The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 620: Tribal Rights and Feral Horses on Wind River

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

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 Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meat. We've got a new book coming out in the meat eater universe and for the first time it is not one of mine. Instead it's my colleague Danielle Pruitt's. Yeah Danielle the founder of Wild and Whole. It's called Meat Eaters Wild and Whole. Seasonal recipes for the conscious cook and it's an ode to cooking seasonally with wild and foraged ingredients. Now let's get to

what you'll find in this book. This cookbook contains more than 80 recipes inspired by what you can hunt, fish, forage or grow in your garden each season. Often Danielle will pair her ingredients to reflect both the hunting season and the growing season. So her turkey cutlet is combined with springtime morels. Her Gulf Coast redfish with summertime sweet corn. She cooks venison with pumpkin for a tasty fall stew. If that all sounds

complicated, trust me it is not complicated. Danielle has a knack for creating recipes worthy of a five-star kitchen, but accessible to two-star cooks. And you'll come away armed with techniques that will make you a better cook all around. This book is also beautiful to look at with gorgeous full-color photographs that inspire you to take a real hard look at your kitchen's output. It's Meat Eaters Wild and Whole Seasonal Recipes for the Conscious Cook by Danielle Pruitt. It is out now and it's available at TheMeatEater.com or wherever books are sold. This is the MeatEater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

The MeatEater podcast. You can't predict anything. The MeatEater podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.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 had all kinds of fishing game people from the states right we've never had a tribal fishing game official and people learn a lot about how this works and will probably in a lot of people particularly in the eastern United States will be surprised about

the level of sovereignty on large tracks of Western lands for reservations. Arthur, do people call you Arthur? Art. Do you call you Art? Yep. And you brought along your wife Renee? Yep.

Okay. And Arthur, you're Northern Arapaho, but you married a Sioux woman. Oguala. Oguala Sioux woman. Oguala Lakota, yep. 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 call ourselves an arranged marriage. Was it common for Northern Arapaho before you two met? Was it common that Northern Arapaho would marry a Glawasu?

Was that like a common union? Yeah, actually we have a long history of the Northern Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Lakota people summering together and, um, 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 a Custer and it's all Custer's guys and their kind of moment of death, you know, at the little bighorn battlefield. And then down the hill, you can see the large encampment. Were Northern Arapaho present? The Northern Arapaho, the Cheyenne, and the Sioux were there too. And then the, is it, I've always wanted to hear someone who actually knows, pronounces, is it unk papa Sue?

Honk poppa sue honk poppa sue and you're a galala sue Crazy horse was a galala sue right? Okay, say it again. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, got it And uh, and you were brought up on the Pine Ridge reservation. No, actually we were not. Okay. I'm sorry I I was born there, but 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. I see. And help, you know, help with the cows and stuff. And so my parents own a ranch on, um, out in Canary, Wyoming. And, um, and then we met each other and he went to school out in Canary, um, and just been there ever since. And what'd you study in school art?

Well, I first started in, um, 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, all we knew in central Wyoming. And so I left, went to Denver, Colorado for a while and then moved back home to the reservation and your reservation We're to get into the don't sweat if you're at home wondering about the whole fishing game thing We're gonna get to that but but Wind River reservation

One was a couple 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 Big Horn River One of the couple 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 Big Horn 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 Shoshone tribe in with the northern Arapaho

So they put the northern Arapaho northern rapper were further south in Colorado. Oh, I'm in those different areas there's during the winter They were pushing northern rap holes back East, Oklahoma winter they were pushing northern rap holes back east Oklahoma. Now on the way up there's a Sand Creek massacre where the Calvary killed a bunch of tribal members and they pushed them up north and then for the winter they landed on the winter of our 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 gonna live with the Shoshone's and you're gonna be 50% owners of this reservation Well, how did the Shoshone's take that? At first probably not too happy He's also it's like okay. You have this well now you now you don't. So right before, a couple years prior to that, the Eastern Shoshone Reservation was only 30 million acres long. Now, four years later, it was down to two, two and a half acres.

And then a couple years after that, then they moved in the Northern Arapaho tribe to live with them and then be part ownership of the rest of the reservation. And how many acres is it now 2.2 million? And it was how many at a time 30 30 million so that's roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park, right? And that's it close. Yeah. Yeah Had the had prior to Prior to the Sand Creek massacre what had been the relationship with the, the Shoshone in Northern Arapaho.

Traditionally, there were enemies. Yeah. Because the Shoshone were more like in the 1800s, the Shoshone were sort of more welcoming of white intrusion, right? In the Northern Arapaho had a history of being more resistant to white intrusion, like in the 1800s. Is that correct? Yes that is correct I mean they also went through their own massacres too and then they were stop population dropped radically

with the massacres and then they were placed onto the well then they started working with the non-natives and the Calvary and everything else becoming scouts and stuff because they were getting benefits of doing that and then until You know everything else happened the San Creek massacre and rapels showed up and then they just became Owners of one one landscape. Yeah how I'm gonna ask one last question. I'm gonna take a break from it and talk about pre chewed food You guys have kids? We do.

You ever, when they were little babies, did you ever chew up food and then hand it to them to eat? With elk meat. Yeah. We're going to get into that in a minute. Okay. So you'll know exactly what we're talking about in a second here. got it. We got it We're gonna touch on a couple things, but how Is this is I'm trying to think of how to put this question How much how Let me prep. I'm I'm getting there trying to think how to ask a semi sensitive question, but it's not terribly sensitive

And I'll start with this I hunted in not terribly sensitive. And I'll start with this. I hunted in, uh, I hunted turkeys down in Mississippi this past spring. Okay. And was surprised that, that like in wandering around in Mississippi, every day someone would mention the war 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. Cause 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

knee? Like are they, how much are they mentioned and 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 bring stuff up like that to show our sovereignty and we're our own nation and we can do things differently than what the US government has planned for us. And so, it comes up but we don't dwell on it. We talk about reservations, but traditionally, tribal tribes are not reservation Indians.

You know, we migrated with the 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. Yeah. So that's kind of the thing where, you know, we're not going to let anybody forget that the Sand Creek massacre occurred or that there were only women and elders and children when wounded knee 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. Cause our ancestors did so much for survived for so long for us to be here today. Yeah. And I don't think, um, you know, it'd be silly for someone to, to expect otherwise, especially when you look at like, like how thoroughly our culture memorializes

Catastrophes wars Right sacrifice, right? It's like totally baked into our culture But then it looks when you see a Nate 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, have you been to Arlington Cemetery? Have you been to Gettysburg? Like, this is not living in the past, you know?

When you were holding reenactments of those battles and stuff, you know? Yeah. Are you ready to talk about pre-chewed food? Sure. Hang on. This is what we're really here for. This is why we brought chewed food. 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,, we'd start 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 Durkin wrote in that his mom and paternal grandmother, 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 Durkin and his siblings thinking it was gross when she would preach you their food. And she called them 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, 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 meat and then put it on your plate. He was unable to locate, uh, he was unable to locate the skit. Dr. Max Kerr. I believe it's Max Kerr. Yeah. You know that everybody thinks that everyone knows ball jars, glass jars. Oh, yes. Yeah. They're kind of like the band-aid of glass jars right well a lot of people prefer Kerr jars care Kerr how do you say it K E R R

yeah my late friend and mentor Ron Lay from bald yeah Kerr jars 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 I We all missed that. I believe there's tuna for me somewhere. I haven't seen it. There is. I've got it for you.

