The Indicator from Planet Money - The echo of the bison (Encore)

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Nearly 30 million bison once roamed North America, from modern Canada to Mexico. In the late 1800s, white settlers and the U.S. military annihilated the population of bison, bringing these creatures to the brink of extinction. The consequences for the people who relied on the bison were dire — and still being felt today. In an episode that first aired in August 2023, we spoke to one economist who reveals the shocking numbers about the destruction of the bison, and one member of the Blackfeet Nation who is trying to bring them back.Fact checking by Sierra Juarez. This episode originally aired Aug. 21, 2023.Your Next Listen –Blood, oil, and the Osage Nation: The battle over headrights –Over 2,000 episodes in our archive on the NPR AppConnect with The Indicator from Planet Money –The Indicator newsletter — a weekly roundup of news, ideas and staff picks. –Instagram, TikTok and YouTube –Find the Planet Money book –Find the Planet Money game, Sell Me A Sasquatch, and other merch at the NPR Shop! Support public media by subscribing to NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hello, indicator listeners. We'll be back tomorrow to tell you about the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Today is Indigenous People's Day, and we're re-airing our show from 2023. It's about the near total destruction of bison herds by the U.S. military and white settlers in the 19th century, and the dire consequences for native populations who relied on them. You'll hear our host, Darian Woods in this episode. He's been on book leave, but he'll be back with us in a few months. Enjoy.

NPR. Right at the top of Montana is a stretch of land bigger than Delaware. It's the Blackfeet Reservation, and it's bordered by the Rocky Mountains shooting up on one side and wide open plains on the other. And it's there that Irvin Carlson lived on his grandparents cattle ranch in the 1950s and 60s. I grew up ranching. It taught me to work hard, to be able to work hard and for a living and work ethics. a good way of growing up. But across the reservation,

across Blackfeet Nation, work was scarce. I didn't see a whole lot of jobs. There was a lot of unemployment here. Not a lot of opportunity for all of our people here. And new evidence has found that the persistently high unemployment in Blackfeet Nation is particularly severe among indigenous nations that once relied on one animal. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darym Woods.

Today on the show, the devastating story, the numbers tell us about the people once reliant on bison. Don Fair is an economist at University of Victoria in Canada, and a few years ago, Don was working with a couple of other economists on a research project that involved trying to estimate how well-off indigenous North Americans were in the 19th century. But economic data was pretty hard to come by for that time. One measure of economic well-being, perhaps a proxy for income, was how tall people were back then. We knew about this data that was collected

in a very ambitious initiative by Franz Boas, who's a famous physical anthropologist on the biological height of about 15,000 Native Americans across North America. So we found it, the data, and required it. And when we started to do the analysis, that's when we saw major declines in height. So that is when it started to really hit us

that this was a disaster. The disaster was the loss of bison. For over 10,000 years, many peoples in what's now known as North America had relied on bison. 30 million of the creatures stretched from Canada all the way down to Mexico. And to people like Evan Carlson's ancestors, the bison or the American buffalo were family. It was a part of their way of life. Buffalo were, they were everything to us to actually our economy. Buffalo was our lodging, our clothing.

our food, tools, parts of our ceremonies. That's how we survived. Was on Buffalo and with Buffalo. And when Don Fair looked at that height data, they saw that the people who hunted bison had a massive height advantage in the 19th century. They're among the tallest people in the world, taller than Europeans or other indigenous groups

who weren't reliant on bison. About two centimeters on average, taller. About an inch. About an inch taller than the... European counterparts. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. No, no, no, these were very tall people. That height was because of good nutrition in their childhoods, but those advantages started to slip dramatically in the 1870s. In 1871, there was a change in European tanning technology, but all of a sudden made bison hides commercially viable in Europe when they hadn't actually been

before. So this change in technology created, I mean, you might have heard of a gold rush, well, this created a hide rush. And settler hide hunters flooded to the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain regions, where the bison were in the thousands and slaughtered the bison and the millions. There's really horrific stories, and I'm sure many people have seen classic images of settlers standing next to a pile of bison skulls, far taller, three times taller than they were. And in some areas of the country, there was more violence,

so you might know the Indian Wars. once the U.S. military realized what was happening to the nations when they were losing the bison, the American military started to participate in its slaughter as well. And then it became an intentional destruction. So depending on the region, we went from millions of bison to virtually none or a few hundred within five, ten or twenty years. So this is a very dramatic change. Livelihoods for nations like the Blackfeet vanished. Some communities had to eat their wharf.

They ate rotting food. Some even ate old clothing. And other economic options were limited. I mean, for one thing, the U.S. government restricted indigenous people's movement well into the early 20th century. And getting bank loans to start a business, well, that was challenging. And Don could see this in the health data. There was increased child mortality, signs of maternal distress. People born after the slaughter and during the slaughter started to be. much shorter than their ancestors who had relied on the bison. And in fact, by the end of the slaughter, the indigenous people who had been at least like an inch dollar actually lost their entire height advantage. The U.S. government would end up providing food and other support and encouraged nations

like the Blackfeet to get into farming. The nations themselves also collected bison bones to sell a fertilizer. But Don and their co-authors found that these initiatives didn't bring bison-reliant people back to where they were economically compared with other indigenous groups. When we started to do the analysis, that's when we saw the major declines in height, right? So that is when it started to really, really hit us, that this was a disaster. I mean, you know it's a disaster, right? It's a near extinction of a brilliant creature that societies relied on. That beyond that, you could actually see in the data the impact was having on indigenous people. And once we saw that, we knew that we had to tell the story because the data wouldn't

deny it. And beyond that, we were able to show all the way until today, statistically controlling for many other factors, by some nations today, their income is at least 25% lower than that of all other indigenous nations in the U.S. You saw how this could reverberate to today, and that seems like an extraordinary finding. You know, it's actually not, many economists have actually started to show that the distribution of economic activity today doesn't rely on modern fundamentals only. So history can impact the development of regions, right? So many economists have showed this in other contexts, features that were important for economic development historically, like, you know, for example, like water routes for trade, right? Those have an impact on where cities form.

Even though you no longer use much of the time anyway, the water and transportation like we used to, they can still shape passive development through agglomeration, right? If people are there already, more people are going to go. I guess that's why I'm in New York is because of an agglomeration that once was driven by the ports and the Erie Canal that no longer is as important. Exactly. And again, New York isn't going anywhere just because their importance declined over time. So there's something similar going on here, but what we're talking about is actually the loss of a resource. It influenced desirability of people both to go to the use. regions. So if there was very little economic activity happening, other people wouldn't necessarily

go there to trade, because what are you going to trade, right? It didn't have to be this way, but it has history played out such that this shock has persisted. But it didn't have to. If you had access to other resources to respecialize your economies like access to banks, you might have been able to recover. Don and their co-authors find that the nations that had more banks in their territories fared better. They were able to borrow and invest. and say new factories. Back in Blackfeet Reservation, there is hope for the future. Irvin's been working to bring back bison.

They have a herd of about 800 that are mostly managed similar to a cattle ranch. It's a big thing with us nowadays, and even helping economically, of them helping take care of us in a new way as they did in our beginning. Earlier this year, Irvin helped with an effort to release bison. to roam freely in the mountains. That was the greatest success. That meant a lot to me. It was a very moving time

for a lot of our people that were there after so many years. Seeing that release back onto their homelands was very, very emotional and very welcome. This episode was produced by Brittany Cronin with engineering by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez.

Kate and Canon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.