One year not long ago, in the season of the Tourist at the time of the Harvest Moon, our neighbors the Oglála Lakota had quite a dust up on their lands. The Oglála are neighbors of the Newe but not friends. Many times, the Newe and the Oglála have found themselves at cross purposes. Even so, the Newe have a healthy respect for all the Lakota Nations and have learned much from them and vice versa.
One of the things the Newe and the Lakota share is a deep love for the bison, called piakuittsun in Newe and tatanka in Lakota. The bison were not only a source of food, but honored neighbors as well. And with their non-domestic nature and massive size, they are neighbors to be treated with greatest respect. Tourists, however, often have a bad habit of respecting nothing and no one.
We of the bison homelands know better than to treat bison as though they are fluffy cows. And even if they were simply fluffy cows, cows are large, dangerous animals in their own right. Cows kill about 20 people per year in the US, and bison kill more people than bears. Also of note: Neither mama cows nor mama bison tolerate people messing around with their babies. If regular bison are dangerous, mama bison are terrifying.
In the US State and National parks where bison can be viewed, traffic jams during tourist season are inevitable. Bison cannot be easily fenced. They’re big enough that they can plow right through most fencing if they feel like it. They’re also big enough that they need a lot of free grazing. So they need to be able to cross the road whenever they like. They cross at their own speed. They do what they want.
Honking is not recommended.
There are always the tourists during the bison crossings who suffer from a startling lack of self preservation or common sense. They get out of their cars to take photos and make videos. They try to pet the bison. They try to climb on the bison. They wave things at the bison, perhaps imagining that they are matadors. Most of the time, the bison ignore them. Sometimes, somebody gets trampled and/or gored.
The other thing that happens in the bison homelands in summer is a huge motorcycle rally. I personally would not want to be stuck in a bison-induced traffic jam while on a motorcycle. Many bison are big enough to trample your bike with you on it. Bison can do pretty heinous damage to cars, even. It is better to have something solid between you and the herd to take the hit if the bison neighbors charge.
So to recap. Summer traffic jams in the Lakota bison homelands. Motorcycle clubs. Tourists with pickled turnips for brains. Very protective mama bison. All of these elements converged into a perfect storm of tourism-induced disaster.
It’s a lovely summer afternoon. The bison neighbors are milling all over the road. The motorcycle people sit waiting. A few of them have climbed off their bikes, but most keep a respectful distance. Except for one woman. She gets closer and closer. She is standing among the bison neighbors. The bison neighbors ignore her for a while, but then she gets too close to a calf. Mama bison hooks the woman with her mighty baby-protecting horns. She tosses the woman, again and again. Nobody’s going to hurt her baby, not on her watch! For a moment, all is a blur of angry bison bucking, blonde hair and white limbs flying.
Moments later, all is still.
The woman is laying in the bar ditch, surprisingly not gored. The mama bison, still snorting, herds her baby away from the road. Away from the motorcycle people. From one of her horns hangs the woman’s jeans.
The Lakota have a saying: Today is a good day to die.
Perhaps that is what the blonde tourist woman was thinking when she was flying through the air at the mercy of one ton of perturbed ruminant. Heavenly Father, or at least Bison Mama, ruled that she was to only be humiliated instead of gored. Some kind man eventually rescued the woman’s pants, but the damage was done. Throughout Indian Country, many memes and tee shirts and beaded works would be spawned by mama bison with pants hanging from her horn.
Tourists bring money to the region. Some businesses make most of their profit in the weeks around the motorcycle rally. Tourist season, the mixed blessing. We can be glad that this tourist season incident brought humor instead of tragedy.
And one heck of a photo op.