You do? Yep. Where? In the freezer, like right outside. This is so off topic for us, but I'm going to get into it anyways. Because 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 regurgitate. How bad is chewing up your food? I always call that baby birding.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, we should. We had a conversation about cud chewing at dinner day or night. We should hit that on a kids segment. Kids podcast. Yeah, my one, one, I keep meaning to bring those pigeons down here, but the, Is that pigeon still shitting it on your foot? 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 have a nest and they have, they roost.

Like when you go up to our front door, it was like, what do you call it? When you got a little cover? Four years like in, yeah, that's a stoop. No stoop. I think is what you sit on. There's a covered entry and probably would say in the covered entry. And my wife needs to apologize to every person that comes through our door because they are standing in a mountain of pigeon shit.

She calls us the shit relas. Shit nelas. It's terrible. But when my kids were raising those birds up, like pigeons regurgitate, 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's saying And he's talking about, uh, he's a DDS 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. Baby should be chewing on all kinds of stuff. It's very important. which is the same as weightlifting, babies should be chewing on all kinds of stuff. It's very important. 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 bags. 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. can picture in the future a bunch of weak-jawed... I was reading, I read that article, I was fascinated by it. It was in the LA Times, I just couldn't stop laughing from a few days ago, it's incredible. It can stunt their speech development because they don't develop the right coordination. Yeah, there's just like, I'm not buying it. Sucking on babies. Listen man. You gotta talk to Dr. Max like guess it's 2010 eating those things non-stop into adulthood That's what's that's that's what you're saying is that people are you know came out? I started in the sons of bitches I think yeah, if that's all they ate, maybe this could happen. But like, 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, our pouches?

And they both were very dead serious. And they said, we only get one per day. Since 2010, pouch consumption, food pouch consumption since 2010 has increased 900%. But there was none. So it's like overtaking jarred puree as Yeah, I think it probably existed before 2010. So it was maybe... Too much, 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 in the Mad Max movies. And we were laughing the other day, Yanni, not a Mad Max fan, but I always like to point out Yanni used to drink a lot of the mother's milk.

So we had, we used to, my boyfriend 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 current makes. I think that means what else he got? Trying not to be judgmental, but curious. No, I just, yeah.

He probably has a really good immune system. Yeah. Yeah, he does. I think. It's friendly too. Wasn't there something? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He's very generous though. Wasn't there something about- Very generous of spirit. Like a ceremonial placenta consumption. Oh yeah, he did that. Did he do that too?

Yeah, I think he did. Put it in a pie or a lasagna or something? That's right. Yeah, I think he did. Which is like, pie or a lasagna or something? That's right. Yeah, which is like Yeah, that's right. We talked about this. It's like a way to have cannibalism. That's not bad Hang on guys, this will be over soon, I promise. These people are really starting to wonder about coming up here. Only one last thing to talk about Hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada and boy my goodness that we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and

Our raffle and sweepstakes law It makes it that they can't join whoo our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of you know Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, ONX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in ONX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater podcast. Now you guys in the great white north can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnez, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meat onxmaps.com slash meat Welcome to the to the onx club y'all We've got a new book coming out in the meat eater universe and for the first time it is not one of mine instead It's my colleague Danielle Pruitt's. Yeah, Danielle, the founder of Wild

and Whole. It's called Meat Eaters Wild and Whole, seasonal recipes for the conscious cook, and it's an ode to cooking seasonally with wild and foraged ingredients. Now, let's get to what you'll find in this book. This cookbook contains more than 80 recipes inspired by what you can hunt, fish, forage, or grow in your garden each season. Often, Danielle will pair her ingredients to reflect both the hunting season and the growing season. So her turkey cutlet is combined with springtime morels. Her Gulf Coast Redfish with summertime sweet corn. She cooks venison with pumpkin for a tasty fall stew. If that all sounds complicated, trust me, it is not complicated. Danielle has a knack for creating recipes worthy of a 5-star kitchen but accessible to 2-star cooks. And you'll

come away armed with techniques that will make you a better cook all around. This book is also beautiful to look at with gorgeous full-color photographs that inspire you to take a real hard look at your kitchen's output. It's Meat Eaters Wild and Whole Seasonal Recipes for the Conscious Cook by Danielle Pruitt. It is out now and it's available at TheMeatE eater.com or wherever books are sold. Brody, how quickly can you do your Colorado thing? I can do it quick. Okay. Do it.

Um, this popped up in my newsfeed, uh, Mancos, Colorado, Southern Colorado, um, bunch of angry town residents, uh, tore down miles of fencing that had uh, tore down miles of fencing that had barbed wire fence that, that a mysterious religious group had blocked off 1400 acres of national forest service land. For what reason? They claim they claimed it was theirs under the homesteading act, but the homesteading act was repealed what 50 years ago, 1970s everywhere except Alaska.

I think it went on for a while longer. And they had the Homestead Act at 1400 acres? They just said it was there. It doesn't really, yeah. There's no real legitimate basis. They're squatting on public land right? Oh 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 taxes. They're they're like a sort of a splinter group when Warren Jeffs got all the way. Yeah, the Free Landholders Committee, they call it themselves. Got it, got it.

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 anymore? No shooting, but it's a heated thing. 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 arresting anyone for tearing it down. How long ago was the fence put up? 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 tear it up. I think they're like, it's blocking access.

They hunt there, they fish there, they run motorcycles, snowmobiles, all that stuff. They're worried someone's gonna get hurt by the barbed wire fence. They're worried about the barbed wire fence affecting big game travel, stuff like that. But nothing's like, they haven't kicked these people off of the National Forest Service land.

It's got rid of their fence. Got rid of their fence and it's to be determined what's gonna happen, you know, if these people 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 newsfeed. 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. Starting November four is the last thing we're gonna talk about. Before we talk about what you're here to talk about. What are we talk about what you're here to talk about. What are we talking about? Starting November 4, we got a new show called Rough Cuts with me dropping on Outdoor Channel and Meater YouTube. So it'll 8 p.m. every Monday, starting November 4 and presented by Moultrie. Okay, we kind of covered off on that. What year, we covered off on the tribal history, but I want to back up now and get into this real good.

What year was, or roughly when was the Wind River Reservation established? reservation established that was established in 18 I think it was an 1860s okay is before the state of Wyoming even became a state 68 I believe 68 step on your toes but I did a little bit of research 1860 something yeah And at that time it was 30 million acres. For a couple of years. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it was two. Yep. It was like three. And then a few other things happened where Bureau Rec came in and a government agency started taking some land.

They opened it up for a homesteading for non-natives in the area. There was a reclamation act that came in where, um, uh, you'll hear about the, the Big Horn, uh, 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, um, 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? Yeah, no go ahead. Explain what BIA is. BIA is the Bureau of Indian Affairs, my bad, I'm just used to talking to everybody who knows what BIA is. Just for the audience, yeah. Yeah and then so the Bureau of Indian Affairs was run by non-natives and and when they came in they had the ability to sell portions of the land Anything around the rivers anything that would create and what with that money? It was theirs 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 Rec irrigation system on the Wind River Indian Reservation doesn't benefit any tribal member on the reservation, it bypasses a lot of the reservation, goes into the Riverton, into the Boystonons 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 time so you paid to have the water bypassed

problem how does how does today how does game fishing game management work on on your reservation and it in is that consistent with reservations at large in the west like like game management so every reservations different every landscape is different. On the Wood River Indian Reservation, the Shoshone and Rapport tribes have the authority to manage

their landscape and their wildlife, fishing wildlife. We use, we're one of the only reservations that use US Fish and Wildlife biologists on the 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.

