Steven Rinella talks with Arthur Lawson, Renee Lawson, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor.
Topics discussed: An inter-tribal arranged marriage; pre-chewed meat, the epidemic of food pouches, and weak jaws; drinking mother’s milk and a way to have cannibalism that isn’t bad; when a mysterious religious group squats on public land and erects a fence up; watch MeatEater's new series, "Rough Cuts" on the Outdoor Channel or MeatEater’s YouTube channel; hunting on Wind River reservation for tribal members only; tribal ID cards and blood quantum; how tribal lands are still considered war zones by the federal government; the Feral Horse and Burrow Protection Act; Wind River as the first reservation that created a wilderness area; getting your impounded horses back; bringing the buffalo back; getting tribal youth involved; and more.
Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network
If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you can't predict anything.
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T l I t E dot com. Joined today by our first ever I think this is our first ever definitely our first ever guest who is from a Native American tribal reservation, however you want to put it, a reservation fishing game agency. We've met all kinds of fishing game people from the States right, but we've never had a tribal fishing game official. And people are going to learn a lot about how this works, and we'll probably and a lot of people, particularly in the eastern United States, will be surprised about the level of sovereignty on large tracts of western lands for reservations. Arthur, if you call you Arthur Art that do you call you Art? And and and you brought along your wife or nay okay and Arthur, you're Northern irapa Ho, but you married a suit and this is not frowned upon. This was arranged.
Somewhat. We're more of like a blind date, but then ended up after. You know, our parents must have known something, so we we call ourselves an arranged marriage.
Is it was it common for Northern irapa Ho before you two met? Was it common that Northern Arapaho would Maria Gualasu? Was that like a common union?
Yeah?
Actually, we have a long history of the Northern Cheyenne, the arapa Ho and the Lakota people summering together and meeting in like the you know when nomadic lifestyle, meeting and stuff and summering together. So we already had a strong familial relationship with those tribes and stuff, and they were like the allies with each other.
So got it. If you go into our restroom down here, you might miss it because you won't be at the urinal. Were you to visit the urinal, you would see a painting called here fell Custer, and it's all Custer's guys and their kind of moment of death, you know, at the little big on battlefield, and then down the hill you can see the large encampment. We're Northern Irapaho ye present.
The Northern, the Cheyenne and and and the is it.
I've always wanted to hear someone who actually knows pronounces is it unk Papa sue unhunk Papa Sue. And you're a Galala sue. Crazy horse was a Galawa sue?
Right?
Crazy horse was Ogalala?
Okay, say it again? O Galala oglalla got it? And uh? And you were brought up on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
No, actually, I'm sorry, I uh I was born there, but I my mom and stepdad. My mom met my stepdad on the Wind River Reservation and she worked for Indian Health Service, and then we moved from there and we moved to different places. We lived on the Navajo Reservation where my stepdad taught school for a couple of years, and then moved down to the Phoenix area and that's where I ended up going to through high school. And then we moved back to the Wind River Reservation after I graduated high school so that my stepdad could help with my grandpa's ranch and helped, you know, help with the cows and stuff. And so my parents own a ranch on out in Canee or Wyoming, and then we met each other and he went to school out in Canear and just been there ever since.
And what did you study in school?
Art Well, I first started in hvac, you know, just working a trade and stuff like that. I come from an area where it's either ranching, farming, oil field. That's all we knew in central Wyoming. So I laughed, went to Denver, Colorado for a while, and then moved back home to the reservation.
And your reservation. And we're gonna get into the Uh, don't sweat if you're at home wandering about the whole fish and game thing. We're gonna get to that. But but Wind River Reservation one was a couple of things here. If you keep going, this is always kind of surprised me. If you're on the Big Horn River and you go up the Bighorn River, it goes through a canyon and all of a sudden, it's the Wind River.
The wedding of the waters, the.
Wedding of the waters, and that's where and that right there is in the country where you guys have your reservation. And when your reservation was formed, they put the they put Shoshone, the Sashone tribe in with the Northern Irapa Hole.
So they put the Northern Applehole. Northern Apple were further south in Colorado home in those different areas. During the winter, uh they were pushing Northern Raple back east to Oklahoma, and on the way up there was a sant Creek massacre where the cavalry killed a bunch of tribal members, and they pushed them up north, and then for the winter they landed on the Winter of Indian Reservation, where the Eastern Shoshone tribe was established. And then the spring they were supposed to move the rap holes back down to Oklahoma, but that never happened. The government pretty much said you're staying here and you're going to live with the Shoshonees and you're going to be fifty percent owners of this reservation.
Well how did the Shoshones take that?
At first? Probably not too happy.
Because also and it's like, okay, you have this, Well now you don't, so now you both have this.
A couple of years prior to that, the Eastern Shoshone Reservation was only thirty million acres long. Now four years later it was down to two two and a half acres, and then a couple of years after that, then they moved in the Northern rapp Wole tribe to live with them and then be part ownership of the reservation.
And how many acres is it now?
Two point two million?
And it was how many at a time thirty thirty.
Million, So that's roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park right close.
Yeah.
Yeah, had the had prior to prior to the Sand Creek Masak or what had been the relationship with the Shoshone Northern Rapahole.
Traditionally there were enemies, Yeah, because.
The Shashawone were more like in the eighteen hundreds, the Shoshone were sort of more welcoming of white intrusion. Right in the Northern Rapaho had a history being more resistant to white intrusion like in the eighteen hundreds. Is that correct?
Yes, that is correct. I mean they also went through their own massacres too, and then they were top population dropped radically with the massacres, and then they were placed onto the well then that's then they started working with the non natives and the cavalry and everything else, becoming scouts and stuff because they were getting benefits of doing that. And then until uh, you know, everything else happened the Santric massacre and rapples showed up and then they just became owners of one one landscape.
Yeah, how I'm gonak one last question that we're gonna take a break from it and talk about pre chewed food. You guys have kids, We do you ever went every little babies? Did you ever chew up food and then hand it to him to eat with elk meat?
Yeah, we're gonna get into that in a minute, Okay, so you'll know exactly what we're talking about.
The second here we got, we got We're gonna touch on a couple of things. But how uh this is? This is I'm trying to think of how to put this question. How much? How let me pref I'm getting there. I'm trying to think of how to ask a semi sensitive question, but it's not terribly sensitive. And I'll start with this. I hunted in I hunted turkeys down in Mississippi this past spring, okay.
And.
Was surprised that, like, in wandering around in Mississippi, every day someone would mention the war and they were talking about the Civil War before the war, right or like after the war. Do you know what I mean? And I'd be like, I cannot believe the way this is. Like when I hear the war. When I say the war, I'm thinking whiskey, whiskey too, because like my dad was in it. But when they're talking about the war, I'm like, oh my god, they're talking about like before the Civil War who owned that? Or after the Civil War? Who built that reservoir? You know whatever. You know what I'm saying, how much like in your culture, how much are the atrocities like Sand Creek massacre wounded? K me, like, are they how much are they mentioned in discussed and remembered? Is it like is it a part of daily life.
It's not part of a daily life, but it's something that the tribes bring up and I never will forget. You know, when we work with the government and we go over different projects and everything else that we do, you know, we're bringing stuff up like that to show our sovereignty and you know, we're our own nation and we can do things differently than what the US government has planned for us, and so you know, well it comes up, but we don't dwell on it, you know. You know, we talk about reservations, but traditionally travel member tribes are not reservation Indians, you know, we we migrated with a wildlife.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely memorialized and remembered, and in a sense that it's not something that we will never forget and we will never allow anybody else to forget that that's that those atrocities happened, because that by by diminishing what our ancestors had gone through to put us here makes a minimizing it makes it easy for further atrocities to happen, and it's not something that we want to ever to allow to happen to us again. So that's kind of the thing where you know, we're we're not going to let anybody forget that the Sankirk massa care occurred, or that there were only women and elders and children when wounded happened that were in the camp and they were slaughtered. We're not going to allow those types of things to ever be forgotten because we don't ever want those things to have to be able to reoccur for our people because our ancestors did so much for survived for so long for us to be here today.
Yeah, and I don't think, you know, it'd be silly for someone to expect otherwise, especially when you look at like like how thoroughly our culture memorializes catastrophes, wars, sacrifice, right, I mean, it's like totally baked into our culture. But then it looks when when you see a like a culture within our culture or neighboring culture do it. There's a tendency for people to be like they're living in the past. It's like, dude, you've been to Arlington Cemetery, even to Gettysburg, Like, this is not living in the past.
You know when you were holding re enactments of those battles and stuff.
You know, yeah, are you ready to talk about pre chewed food?
Sure?
Hang on, No.
The other day I mentioned I kind of mentioned it like it was a little bit like people might think we're nuts, but we used to chew like the first it was very like when our kids got through about nine months old, everyone and we'd started giving them chewed up deer meat and and we were laughing about that. But we got a bunch of people at you know, not a bunch yeah, handful of people wrote in about pre chewed food. Pat Dirkin wrote in that his mom and paternal grandmother they've been feeding their infants that way, going back that far, and he remembers Granny being disgusted with Dirkin and his siblings thinking it was gross when she would precheot her food and she called him spoiled. He claims there was a pat claims that there was a that's a Saturday Night Live skit which he was not able to locate with the head. He remembers that it had Gilda Radner in it and they were eating at a restaurant called pre Chewed Charlie's. On the skit and the way they would chew meet and then put it on your plate. He was unable to locate.
Uh.
He was unable to locate the skit. Doctor Max Kurr, Yeah, you know that everybody thinks that everyone knows ball Jars, glass Jars. Oh yes, yeah, they're kind of like the band Aida Glass Jars. Well, a lot of people prefer curR Jars, Karen, how do you say it?
K e r R.
Yeah. My late uh friend and mentor, Ron Layton was a kurr jar Man, not Ball. I hope I don't get a mean letter from bald Jars from Bald Yeah, curR jars. Uh, he's written in before we actually just met him at Meat Eater Experiences in Venice, Louisiana. He came out He's excited about his day of offshore fishing that I missed, which is depressing.
