After many, many years, Wood bison have returned to the Woodland Cree First Nation.
“Back in the day, sakâw mostos (the Cree term for Wood bison), this would have been their natural habitat,” said Lawrence Lamouche, traditional lands manager for the Woodland Cree First Nation, located about 85 kilometres northwest of Peace River.
The Nation, which consists of four reserves, signed the Buffalo Treaty in 2019, making a pledge to repopulate bison into areas of Alberta. The treaty is the work of an alliance of First Nations on both sides of the border aimed at conserving bison and returning them to the land.
Read Also
Farming Smarter receives financial boost from Alberta government for potato research
Farming Smarter near Lethbridge got a boost to its research equipment, thanks to the Alberta government’s increase in funding for research associations.
Food security is one reason for restoring them, especially after food shortages and price increases caused by COVID-19. Moose populations in the area are also declining, said Lamouche.
“It just makes sense, but all of this takes a lot of time and trial and effort.”
Twelve Wood bison from Elk Island National Park were brought to one of the reserves in March 2020.
“We are not ranchers. We usually scout and harvest from the land,” he said. “It’s a learning experience doing this ranching and building the fences and helping the sakâw mostos to thrive in our area.”
Lamouche is the main bison tender, although other community members helped with the fence building and with caring for the animals.
“I know that in 20 to 30 years, when our herd gets to be too many for our area, that’s when we can see letting a few out, or letting our nation come and harvest the sakâw mostos in our area,” he said.
For now, the Wood bison live in a pen where they have access to water, hay, minerals and grazing.
“We want to, in a sense, do some trade in the future, and only if that’s beneficial and that’s the road we want to take. But we want to be open,” said Lamouche.
The immediate goal is to get the herd established.
“We want to get the formula right, in a sense,” he said. “We want to have them here, healthy and thriving, and have them home before we can think of repopulating, or harvesting or anything like that.”
The Woodland Cree First Nation has a long history of hunting moose and using all parts of the animal.
“That’s something that we will have to relearn how to do with sakâw mostos,” said Lamouche. “We want to be able to practice our culture as we did long before. It’s just learning all the things about how to take care of them right now in the western sense and through our traditional knowledge of how to harvest.
“We’ve done it before, we can do it again, and it’s a bit of transferring everything we know about harvesting moose, just applying sakâw mostos to the equation.”
Having bison again has not been without its challenges. The animals have escaped their enclosure twice, including once when trees fell on the fence line.
“We were scrambling to get guys on horses or quads to get them back in,” said Lamouche. “Then we thought, let’s leave them alone and see what they do. Within a couple of days, they walked back in the gate.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, they do want to stay with us.’”
The First Nation started with 12 bison —one older female along with several young bulls and females — and now have 16. Four bulls have been born, but some were stillborn or died at a young age. The eldest cow died this summer.
“One of the neighbouring nations was in need. They had all females, and we had a young bull who was about two years old, so we gave that to them,” he said. “They helped us with a bunch of other things. They had helped us a lot, so we gave them this bull. He’s not of breeding age yet, but I hope he thrives over there.”
It’s sometimes a process of trial and error, said Lamouche, citing one year in which no calves were born at all. The issue was later deemed to stem from minerals in the feeding program.
“If they don’t have certain types of feed, enough grazing area, and if they aren’t fat enough, they won’t breed,” he said. “August was rutting season. I’m hoping that next year around July, I’ll be seeing a lot of newborns everywhere.”
The band is a member of the Bison Producers of Alberta and is connecting with bison producers in the northern part of the province.
“We want to be able to do the best for our bison here, and find out what other people are doing as well, and learn those best practices and apply them,” he said.
They’ve also recently signed a partnership with ALUS, a non-profit that helps producers provide eco-system services, to develop enhanced grazing for bison on their lands.
ALUS will receive up to $700,000 to implement a sustainable bison grazing program with the Woodland Cree First Nation and the ALUS program in Alberta’s Northern Sunrise County.
This will allow the bison to be fenced out of wetlands and riparian areas, and multi-paddock grazing will be introduced at the site, said Bryan Gilvesy, chief executive officer of ALUS.