I mean, the cooperation between the state and the reservation. Yes. And so we, we team up with them with a lot of our, um, grizzly bear studies, our mountain sheep, our big horn sheep, and everything else that we have on the reservation. You know, we want to, we're unique cause we really take, um, pride on our conservation efforts on the wind river and reservation. And so we team up with all these other biologists. And so we work hand in hand 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 was a bureau of Indian affairs police officer. So I was 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 to Wind River

Reservation and poached a bighorn, I'm in trouble not with the state of Wyoming, I'm in trouble with you. Well you're in trouble with Sivili, travel fishing game will come after you for your probably perfect credit score. Then we're gonna come after you federally with LACIAC 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, well, the tribe can charge you civilly and then the US Fish and Wildlife will step

in and charge you, probably with a felony case. That would come from the US Fish and Wildlife Service yes because I because there's a Lacey violation is is there a late it's a Lacey 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 natural resources but I'm with, this is such a rabbit hole, but I'm familiar 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 one reservation to the other. You're going through state land and everything else. So there's an interstate tag that you have to possess with your travels. Yeah. And on Wind River reservation, hunting there is tribal members only, correct? Yes.

And that also is different than, that's also managed differently on different reservations. Yeah, some reservations open it up to bring in funding to their programs and everything else like that. On the Wind River Indian Reservation, we're kind of stingy with what we got, but it's also a wintering range for a lot of the elk, mule deer, 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 so when we do

better the state does better with their wildlife. Yeah and and talk about what wildlife you have on the reservation. Oh we have we pretty much have everything Yellowstone has after 130 something years we finally got Buffalo back on the reservation which is huge that program that Jason ball does is doing this He's doing a really good job at it. And so we have grizzly bears wolves Wolverines Pronghorn mule deer elk big horn sheep. Yeah, you name it. We got it. No mountain lions black bears everything Yeah, everything now Not now probably a good number wolves. Oh, yeah

No, and uh, how does like for tribal members? What 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. It's pretty unlimited a huge number of whitetail deer. That's pretty unlimited. Antelope, nobody really hunts antelope on a reservation, so that's pretty much unlimited. The elk, each tribe.

That's not a popular animal for members to hunt? No, because we, I mean, each enrolled tribal member from both tribes gets four elk tags a year. You get three cow and calf tags, your rifle bull tag, and then you get your archery. How many people live on the reservation, and do you know how many are, like, whatever, active hunters? We have probably close to 15,000, 16,000 tribal members

from both tribes on the reservation, and we sell about 1 1100 to 1200 hunting permits a year it's it's not very much at all. How much is a hunting permit? Ten dollars for the permit seven dollars per tag for 132 bucks I think you can get 36 tags or something like that. And if someone 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 and cheaper limited there's a quota. We sell very few. That's a hundred dollars a tag. The moose quota, that's a hundred dollars a tag. Is that quota is that allotted through a lottery? Yeah. And so what we do is our mule deer, it's $50 trophy mule deer. The whole month of November you get to hunt that trophy mule deer. We do an entry fee to put your application in at the $10 fee and then we start at the beginning of the year and we release the information who drew in April later on in the year. That gives a chance for everybody to turn in their application.

We take that $10 and my program and other programs go out and we harvest elk and everything else or 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 33 families on the reservation elders and needy families okay what are the draw odds way better than state the tribal member will draw a bighorn sheep tag? It's, I mean, 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 troubled youth are putting in for their 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 got you have to wait three years and then then you

can draw again. Yeah. But now with, you know, the number of hunters coming up, it's harder to draw again. 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'm wondering if you can explain a bit more about the different philosophies between different reservations in terms of using, you know, non-tribal members as a source of funding. Cause 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 on the Hickorya. Yeah. Like white river. Like Manipat, 50 degree. Yeah. like white like a 50 yeah it's probably tag 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 Open 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 myself, I love the idea. You know, wait in line or being a populated area where you go on stateside, 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 400 vehicles on the state side, maybe one tribal member on our side. Yeah. Oh, cause they're hoping to pick up elk coming off your- Migrating back and forth. Gotcha. How does it, how does, uh,

so like for the state, a lot of the funding for wildlife management comes from licensed sales. Where are you getting? So the state, the state gets funding from the licensed cells. They get, uh, um, funding from taxes, from ammunition and stuff like that. The state has other different opportunities that they get different funding from. On the Winn-O-Rinnin Reservation, we don't have those same opportunities.

We don't get any tax money to help support tribal fishing game programs, and no Dole tribes do. So we get a lot of our funding through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We get a lot of funding through the sale of our fishing permits. We only allow fishing only on the Winnaturnan Reservation. And so we try to market that and use that to bring in more funding.

The US Fish and Wildlife steps in and helps out. And then 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? They're different. I mean, there's daily, weekly, monthly, and annually. And so for about like 190 bucks, you can get an annual fishing permit.

Okay. Does your tribe have, we had a Klingit woman on the show and we were talking about the Marine Mammal Protection Act and she is a sea otter hunter. The way the Marine Mammal Protection Act worked is they established 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 25%? Yeah, or more than, yeah. 25% 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 blood 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. Yeah. Northern Rapple. So if you get pulled over, you can show this to someone. And is that from, is that from the BIA or is is it from the okay our tribal enrollment office got you 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 Arapaho woman He's in trouble. His car got spiked. Pull his badge. Oh yeah, Northern Arapaho tribe. Arthur **** Lawson. Really? Yeah, that's an old age. We can keep that out. We'll believe it.

Oh, degree of blood. You're kidding me. Nope. What? Mm-hmm. There's a number on there too you know serial number it's our serial number it's so it's it's it's like being prisoners of war it's like being in a prison that car identifies identifies me, who I am, where I'm at. I don't know, I'll have to put it. It's like name, rank, serial number, right?

You gotta, if you consider like, your- Well, I'll just say this, like if, I do a lot of search and rescue missions on the reservation for native and non-native, right? And before 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. You've got it twofold. One is like, yep, I'm an enrolled member. These are my people, I'm enrolled, and 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 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 is was kind of the idea of it. So

colonialism was probably not the greatest thing 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. Do you, let me return to this, this hypothetical. Like I marry, I would marry a, a rap a woman on wind river. I don't become a tribal member.

Correct. No. Okay. But our, our, our children could potentially become, if your wife was more than was half, if 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 in. Yeah it's just and that's but that's specific on what tribe to correct.

Yeah it depends on each tribe. Because I thought I remember like the Cherokee had the Cherokee have a different blood quantum. Who sets that the tribes okay get a set their own during their treaty rights and dinner are working their treaties they got to choose how they wanted to manage their population and then there is no so they got they got to choose how they wanted the blood quantum to work have so in addition to that like they have if

like our children for example are mixed Northern Arapaho and Ogallala, 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. I got you. I was going to ask about that question. 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 Ogallala would only accept the Ogallala blood so I have some rosebud on my side, but because we're only enrolled in one, I only have Ogallala. That's it. That's it.

