What National Bison Month asks us to remember, restore, and become.

As we celebrate National Bison Month, perhaps the question isn't why America chose the buffalo as its National Mammal. Perhaps the question is why buffalo haven't given up on us–and what they still have left to teach us.

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.

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 buffalo do not recognize borders.

They do not ask permission to cross fences built by empires, or to follow the waterways that predate every map ever drawn on this continent. They move as the land moves, by memory, by relationship, by belonging to something larger than any one nation or jurisdiction. That is the spirit that gathered advocates, knowledge keepers, scientists, tribal leaders, policy visionaries, youth, and relatives from across Turtle Island in San Antonio, TX for Buffalo Beyond Borders 2026: dedicated to the restoration of our collective relative, Buffalo, Iyane'e, Iinnii, Tatanka. A gathering designed not as a conference, but as a ceremony.

PHNX created this work as a reflection on Afro-Indigenous identity, belonging, and wholeness. It speaks to the deep knowledge carried through our lineages and the reality that our DNA does not separate, even when colonial systems attempt to divide or other us. For many Afro-Indigenous people navigating diaspora and recognition, belonging can feel contested or conditional. This piece affirms that we already belong and that unity must be cultivated not only in community, but within ourselves.

“I call you my relative, a sage of the plains.

For together, we are woven through roots

Where all that is sacred remains.”

INDIGENOUS LED was born at a breakfast table in Missoula, Montana in the winter of 2022…