In one of my first memories, we are driving in the Canadian Rockies in winter. Thick beds of cloud congeal in mountain cirques, mingling with the snowpack, white on white swirling together like a witch’s cauldron. The sun is a weak orange furze behind swaddling layers of a dirty blanket sky. Snow slants across the highway: hard needles of ice causing the red taillights of the cars ahead to bleed in the fading light.
Driving in a blizzard is a lonely experience, regardless of how many people are in the car. We are quiet except for the trundling cough of the heater and my dad’s quiet, under-breath humming. It’s a habit that shows up when he’s performing difficult tasks requiring concentration. It’s a habit I’ve adopted.
Eventually, we pull into a rest stop and wait for the storm to blow over. The car is buffeted by wind, rocking creakily on old suspension. Out the window, there is a high fence. Beyond it, in the blur of wind and snow, something large and dark is moving toward the car. It comes closer, shaggy and brown, with an expansive head and wood-carved face staring benignly into the storm. Its shape forms into a word on my tongue: buffalo.
Or bison, if you prefer. Which do you like more? The closed, thudding double syllable of “bison” or the hills and valleys, the open “oh,” of buffalo? Both are impositions; neither is the name used by the people who’ve lived alongside these animals for 10,000 years or more. Neither fits, not totally. “Bison” feels cold, clinical. “Buffalo” requires sharing with an altogether separate group of animals, the snobbishly titled true buffalo: African buffalo, anoas, water buffalo.
The Banff Buffalo Paddock has used both “bison” and “buffalo,” alternating over time. Bordered by Forty Mile Creek, the Cascade River, and the Canadian Pacific Railway, the paddock was 300 acres of mixed grassland, a patch of prairie squatting like a pearl in the sharp shell of a mountain valley. From 1897 to 2015, the paddock held a collection of buffalo: as few as three and as many as a hundred. The first were gifts from the regional aristocrat Donald Smith, better known as Lord Strathcona.
Strathcona had his fingers in just about every Canadian colonial pie: shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company, president of the Bank of Montreal, co-founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Fort Smith, where we set off on our journey upriver, is named after him. It’s hard to escape him in Western Canada.
Someone dumped the buffalo on him as a gift. Perhaps he looked at the big animals on his doorstep and asked: What am I supposed to do with these? He palmed them off on the town of Banff, where they were housed temporarily in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police barracks. In 1897, the paddock was built, and it was there that I first saw buffalo as a boy.
Blackfoot stories speak of the world as created by Napi, the Old Man, who ensured that the plains were well stocked with game and that everything existed in its proper place. Settlers marvelled at flocks of birds that blotted out the sun and the herds of buffalo whose migrations raised dust clouds almost large enough to seem like their own weather system. An account from an American army colonel in 1871 tells of a buffalo herd so large that it took five days to ride through on horseback. Buffalo derailed trains, barrelled through fences, and stood steady and implacable, unnerving settlers with their stares.
In the short film Four Faces of the Moon, Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong depicts those same stares as her stop-motion buffalo confront hide hunters. The buffalo array themselves in ranks, hundreds of them, their bodies merging into one uncountable, unknowable mass that extends far beyond sight, beyond the horizon, melding into land and sky. This is the land that was.
One August, half a world away, I caught the tail end of the biological phenomenon known colloquially as the Great Migration as it passed through the western corridor of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. Regularly ranked as one of the natural wonders of the world, the Great Migration is the seasonal movement of millions of wildebeest from their nursery grounds near the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania to fresh grassland feeding grounds in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, hundreds of kilometres to the north.
The impossibly vast columns of grey-brown animals—supposedly visible from space—sweep across East Africa’s plains like the hands of a clock, circumscribing an immense circle over the course of a year. It is a constant, perpetual movement millions of years in the making and surely one of the greatest spectacles on the planet.
While I cherish the memory of that experience, I shouldn’t have had to travel to the other side of the world to have it. With minor apologies for my geographic parochialism, the real biological Great Migration has been, and should be, the seasonal movement of the North American buffalo across the Great Plains.
Every person from Edmonton to Corpus Christi should know the sight, sound, and smell of a buffalo herd in the summer sun. We should see their shaggy, snow-tipped bulks resting like furred mountains alongside wintry roads outside Jackson and North Platte. There should be viral videos of buffalo calves dipping their hooves in the surf at Galveston. Morning traffic reports should read: “Delay on I-90 outside Chicago as 250,000 buffalo pass through: plan ahead.” Come spring, herds of buffalo should block our highways and shut down our airports while they lick salt from the tarmac. And we should let them. We should be grateful for it. Where are we going in such a rush, anyway?