I'm not sure. Like, your other indigenous ancestry doesn't count to your Indian-ness? Right. 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 Arapaho counted all of it and stuff. So which great because you know what? You're indigenous, you're indigenous. 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?

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our Northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, ONX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in ONX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX, you're on the Meat Eater podcast. Now you guys in the great white north can be part of it, be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try on X out if you visit on X maps dot com slash meet on X maps dot com slash meet welcome to the to the on X club

y'all have you ever heard of a marriage have you ever heard of a marriage, have you ever heard of a marriage that like was good or people that were going to get married or that were that were that were going to have children but then the 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 a, is this like a thing that happens when people are finding mates and growing up?

Earlier, I mean, today's date, no, we don't hear of that, but you know, like my grandparents, my parents maybe, but not, you know, it's date, no, we don't hear of that, but you know, like my grandparents, my parents maybe, but not, you know, it's kind of. You sometimes hear of how they didn't want to, of some tribes didn't want to, 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 they're going to love you. There's a play about that Shakespeare. Who they can and can't divorce. Yeah. You know, you can't know. I have a Navajo friend who, though, made it a point. She would not marry anyone outside of, not just her tribe, but I think there's a smaller level of clan.

And they have clans. 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 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. I always, I mean, this is just a sort of a non sequitur,

but I'm always struck 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 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, is not history. It's, it's there in your wallet, right? Like it's, I don't know. I, 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 la-de-da 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. 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. That's what we Wildlife Management Authority, all kinds of other authorities, but let's talk about Wildlife Management Authority. Sovereignty, mostly. That's what we want to show the world, we have sovereignty. So you have sovereignty over this piece of ground, 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 you guys have done a bunch of work around this, is we have a thing in the U.S., we have the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act. Okay, I'm bringing this up because you spent a ton

of your career on this issue. We have the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act, which I'm gonna give a little background. Okay. If I screwed this up, feel free to correct me. It was in the seventies. Yeah. Um, 72 maybe. Yeah. So, you know, I'm gonna go way back. I'm not going to go back to when the earth's cross first solidified, but I'm gonna go back a ways. Uh, wild horses have been on the landscape of the American

West. Um, see now I'm at another crossroads. If Dan Flores was here, he'd want to be talking about the Pleistocene and ice age horses. I'm not going to go back that far in the 1600s. Um, horses in the 1600s, late, late, very late 1500s, 1600s, horses were brought by the Spanish to initially into Mexico. Um, a lot of those horses were brought up into New Mexico and those horses were proliferated across the West, both as, um as owned horses that 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... He's shaking his head. Feral horses. 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 as 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 since the 1600s. 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 could make pretty good money. And during that time, wild horse numbers got down low enough

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 1970s and they established a thing a careful what you wish for thing called the wild horse and burro 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 them. And some people like them. We hereby declare not only our wild horses, wildlife, you can not touch them. You can't kill them, Which is not something we've done for, we didn't do that for bighorns, 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. Heffelfinger shared with me, I can't remember where he did he write or where he got it, someone made like a man if horses were managed as 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, I that's so different reservations Very we don't know the exact numbers of how many other reservations that you know

We were sitting pretty close to 10 11,000 for horses on 2 million acres Well, you know actually less than that like a million acres because of that the Habitat area. Yeah, so I Think the last I heard Navajo Nation might have a hundred thousand. Yakama was pretty close to a hundred thousand. Feral horses. I've seen a lot of those because because of this, this is the last thing I say on the background, because of this little problem they created that they you can't hunt them you can't send them to slaughter what the 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 taxpayer money and pay those ranchers to house horses, which they truck from the arid west to, and I went to, I drove past a huge ranch that is nothing but a guy that makes his money. Baby sitting feral horses. Baby sitting feral horses.

It's just like a sanctuary. They don't use them for anything. They don't. We feed and water them until they die of old age. You know, the average cost in Wyoming, where we're from, for one horse is $9,000 a year. What? So the amount of horses that we removed, we figured we'd save taxpayers $72 million. Okay. With that big old setup now, that was my setup. Is that okay?

Well, how do you set that up? Okay. Now let's break off and talk about now 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, feral horses. So there's a lot of different issues with feral horses. I mean, it's our livestock producers, you know, our numbers of livestock 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 90 something range units, so we have 90 something producers and their herds are 10 to maybe 100. Hopefully they're at 100 making a little bit of money. You're talking like raising beef cattle. Yeah.

Tribal members who are producers. But with that, we also have a ton of wildlife. You know, we have huge pronghorn herd. We have a mule deer migrations. We have, we worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife in the state to bring in bighorn sheep into certain areas. Um, theervoir area, which is one area we really try to take care of and keep it pristine for the sheep population

to grow because sheep are also having issues. The mule deer are having issues. All of our wildlife are having issues. And then we're just seeing 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 cheatgrass back. And then in the winters where we had really bad winters, they were demolishing all the sagebrush habitat for mule deer, mule deer migration areas, and then the wintering areas for our mule deer. And then we started seeing a big decrease on sage-grouse and different types of birds

on the reservation. So our biologists 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 so with that, we came up with a plan where I threw in $100,000 where we were hiring tribal members.

So let's 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, 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 reservation So they could you could so you're totally you could totally live outside of the wild horse and burrow protection act Yes, no, but you could have built a slaughter plant if you wanted to

Could have but I don't know if we wanted to go that way you talking about non-native trespassing I think you know and so we we've started doing big roundups and removing horses and can you tell how you caught him well first we started catching them on horseback four-wheeler 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 five years old, how you catch them. So we'd purchase panels, we'd send out a few people on horses, a few people on dirt bikes or side-by-side four-wheelers and just try to push them down the alley and get them going one way and gather them. We're averaging like 20 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 gonna be our problem if you can't remove them because they're not gonna stay on the reservation if there's no feed. So there's no boundaries for horses or wildlife.

We could show that in our mule deer migration that they're gonna 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,

um, onto federal land, is that part of, is that within Wild Horse habitat, like what they call the Wild Horse area? There's a lot of fencing and there's a lot, I mean, there wasn't very many horses in those areas like that. So yeah, if they, if they left the reservation and went on to federal property, yeah, that's, then that's their problem. But we didn't have no problem with that. We'd push them all over there on that side.

You know? So the state chipped in and said, well, we'll help you out. And they gave us enough funding to remove like 1600 horses. And then Bureau of Indian Affairs stepped in and was like, this is a good project. Let's keep this going.

And so three years, we ended up removing 7,633 fertile horses off the Winter Indian Reservation. The results of that were overnight, overnight results. One area we removed 800 horses off this reservoir that was almost completely dry. I mean they just demolished that reservoir. Like they drank it dry. Yeah, so you know like your springs, 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 now the reservoirs would get so full of that by middle of summer They'd be completely dry and we had 800 horses on one reservoir the contractors pushed those out and We ended up catching half of those horses that day and then I mean the next morning at sunup We had it over 300 300 elk on that same reservoir.