We all miss that.
I believe there's tunic for me somewhere.
There is.
I've got it for you, ye in the freezer, like right outside.
This is so off topic for us, but I'm gonna get injured anyways, because it was. It was brought on by the idea of chewing up deer meat and giving it to your baby.
I don't think it's off topic.
All kinds of animals chew up their food and let it sit in their stomach and.
Then regurgitating that baby. How bad is chewing up your food?
And I always called that baby birding?
Yeah?
Yeah, cut. We had a conversation about cud chewing at dinnery.
Are you should hit that on a kid's segment? M hm kids podcast?
Yeah might when I keep meaning to bring those pigeons down here, But is.
That pigeon still shipping it on your foe?
I need to send I need to send you. There's a video I should find it. Yeah, so my kids got these baby pigeons I'm a nest and the they have they roost, Like when you go up to our front door, it's like, what do you call it? When he got a little covered.
I think is what you said.
Yeah, it is a covered entry and probably jed in the covered entry. And my wife needs to apologize to every person that comes to our door because they are standing in a mountain of pigeon. Ship. She calls us the ship rellis ship Ella's terrible. But when my kids are raising those birds up, like like pigeons, wigurgitate, they they eat their food and they produce this kind of milk substance. And so when they were raising them up, we were taking sunflower seeds and mixing with almond milk and putting it through a dropper. This guy is saying, this guy is a doctor and he's talking about he's a d d yes.
Dentist.
Yeah. He was saying that, Uh, babies, in order to build your jaw and all that you need to they need what he calls resistance training, which is the same as weightlifting. Babies should be chewing on all kinds of stuff. It's very important. Ye. Breastfeeding is better than a rubber nipple because the sucking effect and the swallowing muscles develop. You know, what's a real problem that I didn't know about is kids sucking all their food out of those little legs.
Yep, squeezers we call them.
Yep, it's prolonged. The advent of that highly processed squeezer is prolonging how long children take before they start to masticate. So you can picture in the future a bunch of weak jawed I was reading.
I read that article.
From a few days ago. It's incredible.
They can stunt their speech development because they don't develop the right coordination.
There's just like, I'm you got to talk to doctor Max.
Like mating those things NonStop into adulthood.
That's what well, that's that's what they're saying, is that people came out I started.
Eating the suns of bitches. I still do I have one yesterday I'll be like, sure, I'll tell you.
I think, yeah, if that's all they ate, maybe this could happen.
But we were camping. We were camping with some folks two weekends ago, I guess, and they they had two kids. And at one point she turns to the kids and she says, what do we remember about our pouches, and they both were very dead serious and they said, we only get one per day.
Since twenty ten, pouch consumption currency food pouch consumption since twenty ten has increased nine hundred percent.
But over before there was none, So it's.
Like overtaking Jarred Pure as the predominant baby food on the market. That's true. When you go from something not existing to existing, it is a big jump. That'd be another way to put it.
Automobile use his skyrocket, since.
Yeah, I think it probably existed before twenty ten, so it's maybe.
Yeah, too many of these, and it's also a highly processed food. I'm a big Mad Max fan, and Mother's Milk plays heavily into Mad Max movies. And we're laughing the other day. Yanni not a Mad Max fan, but I was like to point out, Yani used to drink a lot of the Mother's milk, so we had we used to My boyf would freeze the little bags of it, you know, And I remember for years being real curious before I finally had a little swig. But Yanni was putting the stuff in his coffee the whole time. Oh yeah, that was his half and half all through having babies.
That's my favorite noise curd natures.
I think that means what else you got?
Trying not to be judgmental, but I'm curious.
No, I just yeah, he probably has a really good immune system.
Yeah. I think it's friendly too. He's very generous, very generous of spirit, like.
A ceremonial placenta consumption.
Oh yeah he did that.
Did he do that too?
Oh yeah, I think he did put it in a pie or lasagna or something.
That's right.
Yeah, which is like, yeah, that's right. We talked about it's like a way to have cannibalism. That's not bad.
Hang on, guys, starting to wonder about coming up here.
Only one last thing to talk about, Brody, How quickly can you do your Colorado thing?
I can do it quick.
This popped up in my news feed. Uh Mancos, Colorado, Southern Colorado. A bunch of angry town residents uh tore down miles of fencing that had barboe fence. That that a mysterious religious group had blocked off fourteen acres of National Forest Service land for what reason they claimed. They claimed it was theirs under the Homesteading Act, But the Homesteading Act was repealed what fifty years ago, nineteen seventies, everywhere except Alaska, I think it went on for a while long.
And they had homestead acted fourteen hundred acres.
They just said it was there.
It doesn't really, Yeah, there's no real.
They're squatting on public land right.
Oh. And they're like the kind of people they're like, you know what, I've done some reading and I don't have to pay tax.
They're they're like a sort of a splinter group when Warren Jeff Scott.
Yeah, the free Landholders Committee they called themselves. Yeah, but a bunch of people in the town kind of got fed up with that public land being fenced off and went in there and tore it down.
No one started shooting at each other.
No shooting, but you know, it's a heated, heated thing, and the sheriff's office is kind of staying out of it. They're not like they're saying it's a civil issue, and so they're not arresting anyone for putting the fence up. They're not resting anyone for tearing it down.
How long ago was the fence put up?
Uh, you know, it doesn't say, but it sounds like it's been around for a while.
So one day the whole town's like.
Let's go turn it.
I think they're like, it's blocking access.
They hunt there, they fish there, they run motorcycle, snowmobiles, all that stuff. They're worried someone's gonna get hurt by the barberie fence. They're worried about the barber fence affecting big game travel stuff like that. But nothing's like, they haven't kicked these people off of national of the National Force Service, just got rid of their fence, got rid of their fence, and it's it's to be determined what's going to happen, you know, if.
These people will actually be kicked off that.
Land or not.
So it's an ongoing issue.
It's so odd that this was picked up in the Miami Herald.
I know, it just popped up in my news feed.
Like I looked around and didn't see too much.
It just happened. It's like this all went down just like a couple of weeks ago.
Uh. Starting November four, is the last thing we're talking about.
Before we talk about what you're here to talk about?
Yeah, back, what are we talking about?
Starting November four, we got a new show called Rough cuts with me dropping on Outdoor Channel and me Eater YouTube. So it'll eight pm every Monday starting November four and presented by Moultree.
Uh.
Okay, Well, we kind of covered off on that. What year we covered off on the tribal history, but I want to I want to back up now and get into this real good. What year was or roughly when was the Wind River Reservation established?
That was established in eighteen I think it was in eighteen sixties. It was before the state of Wyoming it even became a state.
Sixty eight I believe sixty eight stepping your toes, but research eighteen sixty something.
Yeah, and at that time those thirty million acres for a couple of years, uh and then also knows two.
It was like three. And then a few other things happened where bureau wreck came in and a government agency started taking some land. They opened it up for homesteading for non natives in the area. There's a Recomation Act that came in where you'll hear about the Big Horn water rights and stuff, the tribal waters and everything else, the conflict that we're dealing with there. And so when that opened up, at the time the BIA superintendent wasn't even a tribal member at the time. He was a non native, and he started selling off portions of the reservation.
Just to can I interrupt, you explain what bia is?
BIA is the Barrel of Indian Fairs. My bad. I'm just used to talk to everybody who knows where he is. But yeah, and then so the Barrel of Indian and Fares was run by non natives, and then when they came in, they had the ability to sell portions of the land. Anything around the river is anything that.
Would create what was that money?
It was airs. Whoever sold it got the money. So the superintendent at the time got the money of the land he sold at the time.
It didn't go back to the reservation.
Yeah, there's a lot of fraud and misappropriation of funds and stuff involved in that.
Yeah. And so the whole Bureau of Wreck irrigation system on the Winter of Indian Reservation, it doesn't benefit any tribal member on the reservation, goes bypasses a lot of the reservation, goes into the river into the Boiston State Park area, and just bypasses a big portion of the Wind River itself and goes to agriculture for non natives and then so a lot of that was built and paid for by Bureau of Indian Affairs funding at the time.
So you paid to have the water bypassed.
Travel mind Yeah, yeah.
How does how does today? How does game fishing game management work on your reservation? And is that consistent with reservations at large in the West like game management?
So every reservation is different, every landscape is different. You know, on the Winter of Indian Reservation, the Shishonian Rappop tribes have the authority to manage their their landscape and their wildlife fishing, wildlife we use. We're one of the only reservations that use US fish and wildlife biologists on a reservation to help manage our landscape. And so we which is another unique thing is that we also work pretty good in Indian country for a state and a reservation that doesn't happen very well on other reservations.
Cooperation between the state and the reservation.
Yes, and so we we team up with them with a lot of our grizzly bear studies, our mountain sheep or our bighorn sheep and everything else that we have on the reservation. You know, we want to were unique because we really take pride on our conservation efforts on the Wind River Reservation, and so we team up with all these other biologists and so we work Hanahan with the state and US Fishing Wildlife.
From an enforcement standpoint. And you spent years as a warden, right like you spent years in law enforcement.
Yeah, I as a Bureau of Indian Affairs police officer, so as a federal officer, and then I came over to travel fishing game.
So if a if a Joe blow white guy like me went on the wind Wind River Reservation and poached a big horn, I'm in trouble. Not with the State of Wyoming, I'm in trouble with you.
Well, you're in trouble with civilly. Travel fishing game will come after you for your probably perfect credit score, and then then we're gonna come after you federally with Lacy Act charges with the US Fish and Wildlife Special Agent. So not only are you civilly charged, so we can charge.
You twice, I mean the tribe can charge me.
Yeah, we Well, the tribe can charge you civilly, and then the US Fish and Wildlife will step in and charge you, probably with the Fellamy case.
That would come from the US Fishing Wildlife Service. Yes, because there's a lacy violation.
