‘The brotherhood of the buffalo’

PINE RIDGE – Charles “Bamm” Brewer is one of only a handful of Native American buffalo ranchers able to take part in the touted trend toward tribal economic development through food sovereignty. However, he says, he envisions more of his neighbors becoming involved due to a new partnership announced Jan. 24 by the reservation-based maker of Tanka brand bison snack foods.

Native American Natural Foods, the social enterprise that invented bison-and-berry Tanka Bars and Tanka Bites in 2007, announced the partnership jointly with Niman Ranch, a Purdue niche brand that fosters 740 family farms producing certified humanely grown livestock using sustainable and chemical-free practices without antibiotics or hormones.

The partnership is strictly a mutual-mentoring agreement, with no money changing hands. It aims to help the small majority-Indian-owned company in Kyle, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, stay independent and boost the local food market by building a Tanka Regenerative Agriculture Coop (TRAC), for tribal members to receive guaranteed meat sales contracts with both companies.

TRAC is the next step for tribal livestock growers, once they become qualified with the support of technical advice and grants from is doing at his ranch west of Pine Ridge.

“I know it will help out tribal members who are interested in raising a herd of buffalo, because the tribe can’t do it on their own,” Brewer told the Native Sun News Today. “It’s going to take individual families” for the reservation to feed itself.

Brewer switched from cattle to bison husbandry some 25 years ago, when the Oglala Sioux Tribe began helping members start buffalo ranches by providing stock from its herd.

At the time, they could sell a heifer calf for $2,000, and so about a half-dozen families got involved. But merely five years later, the market crashed, and they could get only $200 for it. Most of them abandoned the cause.

The tribal government still will provide calves to members annually, as long as the ranchers give back 40 percent of the number after each ensuing calving season. The cause remains: a return to the Lakota traditional primary source of sustenance, health, culture and resilience – the American bison.

Brewer stuck with it, recalling the words of a former director of the tribal herd at Oglala Parks and Recreation Department: “I was told that for every Indian cattle rancher there should have been a buffalo rancher instead.”

Then the youngest Indian buffalo rancher at age 25, he went on to employ his family members and others in the operation. “For us it was about the brotherhood of the buffalo, the spiritual relationship. We just think buffalo are so awesome, we want to have them around,” he said.

It helped that his family has its own 800-acre spread, so, unlike most Indian cowboys, he doesn’t have to pay a yearly grazing lease fee.

That challenge is what holds back a lot of Indian livestock operations, according to Mark Tilsen, Sr., who is the co-founder and president of Native American Natural Foods. The undercapitalized grower is forced to sell each year’s calves at auction to a feedlot middleman just to pay for the lease.

According to the 2017 USDA Agricultural Census, nearly 90 percent of the total sales produced on tribal land comes from non-native producers, who account for 65 percent of all active farms and ranches on Indian reservations.

“In extreme poverty, the colonizer controls your means of production, so that native folks are exploited,” Tilsen told the Native Sun News Today. “Now dynamic leaders are trying to change that. We’re just trying to create an opportunity.”

TRAC can provide a better deal to the grower through a direct contract with the wholesale meat buyer. Tanka needs the lower-end cuts, Niman Ranch the higher end. The producer has a guaranteed price and more control of the income flow.

In point of fact, the tribal members now growing cattle may be among the first to benefit from Tanka Fund and TRAC. That’s mainly because Niman Ranch already has an established customer base that demands humanely treated, grass-fed and grass-finished beef.

Native American Natural Foods plans to follow Niman Ranch’s example in ferreting out ways to help individual operations gear up for the market.

Brewer’s operation received Tanka Fund support to the tune of $25,000 for an all-terrain vehicle to monitor the herd of 40, plus labor and supplies to fortify a fence line separating it from the tribal herd of 400. “I couldn’t find help nowhere, so I really feel great about that,” Brewer said.

One of his chronic issues is the attraction of his animals to those in the big herd on the other side of the fence. His have red and blue ear tags. The tribes have yellow. Nonetheless, if the heifers birth their calves on the tribal herd’s side of the fence, the calves become the tribe’s, since they have no tags.

He doesn’t blame the animals for preferring the larger 2,300-acre tribal grazing unit. “They’re kind of free. I don’t stress out on it anymore,” he said. He retrieves his ear-tagged adults at the tribe’s annual autumn vet-check roundup.

However, he added, the grant support has spurred him along.  “This summer I’ve decided I’m gonna spend a whole summer fixing my fence. I’m basically gonna build a wall. I’m gonna make buffalo ranching better,” he vowed.

Tanka Fund has procured grants of close to $100,000 for this and other native reservation buffalo projects, responding to infrastructure needs, including water wells, land and stipends.

The fund also educates the public about the benefits of buffalo restoration in creating healthy lands, diets and economies, as well as in water conservation, promoting biodiversity and reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

Its goal is to return 1 million acres of native lands to buffalo, to promote prosperity and wellness in reservation communities.

That’s part of Native American Natural Foods mission:  “To heal the people and our Mother Earth by building a company that innovates real food products based on the traditional values of Native American respect for all living things by living in balance with mind, body and spirit.”

Its recipes are based on the traditional food wasna, a pounded buffalo jerky and chokecherry patty, dried and historically carried on travels in parfleche bags. Like its prototype, the modern combination of buffalo with dried cranberries, apples and orange peel uses no artificial preservatives, dyes or fillers.

This innovation led to early success, winning long-term contracts with major distributors, including REI, United Natural Foods, and Natural Grocers. However, a number of other startups soon began producing versions of the meat-and-fruit snack, as well as appropriating the narrative about the historical importance of bison to native culture.

Before long, all but Native American Natural Foods had been purchased by larger companies. One in particular, Epic Provisions, garnered mega-financing in a multi-million-dollar 2016 buyout from the General Mills food conglomerate, to pull ahead in the national competition for shelf space with its Epic Bars and Epic Bites. Meanwhile, Tanka profits flatlined.

Enter Jeff Triptician, former Niman Ranch general manager. Tilsen recalls how the man read a story by Marilyn Noble in New Food Economy, jumped in his car and drove from Denver to meet with co-founder Karlene Hunter and himself about how his company could help.

“A great injustice was done to the Lakota people and anything we can do to help is part of our mission to revitalize rural communities, especially for America’s original farmers and ranchers,” Triptician recognized.

As it turned out, Niman ranch was every bit as mission driven as Native American Natural Foods, resulting in a courtship that has lasted two years.

“It has always been a part of Niman Ranch’s foundation to support rural farming communities and we understand many of the hurdles, Niman Ranch General Manager Chris Oliviero said during the announcement of the partnership at an Edible Institute meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “We felt we could align and support the Tanka mission.”

Triptician is now president of Perdue Premium Meat, and Tanka’s people believe they are finally in a good position to get on about their business.

That business prioritizes tipping the scales in favor of Native American producers.

The Niman Communications Department, headed by director Kerri McClimen, is expected to weigh in heavily in the publicity campaign. With that resource, “we want to help 50 or 100 producers, instead of just two or three,” said Dawn Sherman, a Lakota Shawnee Delaware from Pine Ridge, who became the CEO of Native American Natural Foods in 2020, after years of service to the company.

She and her colleagues are committed to growing the Tanka brand against all odds, as part of their community service, she told the Native Sun News Today. “We’re more than a brand. It’s who we are,” she said. “We’re like the buffalo. We face the storm. Eventually the storm’s going to end.”

 

(Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@)gmail.com)

Visit Original Source