Because the horses kick them out. Yeah, there's no national predator for horses. The grizzly bears won't bother them, wolfs don't bother them, mountain lions don't bother them. And elk don't like them. Elk don't like them, mille deer don't like them. I'm really excited to see the outcome of the mille-leer migration study that we're doing with the University of Wyoming. How if 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 for the summer, if now they have the ability to go anywhere they want on a reservation because they don't have to compete for food. Is there a situation where you gotta 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, that's, that's like overnight. I mean, you'll see five or six horses, you know, four years that, that number doubles just that fast. And so we, now that we've got to a managing level where we want to sustain between a thousand,

1500, Feral horses on the reservation. We want to do little roundups and do things like, uh, of the honor farm and everybody else is doing well, we could start breaking 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 backcountry outfitters in the fishing industry or we could break them and sell them. I use them for something. I mean, it's not like we have a mean heart and just want to go under and destroy this whole population of feral horses. But yeah, and we get it. There's a lot of people on the reservation and the state of Wyoming that

still use horses, but with technology and dirt bikes and side-by-side and for a little, you don't have to use a horse like you used to. And, and, and a lot of these horses, I mean, we had brands on them. The ones that we caught. That's why I rarely express. How, who had branded them? People from all over the United States. I mean we got brands from Iowa, Nebraska, just all over. From people dumping them. Yeah, people dump them. Yeah. You know, I years ago was working on a story about livestock theft,

like contemporary cattle rustling. And some of the stock detectives I was hanging out with made an interesting observation of me because I was asking about horse theft. And they said, when we had horse slaughter plants, there was Indiana, Texas had two, 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 was no outlet for lame horses, there was no outlet for old horses, there was a lot of drought that had driven down hay production and they were too expensive to keep and So people would just pull up at night and cut horses loose So 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 thieves on the reservation of stealing horses are the fur 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 the next thing you know, you got branded horses running around all over the road. And people are saying, well, I know they're not stolen because I seen or heard a fur horse running around. Got it. And it became such a big issue. I mean when I say fences and gates, I mean I'm

telling the truth. It became such an issue with that many ferro 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 as a tribal fishing game and the range unit with Bureau of Indian Affairs and stuff like that. 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 Homestake Pass okay and you pass through Butte, yeah, then you come to Rocker Montana. You know those little coffee kiosks? Yeah. On the vanguard of building coffee kiosks. I'm talking this woman had a coffee kiosk in the late 90s in Rocker, Montana. It 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 in Rocker, Montana.

She would buy horses for the Japanese market. She would buy good-looking meat horses and they would fly them on a C-130 to Japan live to be cut in Japan. And those those horse slaughter plants, was it Illinois or Indiana? There was two in Texas. There's I think there's one in Illinois. Didn't one blow up. I don't know, but it wasn't like they didn't become federally illegal. It just became impractical and pressured to close them. I think you guys,

I mean how open are you to a white guy telling you what you Indians are? I'm on the same page. I thought you Indians are? Myself you know you people ought to do Italians I've eaten horse the Italians make you know like they cure horse meat just like a lot of pork Etc 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 Cannon them and sending them to Europe I

Can't remember I got a friend. I can't remember, I got a friend, I can't remember what year this happened but he had to go to Uzbekistan 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 it so he just knows and he slams it but he did it with too much gusto. and he's just dreading it so he just knows and he slams it but he did it with too much gusto hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness that we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law Makes it that they can't join whoo our northern brothers get irritated. Well if you're sick of you know Sucking high and titty there on X is now in Canada The great features that you love in on X are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps

that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about ONX here on the Meat Eater podcast. Now you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the on X

hunt team some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex, Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. Onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX on X club y'all How many do you think you guys had on the reservation? Pretty close to 10,000. And what's a comfortable number? Thousand. Were some tribal members pissed because they could have gone out and caught horse 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 where a tribal member, if you're enrolled off our reservation, you can go out and 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 livestock trespassing. So if you're going to catch it, keep it, sell it, do whatever you want with it. So tribal members can still go out and catch as many as they want. Okay, but but that the incentive isn't strong enough for tribe like the economic incentive isn't great enough to keep up with the Put the production of the horses You're gonna spend more and fuel and food catching horses than you are gonna

Sell them and then I like I said the average cost for a horse in the state of Wyoming is 9,000 a year. You know, it gets pretty pricey for when I keep a managed horses. Yeah. So when you buy a horse, I mean, I'm not talking about reservation, but 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 20, $30,000. Yeah. And then the maintenance after that, I mean, you have to have pretty good hay, make sure they don't blow up and down. If you're spending that much money on a horse, you wanna make sure they're feeding right. So you're gonna pay top dollar.

Yeah. Then you gotta get your vet bill, you got brand inspections, you gotta, I mean, it's like owning a vehicle. You gotta take care of it. But 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, I mean, the horses that were branded, and then, you know, we, Thoroughbreds, I mean, some big livestock horse, you know, that they use for bareback and then, you know, we throw breads. I mean, some big livestock, or, you know, that they use for a bareback and everything, and horses that could barely get into our panels because they were so big. Yeah, there's, there's a chance. And you can tell the horses that were there for a longer time or smaller in

bread. Um, not very good horses at all. There's nothing you could have done. 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 work horse or a riding horse and that one will never, will never be able to tame that thing. That horse's has about the same size of his body. Yeah. You know, you know, yeah, I mean, you could 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 beautiful and coming in from a distance, and then when you get it to the trap or the panels, well, there's a brand. Yeah, that could be a pretty good horse. That's running with all these other horses. And you can tell, when you start dealing with the studs of those different herds.

The truly wild, wild ones. Yeah, the ones that had never been cut or anything else are mean Yeah, I mean they are aggressive baby You've seen a wolf or a mountain lion 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 and when we've seen studs kill other studs just Away with their teeth with their, biting, anything they can. Their hooves are so sharp.

Do you guys keep horses of your own? No. We used to. You're done with horses. Yeah, we're done. $9,000 a 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 them away. We gave them to Mexico, Canada, whoever wanted them would take them. We helped pay for the shipping and everything else. They paid for like the vet inspections and everything like that. It's not a money maker. We did the brand inspections. We used the state brand inspectors, state vets. We did everything legal. We documented everything and we did the process of shipping them off. Whoever wanted them could take them. If horse sanctuary is one of them, they could have them. As long as they didn't destroy our wildlife habitat, we really didn't care. 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 Burro Protection Act 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 and going. I did the presentation at the Sheep Zone Reno last year, and we had a lot of tribal programs and stuff there. And so, I mean, we're willing to help out

whoever went over any other nation. We're willing to help 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 real, there's no, it's not a moneymaker.

There's no profit into it. It's just. Yeah, if it was a moneymaker, it probably wouldn't have become a problem. It wouldn't have been, yeah. Yeah, I don't know, and like, you know, we talk about our conservation ethics. I mean, uh, you know, we talk about our conservation ethics. I mean, we were, when river was the first one with the wilderness act,

we were through our 1930s. We were before anybody else in the United States. You guys created a wilderness area. We were the first ones. The roadless areas. Yep. Can 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 have, can you say to him, listen, man, come get your horse. I'm not going to pay money to ship your horse to you. Your horse is here. Come get it. Oh, well, it will impound those horses. We'll get a hold of the owner to the brand inspection

to the state. Uh, we'll inform him, inform him that, you know, it cost me 250 bucks to catch this horse plus $40 a day for feeding water. So every day that we, we hold this horse while we're going to civilly charge you the amount that it cost us to House this horse and deal with it unless you want to come up to Wind River and sign off and saying that the tribes are ownership and then we could do what we want with it and And that's how it usually works most the time they just sign off on them Yeah, we have even pounded 22 23 certified quarter horses and the lady

ended up paying almost 25,000 to get them out in pound Wow how did they lose true I have a second quarter 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 loose. I mean, they got let loose and-

And she was like, good riddance. Grass is greener on the other side. And so, yeah, they ended up on the reservation and we impounded them. And they didn't come knocking saying, hey, I think my horse is around your place. I should try to go to find them. No, we had five semis and we were going to impound 86 pairs of cows, beef on the reservation

that somebody was trespassing on. And so it is an issue. I mean, cattle wrestling and everything back in the West we still there's still a lot of that going on on the reservation so Wind River made 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 Wind River Mountain between the tribes US Fish and Wildlife the Forest Service There was a it's such a unique area the the Wind River mountain ranges is so phenomenal and you know, they

Had a meeting about how do we protect this place? How do we keep this pristine? How do we keep it looking like the 1800s 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 go up to the fence line, the snow line of certain areas, you know, there's no 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, 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, our wilderness area is like, uh, 188,000 acres. That's great, man. That's huge. That's probably sheep country too. That's great, man. And that's huge. That's probably sheep country too. Yeah, sheep country.

