The collapse of the teeming bison herds that once blackened the prairie was an economic catastrophe that still affects those who once depended on them, new research suggests.
"Economic opportunity is determined in part by history," said Donn Feir, an economic historian at the University of Victoria and one of three authors of a recently published paper on the lingering economic impact of that near-extinction. "When you look at the landscape of economic development and Indigenous economic growth in Canada and the U.S., you have to keep in mind that history is still very much with us.
Tasha Hubbard, a filmmaker and native studies scholar at the University of Alberta, said the paper's conclusions are valid -- as far they go.But she cautioned that ongoing loss has to be seen in a larger context. To Plains First Nations, bison were a cultural as well as an economic resource and their loss went beyond property and jobs and incomes.As many as eight million bison roamed the plains in the mid-19th century.
To examine the effect of that collapse, the authors looked at data collected between 1889 and 1903 from about 9,000 Indigenous people across the continent. They found bison-dependent nations lost, on average, more than two centimetres in height -- a commonly used proxy for measuring poverty, Feir said.
"Imagine all oil and gas evaporated from North America and you told everyone who lived in Houston that they had to stay in Houston and couldn't borrow any capital from banks and then said, 'Now feed yourself.'"
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