Is there a la it's a lazy violation because you're on government land. So the land is still owned by the US government. But we have the ability to manage our own land, in our own natural resources.
But I'm familiar with this is such a rabbit hole. But I'm for with the lasiac as applying to like moving from one state to the other. But to move on a reservation and off a reservation, does that count as a LASIAC violation.
No, You'll have to get an interstate tag. You know, we have to give you permission and everything else to leave. So when you go from one reservation to another reservation, you're just not from running reservation to the other. You're going through state land and everything else. So there's an interstate tag that you have to possessed with your travels.
And on the Wind River Reservation, hunting there is tribal members only correct, Yes, and that also is different than that. That's awful. Also managed differently on different reservations.
Yeah, some reservations opened up bringing funding to their programs and everything else like that. On the Wind River and in reservation, we're kind of stingy with what we got. But it's also wintering range for a lot of the elk, muldeer, grizzly bears, wolves, everything else. The wintering range on the reservation. The state benefits on how well we manage our wildlife because we're in central Wyoming and so a lot of the wildlife surrounding the reservation that you know, there's no boundaries, there's no reservations to animals. They can come and go as they please. And when we do better, the state does better with a wild life yep.
And talk about what wildlife you have on the reservation.
We pretty much have everything Yellowstone has. After one hundred and thirty something years, we finally got buffalo background the reservation, which is huge. That program that Jason Ball does is doing is he's doing a really good job at it. And so we have grisse of bears, wolves, wolverines, prong horned mule deer, elk, big orange, cheap yeah, I mean, you name it, we got.
It, yep, mountain lions, black bears, everything, you know, everything now not now probably a good number of wolves, oh yeah, you know, And how does like for tribal members. How does it work? What is the sort of tag system you know? I mean you have things that are under quotas and not under quotas. Is that correct?
Yeah, So we have a huge number of white tailed deer that's pretty unlimited antlope, nobody will hunt them up on a reservation. So that's pretty much on limbit.
Did the elk each just not a popular animal for members to hunt?
No, because we have I mean each enrolled tribal member from both tribes gets four elk tags a year. You get three calm calf tags, your rifle bull tag, and then you get your archree.
How many people?
How many people live on the reservation and do you know how many are like whatever active hunters or we have.
Probably a close to fifteen sixteen thousand tribal members from both tribes on the reservation and we sell about eleven hundred to twelve hundred hunting permits a year. It's that's not very much at.
All, right, how much does a hunting permit?
Ten dollars for the permit, seven dollars per tag for one hundred and thirty two bucks, I think you can get thirty six tags or something like that.
And if if someone's working real hard. Well, if someone's working really hard, do they have the ability to get that many elk? Is it like if they if they put the time and they could fill that many elk tags?
Oh yeah yeah, pretty easy, especially for large families. So we started a program. So like our bigger cheaps limited, there's a quota we sell very few that's one hundred dollars a tag. The moose quota that's one hundred dollars a tag.
Are is that quota? Is that allotted through a lottery?
Yeah, And so what we do is our meal deer is fifty dollars trophy milier. The whole month of November, you get to hunt trophy milderh. We do an entry fee to put your application and it's a ten dollars fee, and then we start at the beginning of the year and we do the release the information who drew in April. Later on in the year, I guess chance for everybody to turn into their application. We take that ten dollars and uh, my program and other programs go out and we harvest elk and everything else are any cases that we get from poaching and stuff, and we get the meat processed and then we go out and we deliver it to like thirty three families on the reservation, elders and needy families.
What are the draw odds?
Way better than the states.
A tribal member will draw a big horned sheep tag.
It's I mean it. The odds are going down because the population is going up. It is oh yeah, yeah. So I mean we're trying to get tribal members so involved with our program to support it and build it and make it better. You know, I don't know how many trouble youth are putting in for the sheep and moose and trophy deer and stuff now that they didn't do before, And so it's growing. I mean it's harder and harder. I mean before I had pretty good chance every three years I could draw a sheep tag or a moose tag. Now it's because once you draw, you have to wait three years and then uh then you can draw again. Yeah, but now with you know the number of hunters coming up, it's harder to draw.
Your So you've drawn some sheep tags, I draw a few, Yeah, congratulations, I love it.
My favorite.
I'm wondering if you can explain a bit more about the different philosophies between different reservations in terms of using you know, non uh tribal members as a source of funding, because it does strike me as well, like I think a lot of our listeners probably when they think about hunting on reservations, they think about like high dollar auction tags like in Arizona.
Especially, Like.
That's probably was this a conscious decision by by the tribes to to you know, maintain that resource for tribal members or sort of how is there pressure to open it up? I'm just kind of curious, like what that dynamic is, Like.
Yeah, so there is pressure, I mean, but there's outside pressure, yeah, to come in to open it up for that phenomenal hunting area the tribes. You know, like I said before, our conservation efforts ethics are so important to us that you know, why not keep it just for ourselves? I mean, when you start bringing in money and opening up that slippery slope of different things happening and losing what you have, maybe it's not even worth the chance of doing it. And so you know, being a hunter there on myself, I love the idea I have to you know, wait line or being a populated area where you go on state side, But you know there's boundaries, and then in one area, I might see one or two tribal members hunting on the side of this creek. On the other creek the state. When we go up and patrol that opening day, there's three to four hundred vehicles on the state side, maybe one tribal member on our side.
Yeah. Oh, because they're hoping to pick up elk coming off.
You're migrating back and forth.
There, gotcha?
How does it? How does uh so?
Like for the state, a lot of the funding for wildlife management comes from license sales.
Where are you get.
So the state? The state gets funding from the license cells, they get funding from taxes from ammunition and stuff like that. The state has other different opportunities that they get different funding from the winter reservation. We don't have those opportunities. We don't get any tax money for to help support travel fishing, game program and no, don't try to do uh so. We get a lot of our funding through the Bureau of Indian Fairs. We get a lot of funding through the cell of our fishing permits. We only allow fishing only on the winter and in reservation, and so we try to market that and use that to bring in more funding. The US Fishing Wildlie steps in and helps out and then we we've since I've been there, we've kind of reached out and started working with nonprofits and everybody else to go after different types of funding for different types of projects and stuff.
How much does it cost a non tribal member to fish your reservation?
Different? I mean there's daily, weekly, monthly, and annually, and so for about like one hundred ninety bucks you can get an annual fishing permitt.
Okay, does your does your tribe have We had a Klinget woman on the show and we're talking about the Marine Mammal Protection Act and she is a seatter hunter. The way the Marine Mammal Protection Act worked is they establish what I'm sure you're familiar with, the term of blood quantum, meaning that for Alaskan coastal Indigenous Coastal Alaskans to participate in marine mammal hunting, they have to demonstrate I believe it was twenty five percent Yeah, twenty five percent ancestry to coastal Indigenous Coastal Alaskans. How does how is tribal membership work for you? And then does that have any implication on how you participate in hunting on reservation lands.
So you're talking about a tribal ID card, and yes, we all have tribal ID cards that identifies us as what kind of Indian we are and how much that quantum we have.
Oh do you have an ID card on you right now? I do, and it says what kind of Indian you are? Nor so, so if you get pulled over, you can show this someone and.
Is that from Is that from the b I A or is it from the okay.
Our tribal enrollment office?
Gotcha?
So if I came in, if I came in and married, I'm already married. So this is just hypothetical. But if I was to come marry a northern Arapahole woman expired pulls badge. Oh yeah, Northern tribe arthur Awsome really yeah? Oh degree of blood you're kidding me?
No? What mm hmm.
There's a number on there too, it's our serial number.
It's so it's it's it's like being prisoners of war. Uh, it's like being in a prison. Uh. That car identifies me of who I am, where I'm at, and uh, oh I to put.
It, it's like name, rank and serial.
Number, right, you gotta if you if you consider.
Like, well, I'll say this, like if when I do a lot of cearch and rescue missions on a reservation for native and non natives, right and before uh, we can bring in any military helicopters or equipment to help us, we have to get approval through a general because reservations are still considered war zones. Hmm wow.
So having that is not necessarily a mark of pride then, or it can be.
In you've got it twofold like one is like, yep, I'm an enrolled member. These are my people. I'm enrolled and I'm in. You know, that's something that they can't take from me. So yeah, you've got a sense of pride. On the other hand, when you're looking at the history of how they did that was because they were trying to essentially breach you out and so then that blood quantum lessons and lessons and lessons and so pretty soon they're not going to have any and that was kind of the idea of it. So colonialism was probably not the greatest thing because because you have, you know, still in Indigenous children who don't won't ever be able to say that because they've had that mixed.
Uh, do you let me return to this hypothetical, Like I marry I would marry a rap a hole woman on Wynd River, I don't become a tribal member. Correct, Okay, but our children.
Could potentially become If your wife was more than half, if she was at least half, then your children would be able to be enrolled because you have to have a certain amount of blood quantum before you could be just.
And that's but that's specific on what tribe too.
Correct, It depends on each tribe.
Had the Cherokee have a different.
Who sets that the tribes they get to set the all during their treaty rights and are working in their treaties, they got to choose how they wanted to manage their population and then their area. So they got they got to choose how they wanted the blood quantum to work.
So in addition to that, like they have if like our children, for example, are mixed Northern Arapaho and Ogalala, and then his mom is also from a Quinault Indian, so we've got that mixture and stuff. The Northern Arapaho took all of that blood quantum and made our children be almost like half Indian, so that.
I was going to ask about that question, could you ever get could you ever be from different tribes? But then wind up having not blood quantum because you're from different tribes. So they'll accept the indigenous blood.
For my bloodline, though the Oglala would only accept the Oglala blood. So I have some rose bud on my side. But because we're only enrolled in one, I only have.
Oklawa like your other indigenous ancestry doesn't count, didn't count to your Indian nests.
