After six were released at Burlington Prairie in the northwest corner of Kane County last month, bison are officially back in Illinois prairies after a 200-year absence. It marked the culmination of a three-year odyssey for the Forest Preserve District of Kane County to reintroduce the species to its old home. For Jessica Pamonicutt, an enrolled member of Wisconsin’s Menominee tribe and president of Chicago’s American Indian Center, which now owns the herd (though they prefer “steward” to “own”), the occasion held even greater gravity. “It’s not just to restore them to the prairie. It’s to restore them to our lives,” she said. “It’s part of reclaiming our histories and reclaiming our culture. They were taken from us. … And for us, it’s coming full circle. We’re bringing them back, we’re bringing back that piece of ourselves.”
Some backstory: Bison are North America’s largest mammal and they once numbered anywhere from 30 million to 60 million by some estimates. For Native tribes like the Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee and Shoshone, among others, bison were integral to their culture and survival. By the late 1800s, bison were nearly extinct. In some places, as White settlers pushed further and further west. Millions of bison were also systematically slaughtered for the express purpose of forcing members of Native tribes onto reservations.
Today, there are an estimated 25,000 bison in conservation herds across the U.S. and Canada. In prairie ecosystems, bison are considered what’s called a “keystone species,” meaning they have a disproportionately large impact on the system, creating conditions that allow other organisms to thrive. Any restoration of a prairie is incomplete without that keystone, because bison evolved with prairie, and prairie evolved with bison. The animal created a niche that no other species can fill, not even cattle. It took some time for Kane County to pull all the pieces together, but eventually land was identified; fencing, electricity and water were budgeted for; and talks were in the works with bison farmers.
For now, the bison — two adults and four calves — are acclimating to their new digs, out of sight of the general public, with Burlington Prairie closed, as is typical, for the winter.
