Indigenous Peoples Still Face Effects of Mass Bison Slaughter
The economic shock of the mass slaughter of North American bison in the late 1800s still reverberates in Indigenous communities today, a new economic study shows.
September 14, 2023 by Futurity
By Carol Clark-Emory
The slaughter by settlers of European descent is a well-known ecological disaster. An estimated eight million bison roamed the United States in 1870, but just 20 years later fewer than 500 of the iconic animals remained.
The mass slaughter provided a brief economic boon to some newly arriving settlers, hunters, and traders of the Great Plains who sold the hides and bones for industrial uses.
In contrast, Indigenous peoples whose lives depended on the bison suffered a devastating economic shock.
The new research in the Review of Economic Studies quantifies both the immediate and long-term economic impacts of the loss of the bison on Indigenous peoples whose lives depended on the animals.
Changes in the average height of bison-related people is one striking example of the fallout. Adult height across a population is one proxy of wealth and health given that it can be affected by nutrition and disease, particularly early in development.
Bison-reliant Indigenous men stood around six feet tall on average, or about an inch taller than Indigenous men who were not bison-reliant.
“CENTURIES OF HUMAN CAPITAL WERE BUILT AROUND THE USE OF THE BISON, AND WITHIN 10 TO 20 YEARS THIS ECONOMIC UNDERPINNING DISAPPEARED.”
“They were among the tallest people in the world in the mid-19th century,” says coauthor Maggie Jones, assistant professor of economics at Emory University. “But after the rapid near-extinction of the bison, the height of the people born after the slaughter also rapidly declined.”
Within one generation, the average height of Indigenous peoples most impacted by the slaughter dropped by more than an inch.
“That’s a major drop, but given the magnitude of the economic shock it’s not necessarily surprising,” Jones says.
More:
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/indigenous-peoples-still-face-effects-of-mass-bison-slaughter/
US Army pile of buffalo skulls
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https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2A0kqK-JrFQ/U6hvuBEY67I/AAAAAAAAJfg/gNs0Q0I-zPM/s1600/Bison+skulls+pile+to+be+used+for+fertilizer+,+1870+2.jpg
Bones piled beside railroad tracks in order to move them to Canada to be ground up and used for fertilizer.
One of many piles of buffalo skins
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