Right, although although I am considered more than half Indian, more than half Native there, it didn't count in my blood quantum, and so the blood quantum I gave to my children was less, but the Northern ara Appaho counted all of it and stuff. So which great, because you know what, you're indigenous. You're indigenous. If you if you have a family that you came from that was indigenous, please say it, say it loud and be proud about it.
You know, have you ever heard of a marriage? Have you ever heard of a marriage that was good or people that were gonna get married or that were that were that we're gonna have children, But then the woman or the man was like, I can't do this because you're not because my children will lose their tribal identity, or my children will lose their tribal enrollment because you're from outside, you're not indigenous, Like is this is this like a thing that happens when people are finding mates and growing up.
Earlier, I mean today's day. No, we don't hear of that, but you know, like my grandparents, my parents maybe but not not. You know, it's kind of you.
Sometimes hear of how they didn't want to of of some tribes didn't want to. I didn't want you to marry outside of your race because you would you would water down your bloodline. But also you can't you can't tell people who they can love, So.
About that.
Divorce you.
I have a Navajo friend who, though made it a point she would not marry anyone outside of right, not just her tribe, but I think there's a smaller.
Level of and they have plans.
Yeah, so she would not even marry outside of her clan.
And that's a big thing. And I mean if you think about how they how they raise their children and stuff like that. The Navajo Nation is by far the largest nation of indigenous people in our country. So and you know, they keep their numbers the way they want to, but you know, you still have you still have people who trickle out and marry in and right.
I always I mean this is just a sort of a non sequitor, but I'm always struck, Like with your ID card, I feel like there's a lot of times and you can just sort of walk through the world and think like, oh, this is how this is how things are, and you don't necessarily question things. But I always find that when I'm traveling through a reservation, like when you pull out that ID card, you realize how profoundly people's individual lives are shaped by policy. And and it's like the history is it is not history, it's it's there in your wallet, right, like it's I don't know. It's always very striking to me that because there's a lot there's a lot of people out there that can sort of go through the world Lottida and and uh and not have to grapple with like those big questions.
Yeah, not just through the world, but through the West. Yeah. Yeah, you know, drive all around it.
Their identity is in their pocket.
Yeah, you know, uh, subject change you have because you have management authority over your reservation, wildlife management authority, all kinds of other authorities, but let's talk about wildlife management authority.
Sovereignty, mostly because that's what we want to show the world. Do we have sovereignty?
So you have sovereignty over this piece of ground. And there's areas, there are areas in which US law, Wyoming law ends, and tribal law picks up. One of the areas that I think is of interest, and I know that you guys have done a bunch of work around this is we have a thing in the US. We have the Wildhorse and Burrough Protection Act. Okay, because I'm bringing this up, because you spent a ton of your career on this issue. We have the Wild Horse and Burrough Protection Act, which I'm gonna give a little background kind of. If I screw this up, feel free to crack me. It was in the seventies. Yeah maybe yeah, So you know, I gonna go way back. I'm not going to go back to when the earth's crusted first ceridified. I'm gonna go back aways wild horses have been on the landscape of the American West. See now I'm at another crossroad. If Dan Flores was here, he'd want to be talking about the place, the scene, and ice age horses. I'm not going to go back that far in the sixteen hundreds horses. In the sixteen hundreds, late late, very late fifteen hundred, sixteen hundreds horses were brought by the Spanish to initially into Mexico. A lot of those horses were brought up into New Mexico, and those horses were proliferated across the West, both as owned horses used by people, and also at that moment was the beginning of the wild horse. Okay, the wild or, depending on your definition, the feral horse, because he's they were brought as livestock. They were brought here as saddle broke domestic livestock, but they went feral quickly, just like pigs were brought to what is now the United States of America. They've some people, pigs have always some of these pigs have always been owned and bred and kept his livestock, and some of those pigs from day one have always run around as wild pigs. So we have domestic pigs and we have wild pigs. We've had domestic horses and we've had wild horses. Six since the sixteen hundreds in this For a while, the legal structure was such that you could just go out and catch wild horses and you could sell them to slaughter, and when the prices were pretty good, you can make pretty good money. And during that time, wild horse numbers got down low, and where people that were big wild horse fans thought we need to protect the remaining wild horses. And they made a tragic mistake. I'm editorializing that was all just history. Now, I'm editorializing they made a tragic mistake in the nineteen seventies and they established a thing, a careful what you wish for thing called the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act. And they here, and they came and said, because there's not that many, and people are being mean to them, and some people like him, and some people like him, we hereby declare, not only are wild horses wildlife, you cannot touch them, you can't kill them, which is not something we've done for We didn't do that for big horns, we didn't do that for elk, we didn't do that for grizzly bears. We didn't do that for any of our native wildlife. But we bestowed upon the horse this sort of status without anticipating where we'd be today, which is in areas of Nevada, areas of Arizona, areas of Utah, most reservations, most reservations where you now have feral horses that are out competing native wildlife and in some cases degrading the landscape. Heffelfingers shared with me, I can't remember where he did he ride or where he got it. Someone made like a man if horses were managed his wildlife. Here's what management would look like with horses, A lot of harvest.
How many do you know how many are roaming around the Western United States?
Total?
Total? No, that different reservations. Very we don't know the exact numbers of how many other reservations had. You know, we were sitting pretty close to ten eleven thousand far horses on two million acres. Well you know, actually less than that, like a million acres because the habitat area. Again, yeah, so I think the last I heard Navajo Nation might have one hundred thousand a Yakama was pretty close to one hundred thousand.
Far horses.
Horses.
I've seen a lot of those. Because because of this, this is last thing I say in the background, because of this little problem they created that they you can't hunt them, you can't send them to slaughter. What there's so many of these things now that they're actually taking them to eastern Kansas other areas where there's good grass growth, hiring ranchers to move out of beef production. And then they take tax pair of money and pay those ranchers to house horses which they truck from the Aird West too. And I went to I drove past a huge ranch that is nothing but a guy that makes his money.
Babysitting fair horses.
Bay horse like a sanctuary. They don't use them for any they don't.
We're feeding water in them until they die of old age. You know, at the average costume Wyoming where we're from, for for one horse is nine thousand dollars a year. What so the the amount of horses that we removed, we figured we saved tax payers seventy two million dollars.
Okay with that big old setup, now that was my setup? Is that okay?
Well set that up? Ye Okay.
Now let's break off and not break off and explain the situation on your reservation and how you guys dealt with dealt with the issue of competition with native wildlife and habitat degradation and like kind of where you were and where you're at now around wild horses fare horses.
So there's a lot of different issues with fare horses. I mean, it's our livestock producers. You know, our numbers have life producers on our reservation is not very big. Our livestock producers don't have the numbers of private state producers have, so our numbers are really small. You know, we have ninety something range units, so we have ninety something producers and their herds are ten to maybe one hundred. Hopefully they're at one hundred making a little bit of a bit of anny.
You're talking like raise of beef cattle.
Yeah, so tribal members who are are our producers. But with that we also have a ton of wildlife. You know, we have huge pronghorn herd. We have meal or migrations we have. We worked with the US Fish and Wildlife in the state to bring in bighorn sheep into certain areas the Washko Reservoir area, which is one area we really try to take care of it and keep it pristine for the cheap population to grow because you know, sheep are also having issues, The milia are having issues, all of our wildlife are having issues. And then we just we're seeing that the damage that they were doing, and the only thing that was growing back where these big number of horses were at all over the different parts of the reservation was we were only getting cheat grass back. And then and then winters where we had really bad winters, they were demolishing all the sagebrush habitat for deer milder migration areas and then the wintering areas for our milder and then we started started seeing a big decrease on sage grouse and different types of birds on the reservation. So our biologist teamed up with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to say, we really need to do something. We're at a crisis here. I mean, it's getting so bad that we might even have to start taking these range units away from tribal members because there's not enough feed for production of just livestock. And and so with that we came up with a plan where I threw one hundred thousand dollars where we were hiding tribal members or so like start catching them and just start removing them. Let's ship them out and if there's a buyer, there's a buyer. If not, well we'll just give them away because there's just too many feral horses just damaging our landscape.
Are you under this?
Are you under the obligation to manage them?
Under that? Like they're they're still protected on the reservation. You can't kill them.
No, they're not protected on the reservation, so.
They could you could, So you're you can totally live outside of the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act. Yes, well, you could have built the slaughter plant if you wanted to. Could have.
But I don't know if we wanted to go that round. Were you talking about non native trespassing? I think I would have had a bunch of them. But you know, and so we we started doing big roundups and we're moving horses and.
Can can you tell how you caught them?
Well, if first we started catching them on horseback for side by side. We didn't have funding to operate to do these big projects. You know, we didn't have the money obligated to us from anywhere to start doing this.
Tell me, like, I'm like, I'm five years old.
How you catch them? So we we'd purchase panels, we'd send out a few people on horses, a few people on dirt bikes or side by side forwarders, and to just try to push them down an alley and get them going one way and gather them. We're averaging like twenty a month or so, you know, really small numbers and stuff. But the Bureau of Land Management uses contractors, and so we started meeting with the State of Wyoming and other federal agencies on how we could do this at a bigger rate. Because the state was like, those horses are going to be our problem if you can't remove them, because they're not going to stay on the reservation if there's no feed, you know, so there's no boundaries for horses or wildlife. You know, we could show that in our meal migration that they're going to leave the reservation because there's not enough feed.
And the state can't do anything once they're outside the reservation. So they want you guys to succeed in your efforts.
Doesn't it a little bit depend on the area too, I'm like, I mean, if one did walk, if one walked out of wind River onto federal land. Is that part of it is that within wildhorse habitat, like what they call the wildhorse area.
There's a lot of fencing and there's a lot of it. There was very many horses and others like that. So yeah, if they if they left the reservation and went on to federal properly, yeah, that's then that's their problem. But we have no problem with that. We'd push them all over there on that side.
You know.
Uh.
