A letter from Buffalo to America

Dear America,

As you mark 250 years, the question is not only what do you choose to remember, but what future do you choose to create?

I was here long before your borders.

Before your flag. Before anyone imagined calling this place America.

For thousands of years I shaped these grasslands. Wherever I roamed, life gathered. The prairie breathed with birds, rivers, flowers, insects, wolves, and people who understood that none of us belong here alone.

The First Peoples of these lands never called me a resource.

They called me a relative. They called me uncle. They called me auntie. That single difference shaped an entire world.

Years ago, you chose me as your National Mammal. You said I represent Unity. Resilience. Health. I sometimes wonder: are those values you admire...or values you hope to become?

Today, more than 900 of us are once again being ordered removed from our ancestral homelands, what you now call public lands, to make way for cattle brought from another continent.

In doing so, you are removing one of your greatest hopes for the next 250 years.

History has a way of repeating itself whenever relationship is forgotten. I have lived long enough to know that when buffalo disappear, something else disappears with us. But this letter is not about my past. It is about our future. And this is not a plea to save me.

Buffalo have survived ice ages, drought, fire, and near extinction.

The question is: what kind of nation survives without relationship?

My plea: Remember how to live in relationship – with the land, with one another, and with the living world that has always sustained you.

Tonight, while your skies fill with fireworks, remember that another story has always been written overhead. The old ones saw millions of buffalo running across the stars. We are still running, still waiting.

Not waiting for a return to the past, but for you to look up, and remember what the future could still become.

Some stories do not ask us to imagine; they ask us to remember.

You stand at a crossroads. One path repeats the story that brought you here. The other begins with relationship.

I've been walking that path for thousands of years. May your next chapter begin where ours never ended.

Come home.

In relationship,

Buffalo