A couple days ago I noticed a post on Facebook showing a Caucasian woman standing over a dead white buffalo. The comments reflected everyone's distaste and anger at what they were viewing. I commented that it was an old story and we had shut this down. I posted the link (see the link and the embedded quotes from the story below) where a couple years ago United Urban Warrior Society called this place out and brought enough attention to the ranch that they stopped the hunts. We thought it was over, but the senseless slaughter for all this good old All-American greenback "blood money" continues.
It’s not over! We are asking all United Urban Warrior Society Chapters, American Indian Movement (AIM) groups and all other groups that care about the humane treatment of animals and animal rights to stand with us to stop this heinous killing of our most sacred animal. Please share this information and contact these so-called "courageous hunters" who are gunning down our sacred white buffalo and other domesticated animals in their "canned hunts". According to one dictionary, a
canned hunt is a "hunt for animals that have been raised on game ranches until they are mature enough to be killed for trophy collections."
There have been countless criticisms of this method of hunting from both hunters and animal welfare advocacy groups. This is also sometimes referred to as “vanity hunting”. There really is no risk or danger to the hunter, who is armed with a high-caliber rifle, and the animals being gunned down are as harmless and domesticated as a house cat or a family dog. To make such a situation even less dicey, actually so lame and tame it’s absolutely laughable, these large beasts are normally kept in a fenced-in area or even confined to cages for enjoyment and entertainment of these “courageous hunters”.
If you have a big gun and a lot of dough, you can take your pick of any of the tigers in that cage and just shoot the thing with your rifle and a scope. Your tweenager can deliver on such a juvenile task.
“We’re outraged,” James Swan remarks regarding the white buffalo hunt offered by a Texas hunting ranch. “We don’t have a problem with people having [white buffalo]. We just have a problem with people making big bucks killing them.”
Swan is a Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member and President and Founder of United Urban Warrior Society. “In our Lakota ways our creation story starts with the white buffalo. Over the centuries the white buffalo, to us, is a very sacred part of our culture and part of our spirituality. Our people didn’t have a written language. Everything was passed down through stories over the centuries and white buffalo was a center part of everything we do.”
The story on the white buffalo hunt was posted to IndianCountry Today Media Network on Monday afternoon and kicked off a firestorm of Facebook activity. Late Tuesday, Aaron Bulkley, owner of Texas Hunt Lodge, which advertised the $13,500 buffalo hunt on its website, spoke with ICTMN about the matter. “We’ve had a ton of feedback from people since the white buffalo story came out, and I understand the white buffalo is sacred to Indians,” he said. “It’s been on the website for three years and all of a sudden people are excited about it. I do understand their point. I’m not saying I disagree with it or agree with it but I am going to take it off the website.”
Asked directly if he would be offering white buffalo hunts at all, he responded, “Not for white buffalo.”
Bulkley also explained that white buffalo were not rare like in earlier days. “There are multiple breeding ranches all over the U.S. that breed white buffalo.” He also said the numbers are well over 50 throughout the country including many in Texas. “If you breed a white buffalo to a white buffalo you will have a white buffalo.”
Swan had questioned if the animals were beefalo, a buffalo-cattle cross, or true buffalo but felt either way it was wrong. “The argument would be it looks like one (buffalo) and everybody thinks it is. The argument that it’s not technically a buffalo to me just doesn’t work.”
Bulkley cleared up that question, saying, “They’re buffalo, not beefalo.”
“These hunter guys, they obviously know the significance of the sacred white buffalo because of the way they advertise it. I don’t know what could hurt the native community harder than something like this,” Swan said.
Cynthia Hart-Button was even more emotional about hunting white buffalo. She is President of Sacred World Peace Alliance with Lakota ancestry. She and her husband also have 14 white buffalo on their Oregon property, three born this past year. “I am repulsed!” was her response. “I am beyond … just completely beyond! I am so adrenalized right now because of these buffalo.” She and her husband work with various tribes and provide hair that has been shed by their buffalo to Pendleton Mills for blankets, but not before they do prayer circles and prayers on the hair.
The number of white buffalo has definitely increased in recent years. Dan Sharps is a biologist at the National Bison Range in Montana, where the famous white buffalo “Big Medicine” was born in 1933 and lived till his death in 1959. Sharps said he recalled that the incidence of white buffalo in naturally occurring herds in earlier years was “something like one in ten million.”
Sharps said that the entire population of buffalo is about half a million. That combines the number between private herds and those found in such places as federal and state herds. That’s a far cry from the wild populations that supplied Native Americans with food, tools, clothing and housing for many generations but it is also a significant increase from the low point around 1900.
The increase in the percentage of white buffalo can be attributed to better knowledge about genetics and breeding — breeders are simply able to create white buffalo in abundance today.