And so the state chipped in and said, well, well we'll help you out, and they give us enough funding or to remove like sixteen hundred horses, and then Berevin and Fair stepped in is like, this is a good project. Let's keep this going. And so three years we ended up removing seven six hundred and thirty three horses off the winter reservation. The results of that were overnight overnight results. One area, we removed eight hundred horses off this reservoir that was almost completely dry. I mean they just demolished that right.
Like they drank it dry.
Yeah. So you know, like here's your your natural springs and stuff would all kind of meet up at a drainage and then start filling up reservoirs and stuff. Well, they would stomp in those springs and everything else, and the reservoirs would get so full of that by the middle of the summer, they'd be completely dry. And we had eight hundred horses on one reservoir. The contractors push those out and we ended up catching half of those horses that day and then I mean the next morning at sun up, we had it over three hundred elk and on that same.
Otive war because the horses kick them out.
Yeah. Yeah, there's no national predter for horses. The grizzly bears won't bother them, wolf stoles then't bother them, mountain lions don't bother them, and elk don't like them. Elk don't like them, military don't like them. I'm really excited to see the outcome of the Mildia migration study that we're doing with the University of Wyoming. How if they're they're going to stay on the same route where they had to stay high and travel off the reservation into the Teton National Forest where they summer. If they now they have the abilit to go anywhere they want on a reservation because they don't have to compete for food.
Is there a situation where you got to worry about the remaining horses their population blowing up again or is it a pretty Once you knock them down, they're probably gonna stay knocked down.
The horse population doubles every four years, so we still have to do our management process of keeping those numbers down. And so, I mean it's that's like overnight. I mean, you will see five or six horses, you know, four years that number doubles just that fast. And so we now that we've got to a managing level where we want to sustain between one thousand and fifteen hundred fer horses on the reservation. We want to do little roundups and do things like the Honor Farm and everybody else is doing well. We could start breaking them. We could start using these horses for some of our back country outfitters in the fishing industry, or we could break them and sell them. I use them for something, you know. I mean, it's not like we have a me and heart and just want to go in there and destroy this whole population of feral horses. But yeah, and we get it. There's a lot of people on the reservation in the state of Wyoming that still use horses. But with technology and dirt bikes and side by side and four olders, you don't have to use a horse like you used to and and a lot of these horses. I mean we had brands on them, the ones that we caught. That's why I really expressed.
How who had branded them?
People from all over the United States. I mean we got brands from Iowa, Nebraska.
Just all all over from people dumping them.
Yeah, people dump them. Yeah, you know.
I years ago, I was working on a story about livestock theft, like contemporary cattle rustling, and uh, some of the stock detectives I was hanging out with made an interesting observation because I was asking about horse theft, and they said, when we had horse slaughter plants, there's Indiana, Texas had too. He goes, there was such a thing as horse theft. Now we have the opposite. There's the opposite of horse theft. You don't wake up and see that your horses are gone. You wake up and see that you have new horses. Because people at that time, like there was no outlet. There's no outlet for lame horses. There's no outlet for old horses. There was a lot of drought that had riten driven down hay production, and they were too expensive to keep, and so people would just pull up at night and cut horses loose.
I'm also a livestock investigator on a reservation and we have issues of that. I mean, we can we know when there's more horses showing up in certain areas. And the biggest thiefs on the reservation of stealing horses are the fer horses. They love every brand new panel, they love every brand new gate because they'll go in there and break them and so they can get to the other marriage and the other horses. And so next thing you know, you got branded horses running around all the and people are saying, well, I know they're not stolen because I seen or heard of far horses running around God, and it became such a big issue. I mean when I say fences and gates, I mean I'm telling the truth. We it became such an issue, but that many for horses running around it maybe became a highway safety issue too. I mean, we were getting horses hit on some of our main roads, and that's why we became livestock investigators on the reservation so we can manage these horses. And I mean, you don't know how many fences and stuff that we fixed. There's a tribal fishing game and the range unit with bure of Indian and fairs and stuff like that. It's just they just do a lot of damage, not just to the forage, but also fencing and everything else.
It's so weird and unfortunate that the shift comes when something doesn't have a monetary value anymore. And I just wonder, you know, what it might take if there is anyone thinking about building or bringing back horse slaughter. I was going to ask you if you've ever You know, there are people in other countries and other places that are more open and amenable to either consuming horse meat or putting it in dog food or doing something with it that I think most Americans seem adverse.
Do you know where Rocker Montana is?
No.
If you go over Homesteak Pass and you pass through Butte and then you come to Rocker Montana. You know those little coffee kios Yeah, on the vanguard of building coffee kios So I'm talking. This woman had a coffee kiosk in the late nineties in Rocker Montana. There was a novelty to see one back in them days. One day, I'm chatting her up as she's making a coffee, and you know, what her job was prior to opening a coffee Kiosk and Rocker, Montana. She would buy horses for the Japanese market. She would buy good looking meat horses and they would fly them on a ce one thirty wow to Japan and live to be caught in Japan. And those those horse slaughter plants was Illinois or Indiana? There was two in Texas.
There's I think there's one in Illinois. Didn't blow up.
I don't know, but it wasn't like they didn't become federally illegal. It just became impractical and pressure to close them. I think you guys should I mean, how how open are you to a white guy telling you what you Indians are doing.
I'm on the same page. I thought the same thing as myself.
You know, you know what you people ought to do.
I mean the Italians. I've eaten horse. The Italians make, you know, like they cure horse meat, just like a lot of them got park et cetera. And Italy is not the only country.
Like after World War One there was a big there's a lot of horses rounded up and canned and shipped over to Europe because you know, food production was so low over in Europe after World War One. But I remember reading about that, like there's this huge craze. People were just going around and grabbing horses and uh canning them and sending him to Europe.
I can't even remember I got I got a friend. I can't remember what year has happened. But he had to go to Uzbakistan for work. And his body's like, listen, you're gonna get there and they're gonna give you a big glass of mayor's milk. Just drink it. There's no getting around it. And he gets this big glass of mayor's milk and he's just dreading, so he just ns and he slams it. But he did it with too much gusto. They gave a refills. How many did How many do you think you guys had on the reservation? Ten thousand and what's a comfortable number?
Thousand?
Were some tribal members pissed because they could have gone out and caught horse, because were guys going out and catching them and breaking them?
Yeah, well there's there's no law, there's no act. I mean, both councils did a resolution. Were a tribal memory if you're in rolled off our reservation. You can want catch as many horses as you want, but brand it and then it belongs to you. And then if it's released, they catch it again, then we have the right for your your life stock trespassing. So if you're gonna catch it, keep it, sell it to whatever you want with it. So travel members can still go out and catch as many as they want.
Okay, but that the incentive isn't strong enough for tribe, Like, the economic incentive isn't great enough to keep up with the with the production of the horses.
You're gonna spend more in fuel and food catching horses than you are gonna sell them. And I like I said, the average cost for a horse didn't stay a whom He's nine thousand a year. You know, it gets pretty pricey when I keep it manage horses.
Yeah, So when you buy a horse, I mean I'm not talking about reservation just in general, when you buy a horse, it's not the purchase price that's getting you, it's maintenance.
Well, it depends if you get a good quality horse. I mean they're twenty thirty thousand dollars, yeah, and then the maintenance after that, I mean you have to have pretty good hey, make sure you know they don't blow up.
And if you're spending that much money on a horse, yeah, you want to make sure they're feaking right.
Yeah, then you gotta do your vet bill. You got brand inspections, you gotta. I mean, it's like on in a vehicle. You got to take care of it.
But are are any of those Are those feral horses that are on Wind River? Do they ever have the potential of being a high dollar saddle horse?
Yes, they can, like the horses that were branded, and then you know we throw breads, I mean some big livestock or you know that they use for bare back and everything. Horses that could barely get into our pineals because they were so big. Yeah, there's a chance. And you can tell the horses that were there for a longer time or smaller and bread not very good horses at all. There's nothing you could That's what I was going to ask.
Can you look at them and be like, well, that one has some potential to be a workhorse or a riding horse, and that one will never will never be able to tame that thing.
The horses has about the same size of its body. Yeah, you know, you know, yeah, I mean, you can really tell. You can tell the difference. And uh, when you see one that's just beautiful and you know, coming in from a distance, and then when you get it to the trap or the panels, oh there's a brand. Yeah, that could be a pretty good horse. Well that's running with all these other horses, and you know it's you can tell them. And but when you start dealing with the studs of those different herds, truly like wild wild ones. Yeah, the ones that had never been cut or anything else are mean. I mean they are aggressive. You've seen a wolf forare mountain line attack anything where they bite the neck and start shaking their heads and stuff. Those studs are just as mean as any of those other predators. I mean, we've seen studs kill other studs just to keep their away with their teeth, with their teeth, kicking, biting anything they can.
Their hooves are so sharp.
Do you guys keep horses of your own?
No?
We used to, Yeah, year we no longer play with livestock.
What was the outlet for all the horses you caught?
So we, uh, we pretty much just gave him away. We gave them to Mexico, Canada, whoever, whoever wanted to would take them. We helped pay for the shipping and everything else.
They paid for, like the vets and everything like that.
It's not a money maker. We did brand inspections, we used the state brand inspectors, state vets. So we did everything legal and we did you know, we documented everything and we did the process of shipping off. Whoever wanted them could take them. I have horse sanctuaries one of them, they could have them. We did as long as they did destroying our wildlife habitat. We we we really didn't care.
Base based on the results that you're getting, have other tribes come in to try to learn from the program that you've initiated. I mean, obviously, like outside of Indian country, the wild horse and brow protection are prevents anybody from really learning a lesson. But other tribes could implement similar programs.
Right Yeah. And a lot of it is looking for funding, looking for opportunities to get stuff like that up. Ago and I did the presentation at the sheep so Reno last year, and we had a lot of trouble programs and stuff there, And so I mean, we're willing to help out whoever whenever. Any other other nation we're we're willing to help out other tribes.
It's basically finding finding the funding, having them find the funding to be able to pull off an operation that big, and then finding the buyers or or the transporters to be able to get them to where they need to go.
