INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY

From White Buffalo Naming Ceremony, a Conversation With Lakota Medicine Man Steve Stonearrow - ICTMN.com)

In the rolling meadow below Mohawk Mountain in the northwest corner of Connecticut, a white buffalo baby trots alongside his massive mother, his whiteness highlighted against her dark brown winter fur that is still molting in the summer heat.

As the killing of the rare white buffalo calf in Texas is becoming a national news story, more details are emerging about the circumstance’s of White Medicine Cloud’s death, and that of the sacred animal’s mother.

John Bercier, a Chippewa Cree art teacher at Butte High School in Montana, is raising the bar on art education by combining it with Native American history.

Just days ago, American Indians of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation joyously welcomed 62 pure strain buffalo transferred from Yellowstone National Park.

A story on the event posted to this site earlier today quoted numerous sources — some Indians, some not — who saw the transfer as a long overdue restoration. Said Iris Grey Bull, a Sioux member from Fort Peck, “This is a historical moment for us. We’re rebuilding our lives. We’re healing from historical trauma.”

“It’s a special day,” Larry Wetsit said. “Our people have been waiting and praying about this for a couple hundred years. My relations, there were hundreds of them, starved on several occasions here as we were placed on the reservation. It was all about having no buffalo. That was the low part in our history, the lowest we could go. This is a start on the road to recovery.”