Well, moose, mule deer, you know, those high country mule deer, a lot of elk habitat areas and stuff. Man, why I come hunt this place. Who do I gotta talk to? You gotta become reborn in a different. Well, I'm not going to talk to. You got to become reborn in a different... Well I'm not gonna marry you. You had a guy that did put a monetary value on a sheep tag, right?

Like they could be quite valuable. A few, yes. Especially at the sheep show. I mean we have where we house we take care of some of the biggest wild sheep herds in the lower 48 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 big horn sheep I mean it's

emovie pneumonia the disease that domestic sheep give to the wild sheep and stuff like that. Is there domestic sheep on the reservation or is it a mostly is surrounding the reservation on the state side there was a few domestic sheep back in the day but there's no value market right 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 hmm how many big sheep herds and stuff. So, how many big horns might be on the reservation at any given time at the right time of year? I don't know what the right time of year is, but a couple of

thousand. Okay. And they're using your land. Uh, they're using wind river winter or summer winter. I see. They start moving in in the fall and something like the big ramps, they don't even leave the area, they'll stay there all year. Uh, a lot of the use, uh, they migrate back and forth, different places. Yeah. And then, and also depends on predator

situations, wolves, 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 going to do, but we do have a good population of sheep. With your Buffalo program, are you trying to bring in sorta

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. Um, 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. Okay. Like, like we used to traditional. And then we also, uh,

there's a few producers that wanna go into the, um, the Buffalo market and the tribes already have, there's two few producers that wanna go into the Buffalo market. And the tribes already have, there's two herds right now, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Rappell 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 we live

history. What time of year does that happen? It happens in different parts of the year. We're actually gonna do another one here pretty soon. I think in a couple weeks. Would you ever let us come down and watch that? That, so to me yeah I mean that'd be great but I I get everything approved through both councils. I work for both tribes, and so I usually have to ask permission from them for approval for anything. Yeah, it'd be cool to talk to the kids and stuff who are involved. Yeah, I mean, our youth program that we do on the reservation is that we have more pride in that than we do catching our horses.

Do you have, do you have tribal members that come up and do the, um, the hunt out of the park here? Yeah. Yeah. Gardner. He did it one year too. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah. We're talking to big fan. Don't 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 shoot. Also, you're not a big fan. I didn't know if you meant you're not a big fan of that management strategy, but you mean just the experiences and-

Yeah. Yeah. I want to harvest buffalo. I want to go out and go earn it and work for it and then do it like we do elk or deer or everything else. Can I give a little background on this? And and then again you can correct me if I screw something up yeah good alright so we've talked about this bunch over the years but I don't mean if you go back to the I guess it'd be the late 90s Buffalo numbers and

Yelso National Park got up enough like a good way to think about it is they can usually hold three or four thousand this 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, into Gardner. 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 sheep, mule deer, white tail deer, pronghorn antelope, any of these animals, if he leaves the park he remains wildlife, right? At that, the minute a buffalo leaves Yeltsin 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 out to cause I can sit here for days and go over this issue.

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 Montana, it got to where the Department of Livestock was shooting a bunch of them. They'd shoot them, they'd catch them, send them up to slaughter. And after a while, I think it was in the early 2000s, a bunch of tribes in the West, like any tribe that had a historical claim to presence on that landscape, and it could be the Nez Perce, who would come from from Washington and Idaho, and they would come in that area.

The Sioux 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. It's all part of their treaty rights. Yeah, they would all utilize the area. And so a bunch of tribes, maybe this is my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, a bunch of tribes said, listen, if you're going to be doing all this harvest, our tribal members are going to come exercise treaty rights and we're going to do some harvest. And they also, they do the tribal hunts, like tribes um, 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. Yeah. What was the part? I said something that you didn't like the sounds of. It's just, it's a rabbit hole. I mean, I could issues all day along with how Buffalo are treated through livestock and the birch losses issues and everything else. I mean, I could issues all day long with the, how Buffalo are treated through livestock and the Bursalosis issues and everything else. I know, you know, we, there's still no, not one case scientifically proven that a Buffalo ever gave livestock. Not to red herring. So it's a red, 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. Mm-hmm Fencing issues, but they say brucellosis like okay. Well 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 brucelosis? Exactly. Right. It's like how this how this brucelosis 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 a politician in Montana came and said I got an idea there's a risk the elk will pass

brucellosis to cattle so we'd like to kill all the elk there's a lot of cattle and elk sharing the landscape no like people be like are you insane but that's where you can say it with Buffalo well yeah well and you can say if our 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, uh, how, 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 want to take pride in our conservation ethics and stuff. And so again, maybe 30 years from now, oh yeah. Feral horses are a bad idea. Let's get rid of them. 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 on wind 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 a thousand.

You think so? Oh yeah. So you could have a herd that would rival the size of Yellowstone's 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 outcreek mountain range and stuff and then come back, you know They'd have enough room to roam a lot of that area. Mm-hmm You know a couple thousand Buffalo would be a lot better than 10,000 furrow horses.

Sure, man. And you know, how good, you know, you know, what Buffalo, how good they are for the 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 in right away, I think our, our forage and our landscape would turn around and come back faster than what we're planning on doing with, uh,

Fremont County, weeding pests, spraying, rejuvenate and trying to grow back that, that doesn't exist there anymore. How would you, how, how would you get them? Are you guys eligible to get park ones? So right now, Jasonis is doing a phenomenal job. He's getting like our own quarantine facility and everything else. I mean, this guy is killing it on, and bringing the Buffalo back and doing a phenomenal job of bringing them back. And so I think, and he's tribal member.

Yeah. He's an Eastern Shoshone tribal member and then Northern Rapal. He kind of oversees both programs, the Shoshone's and the Rapal's. And he goes after all the funding and helps bring back purchased land and range units from Bureau of Indian Affairs to Manatee's 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 were the two programs kind of meld in some way? They'd probably kind of meld in some way. They'd probably kind of meld to some way. I mean, we would definitely have to kick back in and bear open any affairs to help manage that and oversee everything stuff, make sure the range units, the fencing, everything is protected and built 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 cause I also had to do a lot of work with the livestock producers on the reservation too. Yeah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes.

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Onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Does a livestock producer on the reservation, does he have to buy, does he have to lease grazing rights from the tribe? Lease grazing rights in different range units. So there's like 90 something different range units on the reservation. Some are shared, some are just one producer, but.