Most North Americans today, if they see buffalo at all, will see them in a zoo or a small protected ranch. The animals will be docile and quiet, grazing, little more than overgrown cattle. All sense of the wild bred out of them, and it will be difficult to understand what the fuss ever was. If anything, that is the point—the pretense of their survival in captivity is couched in the language of conservation, but what it really means is this: We came, we saw, we conquered.
This is true not just of buffalo but of all our interactions with non-human animals. Measured by biomass, wild animals account for only 4 percent of mammalian life on Earth. The rest is made up by humans (36 percent) and domestic livestock (60 percent). What’s left of the wild are pets and minor spectacles—only shadows of shadows of formerly immense, unknowable selves.
Why buffalo? There are other candidates that could be considered as the talismanic animal of the destruction of North America’s wild places. The grizzly bear, the wolf, the whooping crane. Farther to the north, the caribou. In our oceans, east and west: sperm whales, blue whales, cod, and salmon. Passenger pigeons, alligators. North American riverbanks were once lined with hundreds of species of freshwater clams and mussels, an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. We took care of those, though. Now you’ve got to overpay for a few dubious salt-water clams in an overpriced restaurant. Perhaps it will have ocean views.
Why buffalo? Because they are inseparable from the continent, from its ecology, from its relationships between land and land, land and living thing, land and the people who have always lived here. Buffalo are the largest terrestrial animal in North America. They ranged, at one point, from Alaska to Mexico. The University of Alaska Museum of the North has a display of a 30,000-year-old steppe bison named Blue Babe. At the other end of the continent, the diaries of a Jesuit colonist in Mexico record buffalo being kept in the nature gardens and zoo of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma. There was no North America without buffalo. There is no North America without buffalo.
After the Labour Day weekend, Yellowstone becomes a different place. Most of the park’s more than 4 million annual visitors come in spring and summer (and most of those never venture farther than a kilometre from a road). Once September begins, the droves of tour buses and family RVs migrate back to their winter haunts. Restaurants and hotels close, and the rangers are reduced to a skeleton staff. The change is sudden: quite literally overnight.
The last time I was there, my companion and I woke up the day after Labour Day to find that the campground was empty. We were the only people left. We wandered half dressed, feeling the first bright edges of winter on our bare skin. In the northeast corner of Yellowstone lies the Lamar Valley. It was a long drive from our campsite—up, down, and around the narrow roads that trace the curves and ridges of the plateau like a fingernail grazing a lover’s spine. We were going in search of the last days of the buffalo rut, when male and female animals gather to bicker, make up, and mate.
The rut takes place in the shadow of Mount Hornaday, a relatively unremarkable peak in Wyoming’s Absaroka Range. It was named for William Temple Hornaday, a former director of the Bronx Zoo. In 1889, Hornaday wrote The Extermination of the American Bison, North America’s first major work of wildlife conservation and the first thorough ecological and historical study of the buffalo by a European settler. In it, Hornaday argued for the preservation of the Yellowstone herd, whose descendants now live in the shadow of his namesake mountain.
The book also posited that the annihilation of the buffalo was in part a strategy by the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Canadian) government to force Indigenous peoples onto reservations. By our standards, it is certainly not an enlightened work of post-colonial thought, but it is among the first efforts by an American settler writer to consider how the idea of ecology is made up of people, places, and wildlife—and how any of those can be used as a political weapon.
In John Williams’s 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing, set in the 1870s, disillusioned Harvard student William Andrews abandons his studies and heads west to join the last buffalo-hunting expedition. He is inspired by the Transcendentalists—Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson—and their ideas of a harmony between nature and humans.
What he finds, instead, is the brute reality of exploitation. On the hunt, Andrews participates in the systematic slaughter of the last great buffalo herd. Trapped in a valley, thousands of buffalo are killed—the men firing so quickly that their gun barrels overheat, the metal warping and bending. The valley becomes a slaughtering ground: humps of naked, raw flesh bathed in flies, rotting in the sun. Obsessed with the killing, the buffalo hunters enter a kind of fugue state, losing track of the season and becoming trapped in the valley. The meat they’ve left to rot is no good to them. The next spring, they lose all the hides trying to ford a river. Nothing is gained.
When settlers took the buffalo hides, they left the heads unskinned. Imagine the sight: prairies and hollows filled with unbodied heads, massive furred and horned opals attached like perverse puppets to bleaching bones. After a few years, collectors would return to the site of slaughter to gather the bones and bring them to carbon works and ash factories, where the skulls would be crushed and used for fertilizer or for ink.
