The echo of the bison

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

For over 10,000 years, many peoples in what's now known as North America relied on bison. Thirty million of these creatures stretched from modern Canada all the way down to Mexico.

But in the late 1800s hide-hunters and the U.S. military annihilated the bison, bringing them to the brink of extinction. And that had consequences for the people who relied on the bison. Consequences that we still see today.

Today, we hear from an economist who revealed the shocking numbers telling this story, and one member of the Blackfeet Nation who is trying to bring back the bison.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.3	Right at the top of Montana is a stretch of land bigger than Delaware.
0:17.1	It's the Blackfeet Reservation, and it's boarded by the Rocky Mountains shooting up on
0:21.6	one side and wide open plains on the other.
0:25.1	It's there that Irvin Carlson lived on his grandparents' cattle ranch in the 1950s and
0:30.0	60s.
0:31.0	I grew up ranching.
0:32.0	It taught me to work hard, to be able to work hard, and for living in work ethics who
0:38.6	was a good way of growing up.
0:41.0	But across the reservation, across Blackfeet Nation, work was scarce.
0:45.6	I didn't see a whole lot of jobs.
0:47.4	There was a lot of unemployment here, a lot of opportunity for all of our people here.
0:54.1	And new evidence has found that the persistently high unemployment in Blackfeet Nation is particularly
1:00.1	severe among indigenous nations that once relied on one animal.
1:05.5	This is the Indicator from Planet Money, I'm Darien Woods.
1:08.3	To down the show, the devastating story, the numbers tell us about the people once reliant
1:13.8	on Bison.
1:18.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from Indeed.
1:21.4	Buy your great talent for your business faster with Indeed.
1:24.4	Join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed.
1:28.4	Claim your $75 credit now at Indeed.com slash Indicator, terms and conditions apply.
1:35.7	Don Faire is an economist at University of Victoria in Canada.
	...

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