But to many who saw the Lodge’s website, a white buffalo is a white buffalo. “Our goal is to bring this awareness, to shut this down,” Swan remarks. “The eagle is also sacred to our people but it’s also a national emblem so it’s protected. We need to get the same status for the white buffalo to become a protected species. Not buffalo in general but just the white buffalo. If they keep exploiting this, all it’s going to do is create more, longer animosities between the indigenous peoples and the non-indigenous peoples.”
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In case you didn’t want to open the link to Indianz.com, here is the top of the story, which says a lot about this egregious and cowardly way of shooting animals tame enough to walk right up to you and eat a corncob right out of your hand —
HUNT, TEXAS –– A hunting lodge in this small, unincorporated – and fittingly named – community came under fire recently by Native Americans from across the country for its offering of staged white buffalo kills.
Situated in the heart of the Lone Star State, the family-owned Texas Hunt Lodge provides big-game packages to hunting enthusiasts from coast to coast. Rare white buffalo, or bison, packages run upwards of $14,000, according to information once contained on the lodge’s website.Texas Hunt Lodge, which has been in existence since 2008 and touts access to over 100,000 acres of ranch land, is headed by Aaron Bulkley.
“There are no seasonal restrictions on hunting the White Buffalo, or White Bison, in Texas, which makes it a suitable trophy year round,” proclaims apparently now-excised advertising from the hunting lodge’s website.Phone calls to the Texas Hunt Lodge by Native Sun News went unanswered.For centuries, the white buffalo has been a potent symbol of cultural preservation for the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota peoples of the Great Plains. Hunting and harvesting the hard-to-find icon is considered sacrilegious by many of these “Buffalo People.”
“The company started the white buffalo hunts about two years ago, and there was a big outcry about it then,” said James Swan, founder and president of the Rapid City-based United Urban Warrior Society.The lodge acquiesced to pressure from Native Americans at the time and ceased its white buffalo hunts, according to Swan.
“But now it’s started back up again,” he said. “It’s a slap in the face for our people.”
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But now let’s go right into the spring of 2017, right here, right now: Late on Tuesday, Aaron Bulkley, the owner of the ranch, contacted the Indian Country Today Media Network and discussed the issue. He is aware that the white buffalo is sacred to the Native American people and although he claims to have had the picture and the white buffalo hunting offer on his website for three years, he has decided to take it down and no longer offer hunting on the white buffalo.
So, today I find that there is a new white run Hunting Ranch that is offering White Buffalo Hunts. I contacted the this ranch and spoke to “Butch Amlong” (if you would like to talk to Mr. Amlong, here is his telephone number: 1-830-275-3277). I explained to Amlong the history and sacred place that the white buffalo has in our culture and traditions. I also shared with him the story from the other buffalo hunts that stopped offering Sacred White Buffalo hunts to any rich person with a lot of money to throw away on committing such evil acts. And I explained to him that they were sacred to us and it was a slap in our face and disrespectful for them to do that.
Then this “Butch Amlong” businessman started hollering around, saying We are not Native and then he mentioned something akin to: We have a right to hunt what we want. And then this bloodthirsty butcher said, “We as Christian Americans” feel its a slap in our face that you “Drunken Indians” have the nerve to tell them what to do...
Keep in mind these white buffalo are in a large cage when they are being shot. And they call this “canned hunts”. Rich people (mostly Caucasian, but I imagine other races are well represented, too) pay $16.000.00 dollars to shoot a buffalo. It’s all for the "fun of killing" these sacred and beautiful beasts. And all the time, the poor animal is being held in a big fenced off area.
Here is a link to their Facebook page. I have never seen such diabolical butchery of wild animals in my life by these so-called “Great White Hunters". If you love the four-leggeds, the winged wonders, and the sacred animals that are innate to our Native American Traditionalism and spiritual values, you may not want to open this link to Amlong’s so-called entrepreneurial venture .
We must stand in the defense of our relative! The slaughter of the sacred white buffalo must cease! And we must stand united against the greed and slaughter from the white man!
AGAIN!
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James Magaska Swan is a prolific writer, an activist, and one of the top leaders who avidly and indefatigably fights for the rights of American Indians.
About the Guest Author: James Magaska Swan, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, is the founder and leader of the United Urban Warrior Society, based in South Dakota. The UUWS has more than 30 chapters throughout the USA and Canada. Swan served in the U.S. Navy where he traveled throughout the world and got a good look at how people in other lands live. He works a full-time job in the automobile servicing trade. Mr. Swan is one of the leading activists fighting for the rights of Native Americans and is a prolific writer who focuses all his commentary and discourse on issues and concerns of Native Americans and the indigenous people of Turtle Island.
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