There's no we're all, there's no it's it's not a money maker right there. There's no profit into it.
It's just yeah, fills of money maker probably wouldn't become a problem.
It wouldn't have been yet.
Yeah.
Yeah, And like you know, we talked about our controvation ethics. I mean, we were when River was the first one with the Wilderness Act. We were three our nineteen thirties. We were before anybody else in the United States.
You guys created a wilderness area.
We were the first one the roadless areas. Yep.
I can we back up? I want to hear about this, but I got one final last horse question. If you catch a okay, you catch a branded horse and you're like, what in the world this horse is from some guy in Colorado? Is he all right?
Do you?
Can you say to him listen, man, come get your horse like the dog. I'm not going to pay money to ship your horse to you. Your horse is here, come get it.
Oh well, we'll impound those horses. We'll get ahold of the owner to the brand inspection, to the state. Uh well, inform him, inform him that you know, it cost me two hundred and fifty bucks to catch this horse, plus forty dollars a day for feeding water. So every day that we we haul this horse while we're gonna civilly charge you the amount that it cost us to a house this horse and deal with it unless you want to come up to win River and sign off and saying that the tribes are ownership and then we could do what we want with it. And that's how it usually works most of the time. They just sign off on them. Yeah people, because yeah, we have we've been pounded twenty two twenty three certified quarter horses and the lady ended up paying almost twenty five thousand to get them out of inpound.
Wow, how did they lose? I have a second horse? So did she lose horses?
Livestock trespassing is still an issue in the West. She turned them out, well yeah, and depended on somebody else to manage them and take care of them for her. But they got loosed, and I mean they got let loose, and and she was good, grass is greener on the other side. And so yeah, they they ended up on the reservation and we impounded them, and.
They didn't come knock and saying, hey, I think my horse is around your place, so I should try to go to find them.
No want that. We we had five semis and we were going to impound eighty six pairs of cows beef on the reservation that somebody was trespassing on. And so it's it is an issue, I mean kind of wrestling and everything back in the West. We still there's still a lot of that going on on the reservation.
Wind River may their wilderness.
Area yep, first ones.
How did you guys define it? Like, how did it work?
So it was it was between the tribes, US fish and Wildlife, the Forest Service. There was a it's such a unique area. The winter over mountain ranges is so phenomenal, and you know, they had a meeting about how how do we protect this place, how do we keep this pristine, how do we keep it looking like the eighteen hundreds and stuff, and so tribes are like, well, we'll just close it all off. So they have areas where they'll never do any production on the reservation. So you know, you know when you go up to the sland snow line of certain areas, you know there's no uh habitat wilderness area. They the tribes brought that clear down to the snow line and decided that we are not going to have any production in these areas because we want to protect our wildlife. And so we're we'll have no housings, no businesses, no no roads, anything else. And so we're these areas are we're going to protect.
How big are some of those areas?
So the our all wilderness area is like one hundred and eighty eight thousand acres.
That's great, man, that's huge. That's probably sheep country.
Yeah, sheep country. Well, moose mule there, you know those high country mule. There a lot of elk habitat areas and stuff.
Man, I want to come home this place.
Talk to oh man, you gotta become reborn in the different.
Well, I'm not going to marry.
You had a guy. You had a guy. You had a guy that did put a monetary value on a sheep tag, right like you had a few.
They could be quite valuable a few, yes, especially at the sheep show. I mean we're we house. We take care of some of the biggest wild sheep herds in the lower forty eighths with the State of Wyoming and same thing. They migrate on and off the reservation and stuff, and so we do tremendous amount of work with bighorn sheep. I mean it's emovi pneumonia, the disease that domestic sheep give to the wild sheep and stuf.
Is there domestic sheep on the reservation.
Or is it mostly surrounding the reservation on the state side. There was a few domestic sheep back in the day, but there's no value marketing to that either. So we do a lot of work with the state and the Feds and stuff to protect those those sheep herds and stuff.
So how many bighorns might be on the reservation at any given time at the right time, I don't know what the right time of year is, but a couple of thousand, and they're using your land. Uh, they're using wind River winter or summer.
I see they start moving in in the fall and something like the big rams. They don't even leave the area. They'll stay there all year. A lot of the ewes Uh they migrate back and forth at different places. And then it also depends on predator situations, wolfs, everything else that's chasing them around and stuff. You know, it's it's wildlife. They you don't really know what they're gonna do. But we do have a good population of sheep.
With your buffalo program, are you trying to bring in sort of tribally owned free ranging herds or are you having are you trying to establish tribal members as producers for the for the market both both okay both.
One of the big reasons why we wanted to remove feral horses is so that there was forged to release a buffalo on our reservation so tribal members can have the opportunity to harvest like we used to. And then we also saw there's a few producers that want to go into the buffalo market, and the tribes already have there's two herds right now, the Eastern Shoshoni Northern Rappo each have their own herds that they're trying to grow and release so tribal members can harvest right now. When we do harvest, it's usually we have a tribal youth come in and do it and stuff like that, and so we make it a huge educational experience for the tribal youth and elders to come in and talk about it and relive history.
What time of year does that happen.
It happens to different parts of the year. We're actually going to do another one here pretty soon, I think in a couple of weeks.
Would you ever let us come down and watch that?
That so to me, Yeah, I mean i'd be great, but I get everything to proved through both councils. I work for both tribes and so I usually I have to ask permission from them for approval for anything.
Yeah, it would be cool to talk to the kids and stuff who were involved.
Yeah, and we, I mean our youth program that we do on the reservation is that we have more pride in that than we do catching horses.
Do you have Do you have tribal members that come up and do the the hunt out of the park here?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, gardener yeah, oh well yeah, yeah, we're taught a big fan.
Tell me what you mean.
You show up to one little area, you wait for the buffalo to migrate, and then you stand in line.
And also you're not a big I don't know if you meant you're not a big fan of that management strategy, but you mean just the experience, isn't.
Yeah, Yeah, I want to harvest buffalo. I want to go out and go earn it and work for it. And then do you know, like we do elk or hear or anything else?
Can I can I give a little background on this, and then again you can crack me if I screw something up. All right, So we've talked about this bunch over the years. But I don't know, man, if you go back to the I guess it'd be the late nineties, buffalo numbers in Yelsow National Park got up enough. Like a good way to think about it is they can usually hold three or four thousand, This is generally accepted number. But now and then it'll jump. It'll be seven or eight thousand. And when they get the certain numbers in the park and you get to a certain severity of winter in the park, the animals will move out of the park. They'll go out into West Yellowstone area and they'll come out the north entrance into the Upper Yellowstone Valley in the gardener Historically, like of all native wildlife. That's the only one that loses its wildlife status as it crosses a boundary, meaning grizzly bear, wolverine, elk, big horn, sheet meal deer, white tailed deer, pronghorn, anaelope, any of these animals. If he leaves the park, he remains wildlife right at that the minute of buffalo leaves Yelsol National Park, even though it's native wildlife, the minute it walks out of the park, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Livestock. It became like free ranging livestock. You don't like this.
I don't like the rabbit hole you're going down too, because I could sit here for days and go over this.
Okay, well, I'll back out of the rabbit hole. I'm just trying to lead up to this. Some years it got to where the in Montana, it got to where the Department of Livestock was getting shooting a bunch of them. They shoot them, they cut them, send them off the slaughter and after a while, I think it was in the early two thousands, a bunch of tribes in the West, like any tribe that had a historical claim to the presence on that landscape, and there could be the Nez Perce who would come from from Washington and Idaho and they would have come in that area. Su would come in that area. There's like the history of the Blackfeet coming in that area, like all over the Flathead tribe.
Right, sailors, like all these people all part of their treaty rights.
Yeah, they would all utilize the area. And so a bunch of tribes maybe this is this is my understanding, correct me, I'm wrong, A bunch of tribes that listen, if if you're gonna be doing all this harvest, our tribal members are going to come exercise treaty rights and we're gonna do some harvests. And they also they do the tribal hunts like tribes have. They just come when that's the right time when they're coming out. And then the state also conducts like a public draw hunt, which usually comes later and which comes later in the year. Is that all fairly okay?
Yeah?
Now what was the part I said something that you didn't like the sounds of.
It's just it's a rabble hole. I mean, I could issues all day along with how buffalo are treated through livestock and the burcelosa's issues and everything else. You know, we there's still no not one case ivan scientifically proven that a buffalo ever gave livestock.
It's a red herring. So it's a thing. It's a thing that people bring up because it's it's like people bring up brucellosis because it's easier than bringing up what they're really talking about. What they're talking about is competition with cattle.
That's all about money.
Fencing issues. But they say brucellosi is like, okay, well, if brucellosis is the issue, then why don't we kill every elk?
Yeah?
Why is no one talking about killing every elk who also has brucellosis.
Exactly?
It's like, how this how this brucellosis thing is still discussed, blows my mind when it's it's not happened and elk have it. If you came in Montana and you ran on if if a politician in Montana came and said, I got an idea, there's a risk that elk will pass brucellosis to cat, so we'd like to kill all the elk.
There's a lot of elk share in the landscape.
Like people would be like, are you insane? But that's but you can say it with buffalo.
Well yeah, well, and you can say far horses are wild horses and they're good for the habitat area. They're not. We have scientific proof that that's not the case. You know, how can certain groups have the ability to stop and manage and stop things from happening? You know, it doesn't make any sense to me, you know, I, like I said, we really take pride in our controvation ethics and stuff. And so again, maybe thirty years from now, Oh yeah, farrow horses are a bad idea. Let's get rid of them, yeap?
What will your what would be a perfect scenario for you, like if you think of a if you think of a a wild tribally owned buffalo herd and when river, what would be a number if you like, what would be a number of animals that would be plausible.
For buffalo herd?
Yeah?
Oh, it'd be in the thousands, you think so?
Oh yeah, you could have heard it would rival the size of Yellowstones.
