ‘Buffalo Treaty’. The treaty outlined the importance of bringing back free-roaming bison to both the US and Canada. “We used to always have an empty chair for the buffalo, for the spirit of the buffalo [at the dialogues], in our talking circles,” said Little Bear, who facilitated the dialogues. “It’s hard to explain but the buffalo was basically asking us, ‘you know, I’ve been gone for 150 years, why do you want me to come back?’”
A herd roam on the Fort Peck Reservation near Poplar, Montana Photograph: Matthew Brown/AP
By the end of the dialogues, the tribes agreed why. “The concern was the young people hear only stories, they hear the songs, they see the ceremonies, but they don’t see the buffalo out there,” added Little Bear.
The treaty is already making good. Last year, Blackfeet Reservation, also in Montana, received 89 genetically pure bison from Elk Island in Canada. Although the Blackfeet’s Iinnii Initiative – their name for buffalo – is the youngest, it’s also the most ambitious.Advertisement
The tribe is negotiating with state officials to allow these bison, which are free of brucellosis, to range freely into Glacier national park and even, hopefully, one day as north as Waterton Lakes national park and Blood Tribe Reservation Canada – which would make it the first international bison herd in over a century.
Tribes sign the treaty to commit to bison repopulation and conservation in Polson, Montana Photograph: Dennis Jorgensen/WWF
Little Bear said they are also working with the Y2Y Initiative, which aims to create a massive wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon for wildlife such as bears and wolves.
“We talked to the Y2Y people and said ‘hey, what about buffalo?’ And [they said], ‘we never thought about it but we can include buffalo.’” This year, wild bison returned to Banff national park after being gone over 100 years. Little Bear said the tribe’s Buffalo Treaty acted as a “catalyst” for the re-wilding in Canada’s first park.
“Tribes of the northern plains are the lead in wild bison restoration right now,” Proctor said. In 50 years’ time, the conservation community hopes to have at least 10 bison herds that number 1,000 animals – the minimum, he said, needed for the bison to fulfil their ecological role (currently only Yellowstone has a herd of more than 1,000 animals).
On top of that, Proctor hopes there will be a few herds of more than 10,000 animals, a herd size which hasn’t been seen since the mass extermination in the 19th century.
A coyote and bison in Lamar Valley, Yellowstone national park. Photograph: Sumiko Scott/Getty Images
“Well never see bison roaming the entire Great Plains again,” said Proctor. “We’ll never see 20 million to 30 million bison again. No one is trying to go back in time. We’re trying to go forward. We’re trying to restore this important animal where we can, where people want them, and to the level where they will help restore the natural balance.”
For any of this to happen, Native American tribes will be key. They have the land and the desire to bring back the continent’s largest land mammal. And it’s not just bison, Proctor said. They have been instrumental in conserving wolves, grizzly bears, swift foxes and black-footed ferrets among other species.
Magnan said Fort Peck’s “dream” is to have 2,500 buffalo in their conservation herd running on more than 40,000 hectares. Already the tribe has passed a resolution to purchase more land.
“It’s amazing … with limited budgets and widespread poverty, [Native American tribes] are the leader in wildlife restoration when compared to the state wildlife agency,” he said. “In reality, it was not the buffalo that left us, it was us that left the buffalo. So we have to do something.”