Perhaps the most famous photo of the slaughter of the buffalo was taken outside the Michigan Carbon Works, in Rougeville, Michigan, in 1892. It depicts a fortress of buffalo skulls, an interlocking wall of horn and bone, like a horrendous pyramid from nightmare or the catacomb tunnels of bone beneath Paris. Two men stand in the picture. One is on the ground, his foot perched triumphantly atop a skull. The second stands on top of the pyramid, holding a skull in one hand like a piece of luggage and staring into the distance. The wall of bone is five times taller than either man and extends beyond the frame in every direction. Thousands, tens of thousands, of skulls.
We have learned to gild our language with the abstractions of economics: liquidity, profitability ceilings, externalities, elasticity. Some of that language we have absorbed and attached to our individual lives, to our own detriment. How often do we speak of our actions in terms of productivity and efficiency, making a commodified factory of a human life? What is most shocking about those pyramids of skulls is the nakedness of them, the artless unsophistication of them: all that violence, laid out so clearly for all to see.
Colonial North America was the backwoods of European high society. The costs of life in Europe were hidden here, out of sight and out of mind. It’s not so different from the smoking dumps of electronic waste we heap on African and Asian countries today. There is always a backwater, always a backwoods, always someone else, or something else, to carry the cost. At least, for now.
I often dream of buffalo, memories of the rut in Yellowstone, mixed with other, vaguer images—half real, half invented. Gregory Scofield, a Metis writer and bead worker, told me once that those dreams are a reminder of where my home is, a reminder of some spiritual connection to the prairies. It is a generous thought for him to share with me, although I’m not sure how comfortable I am with it.
I don’t know how to live, really, as a settler, in a specific kind of body, in this place that carries a specific kind of legacy—one of violence and extraction, one of dominance and control. I can refuse it, of course, that legacy, but to what end, for how long, and how completely? The Tunisian Jewish writer Albert Memmi talks of the colonizer who refuses, the colonizer who recognizes an unjust system, withdraws from the way it privileges them, and fights for change.
But, Memmi argues, theirs is a limited role. The struggle isn’t really theirs: they are benevolent but detached. Memmi speaks from the specific context of 1960s anti-colonial struggle, particularly in North Africa. But I wonder if his argument, and its central problem, can be extended to our own, as environmentally destructive individuals embedded in an extractive machine from which we derive, every day, more benefits and more pleasures (or at least their illusions) than almost any human being in evolutionary history.
Given how embedded we are, how do we become citizens who refuse? And what are the limits of that refusal?
Of the buffalo that passed through the Banff Buffalo Paddock, the most important came in 1907. By then, the animals were just about extinct. From the millions that had roamed the plains, perhaps a few hundred remained, in private herds or roaming in small groups in Yellowstone National Park. The largest single group was owned by an American rancher, Michel Pablo. He had accumulated them somewhat by happenstance, rounding up buffalo when he saw them, buying them on the roadside from other ranchers—a hobby that got out of control.
Pablo recognized the dire straits that the buffalo were in, threatened by extinction, and also that there wasn’t much he could do about it. He offered to sell his herd to the US government. They declined, so he tried looking north. The Canadian government, in an uncharacteristic moment of vision and foresight, agreed to purchase the last North American buffalo.
On a dusty, hot summer morning, a swathe of red-coated RCMP officers travelled south, crossing the Milk River, to help stuff seventy-seven ornery buffalo onto train cars for their journey north to Banff. From Banff, some went farther north, to Edmonton and on to the Northwest Territories. For a time, they were crossbred, disastrously, with cattle, threatening, again, a new form of extinction. For over a hundred years, the bison lived in a twilight state, an animal of presence and non-presence, removed from its place of prominence in the Americas and consigned to a kind of half-mythic past, seen only in zoos or fenced enclosures. But not forever.
In 2014, under the co-guidance of Blackfoot writer and lawyer Leroy Little Bear, thirteen Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada signed the Buffalo Treaty, an agreement to reintroduce buffalo to their nations’ lands. The story of the buffalo’s resurgence is a story synonymous with the strength and resurgence of the Indigenous peoples of the plains, who have stewarded and maintained knowledge of the buffalo—ecology and stories—as well as maintaining buffalo herds in both Canada and the United States.
In 2018, following the lead of the Buffalo Treaty, buffalo were returned to Banff, with sixteen wild ones released into the Panther Valley. Every year, the population has increased. For the first time since 1861, wild buffalo roam on the Canadian plains. It is not enough, but it is a beginning.
Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Endings: Encounters with Extinction by Neil Griffin, published by the House of Anansi Press, 2026.