Help me understand this, this question for both of 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, to you is it all the same word? Or is there a way that you'd prefer, not how you talk about you, is there a way that you'd prefer 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 disappointed that I would say that word not to me no but to him if I said no let's say said, if you were having a private conversation

with between you and Randall this morning, I would say to Randall, we have some Indians coming 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 gonna talk the way you're gonna talk I don't know, you're gonna talk the way you're gonna talk and nobody's gonna talk. Well, no, I'm not. I mean, I can. I can and I do, but I'm asking. I'm just asking.

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 your internal compass telling you how you should address people. Sure. Yeah. I think what, like where I find confusion about it 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'd hear, you know, you hear a politician, you hear a tribal member say Indian country. I would have a very hard time saying I was over in Indian country.

Like, I just, I don't know, that strikes me as somehow. It's more of the historical commonplace that it's been called Indian country. think about it in terms of what it actually is. They're more of internment camps. And we're still living on federal land that is given to us and we're gonna call it, and the federal government's gonna call it Indian country. Yeah. Well even on every old map that you see, I mean, in the history books, those lines,

everything is Indian country, and then you have the names of the different tribes and stuff there. So through history, it's always been called Indian country, through the wars and everything else. Yeah. Yeah. I had, I guess I find myself casually saying like like Rand and I will be like indigenous Native American Indian I don't know it's just like you know yeah

that's what I say you know I'm just asking 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 that somebody would ask, that somebody did ask. Yeah. Well, I could also see you thinking, do I really have to tell you this? I think for us, you know, because we're right, 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 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 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. Right. Yeah, we've even put that sort of clarifier in. We did one, we did a American history piece on the deer skin trade of the eastern seaboard Appalachia and we could that was called like the long hunters and it was

1763 to 1775 and it focused on the deer skin trade and in explaining the landscape Like how we're going to talk about it. We talked about Where possible 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 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 1840. The beginning bracket is like somewhere around 184, 1810, 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 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. 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. ancestors are, were a couple of French trappers who married Lakota women. Oh really? Mm hmm. And they came from St. Louis. No kidding. Mm hmm. Yep, Antoine and Nicolas Janisse.

Have you run into those names? I'm going to keep my hat for him now. So part of the history of it is Antoine Antoine Janisse actually homesteaded in the Poudre Valley and near La Porte by Fort Collins his cabin still stands. And he was moved by the Calvary back to the Pine Ridge Reservation,

him and his brother Nicholas, and Nicholas is my direct descendant. Oh wow. And stuff, so yeah, they both married Lakota women and they both died on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Really? Mm-hmm. Oh. Yeah.

We'll keep our eyes peeled. Yeah. Tell me the names again. Antoine and Nicholas Janice. Okay. And then what is, uh, so on your, on the Aguawa Sioux side of your family, what was the, like when you go back to like matriarchs, what was your family's name?

Um, they didn't. Because like, like like maid, however you think of like, what are the equivalent of maid names or whatever? So some of them, 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 Cloud. So I guess that kind of correlation. Yeah, because there's not like a, in the culture there's not like a last name structure.

Right, right. A lot of them come from the different chiefs, like my family on the Northern Apple side, we all come from Chief Friday. So when I, I'm related to every Friday on the reservation and I'm related to every hand away, and I'm related to pretty much almost everybody on every Rappo on our, when we were in reservation.

But with the Rappo too, there wasn't a, you know how like, like we track, like a- Family tree or right now. Like generally you go like, we're sort of patrilineal and name meaning it's like this the series of fathers names and maiden names fall away and in native culture in the western tribes are talking about there's not a way by a name me if we talk about red cloud we talk about crazy horse there's 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, that captures

your ancestry, correct? Correct. Right. Okay. Each person takes an individual name that doesn't carry with it who, like who your dad was, who your mom was. Right. Yeah. That's a colonial structure. Yeah. And we didn't start, like on my side, we didn't really start seeing ours until, what was it? Paul Bridger, my grandpa's brother was named Paul Bridger

after Bridger the famous. Yeah, Jim Bridger, because Jim Bridger married his third wife was Shoshone. Yep, and so like my oldest brother, his name is Bridger married his third wife was Shoshone. Yep. And so like my my oldest brother His name is Bridger. You know, you don't hear that Somebody was born in the early 70s and stuff, but he was only one around forever now Now it's kind of a common name, but there's a lot of Bridgers and in the Shoshone Well, just in public anywhere even off the reservation because around here everybody's you get kids

They people name their kids, their first names Bridger, but you guys got people whose last name is Bridger. And then, and when River, uh, uh, Riverton area is one of the bigger rendezvous sites that ever used to happen. And so we used to have a lot of rendezvous there and now it was a Shoshone, Trapholes, Cheyenne, Sioux, everybody used to come there for a 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 a lot of us grew up seeing and stuff. And as you see The generations of people leaving it's it's candy declining pretty fast. Is that right? But you said there is an interest from in hunting from the younger members. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely 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. We put on huge classes and so we just wanted to get involved the youth some way somehow to protect, to have a passion for the outdoors and our natural resources. So you know we're just trying to prepare for the future so when we're all gone, 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, you're not going to be in charge of your natural resources and do a good job if

you don't care for it. How are predators managed? Coyotes, etc. There's no, I mean we have a wolf season, there's no nothing on coyotes or mountain lions or anything else. We have a black bear season but still I think we might get a handful of black bears harvested every year. How many wolves is anybody getting after? Do you got any guys like to hunt wolves? Got a lot of guys that like to hunt wolves to harvest one. Sounds like Montana. You don't have a high harvest rate. Did you at first? Nope. We've never had one harvested during our seasons. Wow. How long is your season? It's January to February. Do you know of guys that try Collin? Oh yeah, they tried 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 growing, you know. Yeah. Our just not really blown up or going to get out of control, even though we have less pressure on wildlife and hunting and everything

else and, uh, big herds of wild game game elk, mule deer, unlimited whitetail. We just don't have that population growth on and around the reservation. Got it. 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 trail camera. We see mountain lions on every trail 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 you guys think you have at any given time? It's so hard to determine. I mean, I'm seeing them more and more every year in places we've never seen them before. Do you think it's closer to 10 or closer to 100? Well, closer to 50. That splits the middle, don't it? So maybe about 50. to ten or closer to a hundred? Well, I'd Endangered Species Act wouldn't legally restrict you. That does still cover eagles and migrating birds and there's a bird is covered under the... Also ESA, the Endangered Species Act, does apply to tribal lands.

Does that ever create a pain point for you guys for management? Or is it not an issue? Not an issue. Hmm. I had no idea. Yep. I mean, there's, well, it would actually be to that point where it is an issue where we might have the population double on and issue, uh, attacks and stuff, but we, I don't even think we have one record attack on the reservation with human and grizzly bears. How about livestock loss?

A few. Not a huge problem. Well, it's so hard to determine what killed livestock. Was it a wolf? Was it a lion? Because you know what bears are going to come in and take over and eat on it anyway. So you can't go by who's standing there when you get there. Right. This is going to be a bear.