Oh yeah, we'd have an area, we have areas big enough that we could manage to We could migrate from south of the Big Wind and head north into the out Creic Mountain. Range and stuff and then come back. You know, they'd have enough room to roam a lot of that area. You know, a couple thousand buffalo would be a lot better than ten thousand four horses. Sure, man, And you know how good you know, you know what buffalo, how good they are for an environment and how they bring back the forage and make everything better. You know it would if we could get those numbers up and release them and start moving buffalo right away. I think our forage and our landscape would turn around and come back faster than what we're planning on doing with Fremont County Waton past spraying we drew and trying to grow back that that doesn't exist there anymore.
Yeah, how would you how would you get him? Are are you guys eligible to get park ones?
So right now Jason bald is doing a phenomenal job. He's getting like our own quarantine facility and everything else. I mean, this guy is killing it and bringing the buffalo back and doing a phenomenal job of bringing them back.
And so I think, and he's a tribal member, Yeah.
He's an Eastern Shoshoni tribal member, and then Northern Rappo. He kind of oversees both programs, Shoshoni's and a rappoles, and he goes after all the funding and it helps bring back purchase land and ranging. It's from barre Obnion first to manage his buffalo.
Got it. And when you have if you were to have tribal members become producers too to sell in, that would be a totally separate program or where the two programs kind of meld in some way.
They'd probably kind of meld in some way. I mean we we would definitely have to kick back in Barobini infairs to help manage that. And I'll oversee everything stuff, make sure the range units, defencing, everything is protected and belt right.
Yeah, but there are guys that maybe do beef now that would would like to go into that market.
There's a few that we know of. Yeah, we've been in conversations with a few. Because I also have to do a lot of work with the livestock producers on the reservation too.
Yeah, does a does a livestock producer on the reservation does he have to buy does he have to lease grazing rights from the tribe least.
Graze rights in different range units. So there's like ninety something different range units on the reservation. Some are shared, some are just wow one producer.
But yeah, uh, help me understand this, this this question for both of you. How do you how do you feel.
Like?
If I say, what do you think? If I say Indian? What do you think? If I say Native American? What do you think? If I say indigenous? Am I saying all? Is to use it all the same word? Or is there a way that you'd prefer for not how you talk about you? Is there a way you prefer me to talk about you to you? To Randall like, is there a word that I say that You're like, uh, disappointed that I would say that word? Not to me, no, but to him.
If I said talk, if you were having a private conversation with between you and random, and he would say, do you mean Indians or Indians?
What are you talking about?
What type of Indians are you talking about? Whereas if you say, I'm we're talking to some an indigenous couple today she's from South Dakota and he's from Wyoming, or two Native Americans coming, I.
Mean, that's that's better.
The better way I would say, I don't know you're going to talk to me you're going to talk to nobody.
No not, I mean I can't, but I'm asking asking you.
I mean, if you didn't realize where your audience was, like who is standing behind you as you were saying it? How would you say it? You know, that's that's your internal compass telling you how you should address people.
Sure, yeah, uh, I think what could like where I find confusion about and the reason I'm asking and I think, I mean and I can tell you, I can promise you in my world, the confusion and sort of apprehension is widespread, right because you you'd hear, you know, you hear a politician and your tribal members say Indian country. I would have a very hard time saying I was over an Indian country, like I just I don't know. That strikes me somehow.
It's more of the the historical commonplace that it's been called Indian country if you think about it in terms of what it actually is. They're more of in tournament camps. And we're still living on federal land that is given to us, and we're gonna call it and the and the federal government's gonna call it Indian country.
Yeah.
Well, even on every old map that you see. I mean every in the history books, you know those lines everything is Indian Country, and then then you have the names of the different tribes and stuff there. So through through history it's always been called Indian country, you know, through the wars and everything else.
Yeah, I had uh, I guess I find myself casually saying like, like random, I will be like Indigenous Native American Indian. It's just like, you know, yeah, that's what I want to say. You know, I'm just asking do I want to know?
Absolutely? Thank you for asking?
Yeah, okay, that's my next question. Does it bother you that I'd ask?
No, it's more surprising. It's more surprising that somebody would ask. Somebody did ask.
Well. I could also see you thinking, do I really have to tell you this?
Yeah? I think for us, you know, because we're right, we're we're working on historical projects, right, and I think our best practice has always been, like, when you can specify someone's individual identity or their tribal identity, that's that's the best practice, right, and recognize that person and who they are. But a lot of times when we're going through primary sources, you just get a reference to you know, we saw an Indian, and so you're sort of left maybe guessing as to who that is. But it's just something that we run into in the work that we do in terms of our writing projects.
Yeah, we've even put that sort of clarifire and we did one we did a American history piece on the deer skin trade of the Eastern Seaboard and Appalachia, and that was called like the Long Hunters, and it was seventeen sixty three to seventeen seventy five, and it focused on the deer skin trade. In explaining the landscape, like how we're going to talk about it, we talked about where possible identify like the individual, where possible identify the tribe. But oftentimes when dealing with descriptions of written record, it's just there is no tribal identification right and right now we're working on one about the Mountain Man era, which is like the beaver skin trade. So the height of like the height of the beaver market, which we kind of bracket off as being I don't know, it's a hard The end bracket is eighteen forty. The beginning bracket is like somewhere around eighteen four eighteen ten. Like the height of the beaver skin trade when these were incredibly valuable and there was this big push of people into catch beavers, trade for beavers. We again say that we try to use tribal identification like like who, but at times like we get in this thing like this one guy in his journal, it's just Indians. So we'll point out like, no idea, what who he's talking about.
Well, you'll have to let me know. I have a strong familial background in the trades of the beaver trading, the fur traders and stuff.
Oh, really tell me about that.
I my ancestors are were a couple of French trappers who married Lakota women and they came from Saint Louis. Yeah, Antoine and Nicholas Denie. So so part of the history of it is Antoine Antoine Jennie actually homesteaded in the Pewter Valley and near Laporte by Fort Collins. His cabin still stands, and he was moved by the cavalry back to the Pine Ridge Reservation him and his brother Nicholas, and Nicholas as my direct descendant. So yeah, they both married Lakota women and they both died on the Pine Ridge. Indian reservation.
Really, Oh, we'll keep her eyes peeled.
Yeah, tell me the names again, Antoine and Nicholas Denise.
Okay, And then what is uh so on your on the Aglala Sue side of your family? What was the like when you go back to like matriarchs, what was your family's name.
They did it?
I guess like like maid however you think of like what the equival of maiden names or whatever.
So some of them there's a there is a correlation of a descendant to the one of the wives. And I can't remember if it was Antoine's or Nicholas's wife was the niece of Red Cloud, of chief Red Clouds, So I guess that kind of.
Correlation because it's not like a like in the culture, there's not like a last name structure, right, right.
A lot of them come from the different chiefs, like my found on the Northern Rapples, right, we all come from Cheap Friday. So when I I'm related to every Friday on the reservation, and I'm related every handway, and I'm related to pretty much almost everybody on every rapper when reservation.
But with the Rappo too, there wasn't a you know how like like we track like a family tree or like generally you go like we're sort of patrilineal in name, meaning it's like this this series of fathers names and maiden names fall away and and native culture in the western tribes we're talking about there's not a way by a name. I mean, if we talk about red Cloud, we talk about crazy Horse, there's no thing in the name that travels on the captures your your your ancestry. Correct, Okay, each person takes an individual name that doesn't carry with it who like who your dad was, who you're was, right.
Yeah, that's a colonial structure.
And we didn't see on my side, we didn't really start seeing ours until.
Paul Bridger.
Uh, my grandpa's brother was named Paul Bridger after uh Bridger, the famous Yeah.
Jim Bridger. Jim Bridger married his third wife was Shashone and so.
Like my my oldest brother, his name is Bridger. You know, you don't hear that somebody was born in the early seventies and stuff, but he was only one round forever. Now that's kind of a common name.
But there's a lot of Bridgers in the Shoshone.
Well, just in public anywhere, even off the reservation.
Because around here everybody's you get kids. They people named their kids their first names Bridger. You guys got people whose last.
Name was and then and when river uh uh. Riverton area is one of the bigger Ronnie Boos sites that ever used to happen, and so we used to have a lot of Ronnie Boos there and now it was a Shoshonies rapples Cheyenne, So everybody used to come there for rendezvous. And so trapping was pretty big in the area. And I grew I remember growing up trapping weaver bobcats, everything else. You know, growing up, we didn't have cell phones or anything else to do back in the day.
Are there many tribal fur trappers left.
No, it's really decreasing. It's sad to see. I mean, it's something that a lot of us grew up seeing and stuff. And as you see the generations of people leaving, it's it's kind of declining pretty fast.
Is that right?
What you said?
There is an interest from in hunting from the younger members.
Yeah, yeah, they're definitely a big interest. Well, we we're doing a lot of work, So I got I hired a youth coordinator to go in and make efforts and to get into the youth involved. And so we teamed up with a nonprofit to help sponsor fly fishing and any different fishing events or we put on huge classes, and so we just wanted to get involve the youth some way, somehow, to protect to have a passion for the outdoors and our natural resources. You know, we're just trying to prepare for the future so when we're all gone, that somebody comes and takes our place and then all the tools they need to succeed.
Is already there and they care about the place.
Yeah, I mean you do not. You're not gonna be in charge of your natural resources and do a good job if you don't care for it.
You know, how are predators managed, coyotes, etcetera.
There's no I mean, we have a wolf season. There's no nothing on coyote or mountain lions or anything else. We have a black bear season, but still, I mean, we might get a handful of black bears harvested every year.
How many how many wolves does anybody getting after? Do you got any guys that like to hunt wolves?
A lot of guys that like to hunt wolves. The harvest one doesn't happen.
Sounds like you don't have a high harvest rate. Did you have first?
We've never had one harvester during our seasons.
Wow, how long is your season?
It's uh January till February.
Do you know if guys that try calling, Oh yeah.
