Bison hunting

Bison hunting (hunting of the American bison, also commonly known as the American buffalo) was an activity fundamental to the economy and society of the Plains Indians peoples who inhabited the vast grasslands on the Interior Plains of North America, before the animal's near-extinction in the late 19th century following United States expansion into the West. Bison hunting was an important spiritual practice and source of material for these groups, especially after the European introduction of the horse in the 16th through 19th centuries enabled new hunting techniques. The species' dramatic decline was the result of habitat loss due to the expansion of ranching and farming in western North America, industrial-scale hunting practiced by settler hunters increased Indigenous hunting pressure due to settler demand for bison hides and meat, and cases of a deliberate policy by settler governments to destroy the food source of the Indigenous peoples.

Long before the arrival of humans in the Americas, bison hunting had been practiced by archaic humans in Eurasia, like Neanderthals. Bison hunting has been practiced in North America since shortly after the first arrival of humans in the region. At Jake Bluff in northern Oklahoma, Clovis points are associated with numerous butchered bones of the extinct bison species Bison antiquus, which represented a bison herd of at least 22 individuals, which dates to around 12,838 calibrated years Before Present (10,888 BC) At the time of deposition, the site was a steep-sided arroyo (dry watercourse) that formed a dead-end, suggesting that Clovis hunters trapped the bison herd within the arroyo before killing them, showing continuity with the bison hunting tactics of the later Folsom tradition.

The modern American bison is split into two subspecies, the wood bison in the boreal forests of what is now Canada, and the plains bison on the prairies extending from Canada to Mexico. The plains subspecies became the dominant animal of the prairies of North America, where bison were a keystone species, whose grazing and trampling pressure was a force that shaped the ecology of the Great Plains as strongly as periodic prairie fires and which were central to the survival of many Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. To the corn-growing village people, it was a valued second food source. However, there is now some controversy over their interaction. Charles C. Mann wrote in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, pages 367 ff, "Hernando De Soto's expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early 16th century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn't see a single bison." Mann discussed the evidence that Native Americans not only created (by selective use of fire) the large grasslands that provided the bison's ideal habitat but also kept the bison population regulated. In this theory, it was only when the original human population was devastated by wave after wave of epidemics (from diseases of Europeans) after the 16th century that the bison herds propagated wildly. In such a view, the seas of bison herds that stretched to the horizon were a symptom of an ecology out of balance, only rendered possible by decades of heavier-than-average rainfall. Other evidence of the arrival circa 1550–1600 in the savannas of the eastern seaboard includes the lack of places that southeast natives named after buffalo. Bison were the most numerous single species of large wild mammal on Earth.

Religion plays a big role in Native American bison hunting. Plains tribes generally believe that successful hunts require certain rituals. The Omaha tribe had to approach a herd in four legs. At each stop, the chiefs and the leader of the hunt would sit down and smoke and offer prayers for success. The Pawnee performed the purifying Big Washing Ceremony before each tribal summer hunt to avoid scaring the bison.

To Plains tribes, the buffalo is one of the most sacred animals, and they feel obligated to treat them with respect. When they are about to kill a buffalo, they will offer it a prayer. Failures in the hunt could have been attributed to poorly performed rituals.

Before the introduction of horses, bison were herded into large chutes made of rocks and willow branches (drive lines) and trapped in a corral called a buffalo pound, and then slaughtered or stampeded over cliffs, called buffalo jumps. Both pound and jump archaeological sites are found in several places in the U.S. and Canada.^{[citation needed]}

In the case of a jump, large groups of people would herd the bison for several miles, forcing them into a stampede that drove the herd over a cliff.

The earliest evidence for buffalo jumps dates to around 1400.^{[citation needed]}