And you know, have you ever watched wolves and stuff? standing there when you get there. This is going to be a bear. And you know, have you ever watched wolves and stuff? Um, sometimes they just kill for fun. They don't kill to eat and to manage a herd or anything. That's kill for fun. You know, we've, we've watched them take down elk and mule deer and just leave them. And then the coyotes and the wolves, uh, bears will come in and finish, you know,

eating the animal, eating on the carcass we do a podcast we do limited releases of a podcast for kids and 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 corrine the other day and i thought about but did not include and i might put it on there is the surplus killing when predators go a little gangbusters to 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.

It's all subjective. It's in their mind. It's by like, this is a perfectly appropriate amount of elk to kill. In their mind, this is what I do. This is a perfectly appropriate amount of elk to kill. In their mind, it's just this is what I do. Yeah. This is what I do. We spend a lot of time with the youth,

with gun safety, ethics, a lot of hunter safety, survival, just, and we take tribal youth hunting, game board, and we'll go out with them, and we'll go out and try to harvest some elk 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 trot in a classroom. We take them ice fishing, just fly fishing and stuff.

Oh yeah, we do a lot. We ended up taking 50 tribal youth to an ice fishing event at the Washington Reservoir, one of the big areas where we removed federal horses and On the way up while we seen with mule deer or herd elk and then on top of the big herd of sheep And all the kids are out there catching ice fishing catching cutthroats all day long. That's a little bit. Yeah, that's great Now 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 tribal youth in them. We're probably working with around three or four hundred kids. So with that success we decided to start up a female tribal female program too and so we're doing the same thing with tribal females. Yeah, we get them outdoors hiking. Of any age. Any age in any tribe, uh, we'll take on any tribal female to come out and join us. That's great, man. Yeah. Um,

it's really cool with the kid program that you can see that you would be able to grow. I mean, cause you guys got a good resource. You got a good management strategy. The landscape's 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 tribal youth making their own YouTube videos and stuff for you.

Oh yeah. For those kids outdoors. And they're starting their own fly fishing clubs, their own fishing clubs and stuff like that. You kidding me? Yeah, no, it's going really good that's great that's awesome man congratulations thanks uh we can talk about more but I don't know I would love to see some of that I mean just to hang out and check it out be cool oh yeah I mean we put everything on social media on our Shoshone and Rappel Trouble

youth page and so there is a place, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And 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, Bro, and Interfares, we plan on making it work for both ends, you know. I think we can sustain both Buffalo and livestock. Both types of livelihoods. Yeah. So you have some producers that are worried about the loss of grazing lands. Yeah.

Got it. How will a conflict like that resolve? Either the Buffalo program will come in and pay more for those leases and stuff or 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 loss. 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 Shoshone, Northern Rapel. 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? There's like three other different programs that they... Transportation. Transportation and stuff that they have to

manage together. And so it's a joint effort for both tribes to, to work on, to manage a lot of the natural resources on the reservation. Have you ever been a council member? No. Does that, is that like a no? I take it you don't have any interest in it.

I mean, it's a politician job. This job I have is a politician's job. And I've only wanted to be a game warden. That was the highlight of my career was, you know, you'd wake up and I got 2 million acres. Where do I want to go today? And you go see them with some of the best natural resources in the lower 48. You know, I forgot to ask you about that earlier. When you were game, when you were doing work as a game warden, what would be a common, like I don't imagine because you guys have the allocations and game

allocations, you're probably not out busting tribal poachers, right? Yeah, there's some. An example of that hunting outside of the regulation time. Yeah. Oh, I see. So even though you got a good elk allocation, you're not, you're out hunting in the the regulation time. Yeah. Oh, I see. So even though you got a good elk allocation, you're not, you're out hunting in the summer. Right. Yeah. All that and then over-harvesting bulls.

I mean, you know, we've got phenomenal trophy animals. And so, you know, you already punched your tag. Why are you punching another one? I'm trying to get another one. And waste. Yeah, waste. You know, you just take the antlers, not the meat and stuff. And you know, that happens everywhere.

The same old stuff as anywhere. Yeah. I got it. 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 work in relationship with them oh yeah yeah I mean they're we're all in the same if you know anything about law enforcement kind of work together as a team and then a lot of us like me and the other wardens are from BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs police me and the other wardens are from, uh, BIA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, police officers. And so not only with the state wardens and everybody else, but with the FBI, Cremont County sheriffs, um, you know, Lander police, Riverton police, everybody else. And so it's kind of have good to have that network in a small

popular area like that so we can communicate and eliminate a lot of these big problems. Yep. So if you're, when problems. So if you're a tribal member and 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? 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 tribal court and then we have have taken hunting rights away for five years we've 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 but you can confiscate equipment like all the kind of yep normal things that would happen if you do something real bad. Yep. 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? That's what I was going to say. 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, Indian reservation and stuff. And I think I'm speaking for a lot of people when I say that, uh, myself included don't know shit about reservations. Right. You know, they're over there. They're over there. You're driving along. This is all Indian reservation. 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.

Some of the success that we are having and what we are doing, I can tell you one thing, the success of removing furrow horses has gone pretty big in the state of Wyoming. A lot of non-native support of what we're doing and a lot of conservation efforts and giving out information to everybody, but in other states and other tribal programs, other state programs, other agencies and stuff to see the results of and the comeback of natural resources from

removing fur horses. That's one of the best positive, um, 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, um, again, good luck on the Buffalo thing. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Come down anytime. We're only six hours away. Yeah. Come look around.

Yeah. Come for a visit. Not hunt. No, but you can cut the mail. Maybe we can take you fishing. Oh, by fishing license. Didn't you live in Thermopolis for a short time? Yeah, I spent some time in Thermopolis.

That's a different thing. No, just fishing. So it's all protected. Yeah. I was, I was recently down at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico and I went out with those guys and, uh, you know, they were out hunting and, um, 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. Oh, is that right? Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. Really? You can't get her a pass? You Oh, is that right? Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. Really?

You can't get her a pass? 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. I mean, the kids are enrolled, so 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. Cause all you guys want me to do is pack out meat. Yeah. Do you guys eat a lot of Wild Game? That's all we eat. No beef. We don't. You don't raise any beef. We don't raise any beef. I come from a strong family of cattle ranchers and stuff, but at once I married, that's all we've ever eaten and stuff. We have a freezer full of elk and, um, I'll buy,

I'll buy chicken occasionally, you know. That's a conversation in the household too. My kids would be like, my chicken. Did you see that pork line? All right, man. Well, I want to thank both of you coming on. This has been real educational. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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Yeah, Danielle, the founder of Wild and Whole. It's called Meat Eaters Wild and Whole, seasonal recipes for the conscious cook, and it's an ode to cooking seasonally with wild and foraged ingredients. Now let's get to what you'll find in this book. This cookbook contains more than 80 recipes inspired by what you can hunt, fish, forage or grow in your garden each season. Often Danielle will pair her ingredients to reflect both the hunting season and the growing season. So her turkey cutlet is combined with springtime morels. Her Gulf Coast Redfish with summertime sweet corn. She cooks venison with pumpkin for a tasty fall stew. If that all sounds complicated, trust me, it is not complicated. Danielle has a knack for creating recipes

worthy of a five-star kitchen, but accessible to two-star cooks. And you'll come away armed with techniques that will make you a better cook all around. This book is also beautiful to look at with gorgeous full color photographs that inspire you to take a real hard look at your kitchen's output. It's Meat Eaters Wild and Whole Seasonal Recipes for the Conscious Cook by Danielle Pruitt. It is out now and it's available at TheMeatEater.com or wherever books are sold.