They try to everything. The unique thing about the I mean we don't when you go to different areas and you see different areas the wolf population is just blowing up. It's grown. You know, our is not really blowing up or going getting out of control. Even though we have less pressure on wildlife and hunting and everything else and uh big herds of wild game, elk, mile deer, unlimited white tail. We just don't have that population growth on and around the reservation. And so when we deal with grizzly bears and stuff, we know the population is growing. We see them all the time. We see them on every child camera, we see mountains on every child cameras. But we do not have the issues that the state does just on the other side of that boundary, on the other side of that creek.
How many grizzlies do you guys think you have at any given time.
It's so hard to determine. I mean it, I'm seeing them more and more every year and places we've never seen them before.
It's closer to ten or closer to one hundred.
Well, I'm closer to fifty.
That splits the middle of it. So maybe about fifty. And here's the crazy thing. If you guys wanted to and you had to try, you could. I mean, there's nothing legally preventing a tribal member from hunting a grizzly right because the Dangered Species Act wouldn't legally restrict you.
That that does still cover uh, eagles and migration migrating birds and is covered under.
Also EESA that in Dangerous Species Act does apply to tribal lands. Yes, huh does that ever create a pain point for you guys for management or is it not an issue?
Not an issue?
I had no idea.
I mean, there's well it would actually be to that point where it is an issue where we might have the population double one and issue attacks and stuff. But I don't even think we have one record attack on the reservation with human and grizzly bears.
How about how about livestock loss? A few not a huge problem.
Well, it's so hard to determine what killed livestock. Is it a wolf? Was it a lion? Because you know what birds I come in and take over and eat on it anyway.
Yeah, so you can't go by who's standing there when you get there. Yeah, this is going to be a bear.
Yeah yeah, you know. I mean if you ever watched wolves and stuff, sometimes they just kill for fun. They don't kill to eat and to manage a herd or anything. They just kill for fun. You know. We we've watched them take down elk and mildeer and just leave them and then the kylets and wolves bears will come in and finish, you know, eating the animal, eating on the carcus.
We do a podcast. We do limited releases of a podcast for kids, and in it, in one of the sections we kind of explain different history or biology things. I was making a list of stuff for upcoming episodes with Krinn the other day of thought about but did not include, and now I might put it on. There is the surplus killing. When predators go a little gangbusters, they get a little carried away, not in their mind, but in our minds. To get a little carried away, I don't know what's in their mind.
That's all subjective in their minds, appropriate amount of to kill in their mind.
This is what I do.
Yeah, we spend a lot of time with the youth with gun safety, ethics about a hunter safety survival just and we take we take travel youth hunting game one. We'll go out with them and we'll go out and try to harvest some milk and stuff like that. But we spend a majority of our time with ethics and gun safety and so you know, with the fishing, we bring in trotting a classroom, we take them ice fishing just and stuff. Oh yeah, we do a lot. We ended up taking fifty trouble youth to an ice fishing event reservoir one of the big areas where we removed feral horses and on the way up all we've seen was mule deer or herd elk and then on top of the big herd of sheep and all the kids are out there kitchen and ice fishing, kitchen cutthroats all day long. Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, how many kids you think are participating in your program right now?
I bet because we're in every tribal school and there's four tribal schools out there, and we're trying to reach out to the surrounding state schools that have house trible youth and them, well, we're probably working with around three four hundred kids, yep. And so with that success, we decided to start up a female tribal female program too, And so we're doing anything with tribal females. Yeah, we get them outdoors hiking of any age, any age, and any tribe will take on any tribal female to come on and join us.
That's great, man, it's really cool with the kid program that you can see that you would be able to grow. I mean, because you guys got a good resource, you got a good management strategy. The landscape is getting better with the absence of horses that you'd get that you'd have more and more tribal kids get introduced to going hunting.
You know, we got trouble youth making their own YouTube videos and stuff. Kids outdoors and they're starting their own fly fishing clubs, their own fishing clubs and stuff like that. Yeah. No, it's it's it's going really good.
That's great.
That's awesome. Congratulations.
Thanks.
Uh, we can talk about more, but I don't know, I would love to see some of that. I mean just hang out and check it outll be cool.
Oh yeah, I'm gonna we put everything on social media on our stu's showing rapp with Trouble Youth page and.
Okay there is a place. Yeah yeah, and then good luck with the Buffalo program. That sounds exciting.
Yeah, we are. We're all excited about it. I mean, I'm sure there's a few livestock producers worried about and stuff, but is that right? Yeah, with trouble fishing game, broken interference, we plan on making it work for both ends, you know, I think I think we can sustain and both the.
Yeah. So you have a you have some producers that are worried about the loss of grazing lands, Yeah, got it. How will how will the conflict like that resolve?
Either the Buffalo program will come in and you know, pay more for those leases and stuff and then start managing them better. But that's one of the issues that we're working on now, is how how to compensate for those producers lost.
When when you mentioned that you would do it through the tribal council, can you quickly lay out what that means.
So there's Eastern Shoshoni, Northern rap Pole they have their own different programs, tribes operations they have to manage every day on a day to day basis, and then they have to come together a few times out of the month to manage law and order codes, tribal fishing game. What else is there? Just like three other different programs that they transportation and stuff that they have to manage together. And so it's a joint effort for both tribes to work on to manage a lot of the natural resources on the reservation.
Have you ever been a console member?
No?
That is that like at Hot Hot I mean it's a politician job. This job I have is a politician job, and I've only wanted to be a game warden. That was the highlight of my career. It was, you know, you'd wake up and I got two million acres? Where do I want to go today? And you go seem with some of the best natural resources in the lower forty eight.
You know, I forgot to ask you about that earlier when you were a game when you were doing work as a game warden, what would be a common like I don't imagine because you guys have allocations and game allocations, you're probably not out busting tribal poachers, right few, Yeah, there's something be an example.
Of that hunting outside of the regulation time.
Yeah.
Oh I see, So even though you've got a good elk allocation, you're not you're out hunting in the summer.
Right Yeah. All that and then overharvesting bulls. I mean, you know, we got phenomenal trophy animals and so you know you already punched your tag while you punched another one, are trying to get another one?
Or waste?
Yeah? Waste? You know, you just take the antlers and not the meat and stuff, and you know it happens everywhere.
The same old stuff as anywhere.
Yeah, did you get.
When you were were a game warden, did you guys have like a constant kind of working relationship with the wyoming game wardens that kind of surround the work the surrounding area, like if things were going on like near the border, like people were where they weren't supposed to be where you like, do you have guys you'd call up.
Like you had a working relationship with them?
Oh?
Yeah, yeah, I mean we're all on the same if you're not anything aout law enperson, I kind of worked together as a team and then a lot of us like me and the other wardens are from Bia, were open interfairs police officers, and so not only with the state wardens and everybody else, but with the FBI, Pemmut County sheriffs, you know, land of Police, Proton police, and everybody else. And so it's kind of good to have that network and a small popular area like that, so we can communicate and eliminate a lot of these big problems.
So if you're when you're if you're a tribal member and you're for you're fulfilling the role of a game warden on reservation land, and you catch a tribal member in violation, is it the same old thing? Liked be like, depending on the severity of the crime, there's a financial fine, there's like a loss of privileges. Like does the sort of toolkit of enforcement look similar.
Yeah, yeah, it's that's well, we have criminal jurisdiction over tribal members, any tribal member, any recognized tribal member in the United States, and so we can prosecute through able court. And then we have have taken hunting rights away for five years we've had you know, it's a lot of the same. I guess we didn't really invent the will, but we kind of mirrored off of what the state was doing.
Like you can confiscate equipment, like all the kind of yep, normal things that would happen if you do something real bad.
Yeah.
Yeah. Is there anything I didn't ask about that you wish we would have asked about?
Not really?
I mean, is there anything I asked about you wish I hadn't asked.
You?
Or no?
I mean, if there's anything else you know. Uh, there's a lot of information out there that people don't know about reservations, and in particular Wind River Reservation and stuff.
And I think I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say that, myself included. I don't know shit about reservations, right. You know, they're over there, they're over there, you're driving along. This is all.
Well, and a lot of it too, is a lot of bad press. What you see on reservations. We don't get a lot of good press of some of the success that we're we are having and what we are doing. I can tell you one thing, the success of removing fur horses has gone pretty big in the state of Wyhoming. A lot of non native support of what we're what we're doing, and a lot of conservation efforts and and and giving out information to everybody but any other states and other tribal programs, other state programs, other agencies and stuff to see the results of the comeback of natural resources from removing for horses. That's one of the best positive feedbacks I've ever got working for the tribes.
Yeah. Well, I'd like to give you more positive feedback on the youth uh programs. That's exciting.
Yeah, and we just wanted to grow and get bigger.
Yeah. Man, And again, good luck on the buffalo thing. That's great.
Yeah, come down anytime. We're only six hours away.
Come look around, visit. But you can get.
That's a different thing.
That's all protected.
I was.
I was recently down at Zooni Pueblo in New Mexico, and I went out with those guys and uh, you know, they were out hunting and yeah, they're like, not even a rabbit, buddy.
Sorry. I don't get to hunt there either. I've lived there most of my life. I don't get to hunt there either.
That right, Oh wow, yeah, oh really you can't get her past you guys are married.
I can go with him. There's a spousal permit that I can be on the mountain with him and stuff, but I can't hunt. Yeah, huh.
Me and the kids are en ropes. We don't let her shoot anyway.
I just help them pack out their meat. That's what I'm there for. And then they have to get me to go, because all do you guys want me to do is pack up meat.
Do you guys eat a lot of wild game?
That's all we eat?
No beef. We don't know rais any beef.
We don't raise any beef. I come from a strong family of cattle ranchers and stuff. But at once I married him. That's all we've ever eaten and stuff. We have a freezer full of elk, and I'll buy I'll buy chicken occasionally.
You know.
That's a conversation household to my kids will be like my chicken?
Did you see that? More?
All right?
Man? We want to thank both. If you're coming on, this has been real educational. I appreciate it.
Thank you, thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.