Ted’s Montana Grill wants to rewild the American west with BISON not buffalo. Bison would be Lakota for ERASURE.

TATONKA is the Lakota word for Buffalo, or Bison as the white man calls the buffalo now. The difference would seem to be academic, maybe more to the zoologist than the historian. So what’s the big deal? Apparently the buffalo of the American West is not related to the Cape Buffalo of Africa, nor the Buffalo of the water, so it’s not a buffalo, it’s a bison. Okay. The whale shark is not a whale but we don’t call it a bison. Considering the plethora of creeks, hills, lodges and gals named Buffalo, you wonder what’s so damned correct about calling them bison. I’ll tell you. ERASURE. Apparently if Buffalo Bill had known those vast herds were BISON, darling herbivor of today’s most favorable carbon hoofprint status, Bill wouldn’t have carpet-gunned them in record numbers. What he killed into near-extinction were buffalo, of the hides, robes, dances, ceremonies, grasses, and rifles.

(Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)
Eric Verlo

About Eric Verlo

On sabbatical

2 Responses to Ted’s Montana Grill wants to rewild the American west with BISON not buffalo. Bison would be Lakota for ERASURE.

  1. Avatar Chuck Noland says:

    It sounds like Buffalo Bill actually killed off tatonka, not buffalo. I prefer the term buffalo over bison, but take your choice. I don’t think it will change history.

  2. Brother Jonah Brother Jonah says:

    That’s the theme, semantics change not the facts or the nature of the events, just the perception. For propagandists one changed word can be the support of the other lies from the past. The way it was portrayed in my 8th grade history book was market pressures to have tetanka hides, but who created that “demand”? Custer, Carson, Palmer, Chivington, they all took turns using each other’s catch phrases, and by the time they conspired to starve out the Natives by destroying the ecology they had cutesy-pie slogans like “nits make lice” and were deliberately killing the women because they bred the next generations of “enemies”, the Great Buffalo Hunter Cody had learned to do an almost exact mirror of that policy with the tetanka.

    They have a matriarchal order in the herds, one boss momma, and you could tell which one was create a little ruckus, and see where the other cows look, to ignore or escape or deal with the new development.. Take out the lead cow, the others would look to see what she does. Since firearms were only a part of their evolution they had no pre-set thought patterns for What To Do When The Puny Humans Shoot Guns… and when they looked toward the lead cow and she’s just lying on the ground, not panicking or anything, nothing to see, citizen, keep moving… nothing to see. They went back to grazing.

    There’s a lot of loud noises, thunder for instance, tetanka don’t frighten very easily. The buffalo hunters would lay out all their rifles on blankets and just keep shooting. The cows would look to the Leader for non-existing leadership, and just go back to grazing. It sounds so simple that somebody would catch on. But it worked.

    The Custer Cartel were well into the campaign to exterminate Natives by exterminating their food at the time Custer got killed.

    Kit Carson used a similar strategy, “befriend” the Navajo people, make note of the locations of their harvest caches, and have the Army come in and burn the food, right at the start of winter.

    They felt they were so slick, but they’re all dead now, they have towns, counties and such bear their names, we have the Palmer “punk on the pony” statue in the intersection of Platte and Nevada, the ‘glory’ they had died with them. Now their heirs are trying to blur the perceptions of just exactly what they did to get rich and famous. Gee, I wonder why.

Leave a Reply
