And now:[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: From: Pat Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.omaha.com/Omaha/OWH/StoryViewer/1,3153,251134,00.html November 15, 1999 Students Retrace an 1876 Buffalo Hunt BY HENRY J. CORDES WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER Macy, Neb. - It was late November 1876 when 500 members of the Omaha Indian Tribe set off from their northeast Nebraska reservation in search of buffalo, the sacred animal that for countless generations had helped sustain their way of life. On foot, on horses and in wagons, the Omahas ranged across the prairie, following the Platte River before turning south and crossing the Republican River into Kansas. Finally, after a long 33 days and 400 miles that had some people despairing of ever finding a herd, advance scouts returned to camp late one night with the word. "Te!" - the Omaha word for buffalo. A herd had finally been found. And the hunt -which would be the tribe's last successful one - was on. Now, 123 years later, students in the Omaha Nation School District on the Omaha Reservation are following in the footsteps of their ancestors. They've spent the fall studying and researching aspects of that historic hunt. And today, 120 students and a dozen staff will set off on a four-day trip tracing the route of their forefathers' last successful hunt. The journey will culminate Thursday near Scott City, Kan., with a stop at a buffalo farm, a tribal ceremony and a feast of buffalo stew, all near the site of the tribe's last buffalo kill. Unlike their ancestors, the Omaha students won't be looking for buffalo. What school officials were hoping to find - and did find - was a way to make learning more fun, to preserve and resurrect some of the tribe's culture and to boost the pride of Omaha students in their heritage. "It's been a positive thing for the students, the staff and the community," said Vida Stabler, who teaches Omaha tribal culture in the Omaha Nation School. "It's built self-esteem and pride in who we are." The hunt also provided a teaching method that Indian education experts nationally say fits the learning style of Indian students: one that is hands-on and relates to their culture. Many Indian school districts across the country have used such methods to combat high dropout rates and low achievement. For Omaha Nation's junior high and high school students, aspects of the hunt have been woven into a range of subjects during the first 11 weeks of school. Students in English classes have written papers and poems about the buffalo and tribal history. Shop-class students have built tepees and learned how the construction methods used are still relevant today. Students in gym have played traditional Omaha games, such as shinny, similar to field hockey. Art students have made beaded moccasins. Social studies classes have studied the histories of the Omaha's 10 traditional clans, which in many ways remain a part of the tribe's social structure today. An advanced science and math class has studied prairie ecology, sampling square-foot plots of grassland and identifying and categorizing the plants. Michael Parker, a senior, sat in class recently trying to identify a strange vine with heart-shaped leaves that he found in one of his samples, wrapped around a long stem of grass. He and his partner eventually decided it was a wayward English ivy plant. The class would later do a mathematical analysis of its collected samples. "It's a lot more hands-on," Parker said of this fall's studies. "You memorize stuff a lot better when you do that." Todd Chessmore, superintendent of the Omaha Nation District, said the district in recent years has sought teaching methods that give its students, 99 percent of whom are Indian, more hands-on experiences. When school officials learned of an old written account of the Omaha Tribe's final successful buffalo hunt, they knew they had a unique event they could build their studies around this fall. Coming in 1876, the last successful hunt by the Omahas occurred at an important time in Great Plains history, said Mark Awakuni-Swetland, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln anthropologist who has consulted the school on the hunt project. A tide of white settlement already was sweeping over lands that for centuries had been occupied by Plains tribes such as the Omaha. Nebraska's population was pushing past 300,000. Some of the people lived in small, fast-growing towns, including Omaha, Lincoln, Bellevue and Columbus, but most were widely scattered on small farmsteads across the state. The hunt came just five months after the Sioux routed George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a fleeting victory for the Indians in what would be the last of the great wars between the U.S. government and Plains tribes. The Omahas already had accepted the inevitable. Faced with the choice of peace or extermination, they ceded their vast lands in eastern Nebraska in 1854 in return for a reservation along the Missouri River in present-day Thurston County. An important covenant of the treaty gave the tribe the right to leave the reservation for its twice-yearly buffalo hunts. Those hunts were a matter of tradition but also continued to be a major industry for the tribe. In addition to the abundant meat supply the buffalo provided, the animals' hides were used for clothing and shelters, the bones for tools and the tendons for twine and bow strings. But each year, it seemed the buffalo were harder to find. White settlement pushed the herds farther and farther south and west. The bearded beasts were being hunted to near extinction by white hunters and trappers who sought only their pelts, leaving the rest of the carcass to the coyotes, buzzards and wolves. On the reservation, life for the Omaha was changing dramatically in other ways, too. Some tribal members still lived in tepees and earth lodges, dressed in traditional garments and moccasins and spoke only the Omaha language. Others were becoming assimilated to the white man's ways. They spoke English and practiced Christianity, wore store-bought clothing and shoes and lived in wood-frame houses - a part of what tribal traditionalists called "the make-believe white man village." Still, all walked and rode side by side as they took off on the 1876 winter hunt. They traveled south and west to the Platte and followed the river to Grand Island, a small white settlement near which they had had a very successful hunt three years before. This time they encountered railroad tracks, farms, domestic cattle and - given the recent events at Little Bighorn - probably some frightened white folks. But they found no buffalo. Working against the short winter days and frequently having to cross bone-chilling creeks and rivers, they traveled south into the Republican River basin, looking for the telltale sign of buffalo dung. Still nothing. They crossed the Republican River into Kansas and continued south and west. By this time, enduring a month on the exposed Plains, being so far from home and finding no buffalo, the Omaha were surely despondent, Awakuni-Swetland said. They might have been asking themselves: Have we done something wrong spiritually? Is our culture dying off? So there would have been a lot of happy tribal members when the scouts returned to camp on the 33rd night with word of a herd about 30 miles away. Two days later, the herd was tracked and surrounded, and, with bow and rifle, an unknown number of buffalo were taken. Historical evidence suggests that the kill was down from previous hunts, Awakuni-Swetland said. Subsequent hunts by the tribe in the years that followed yielded no success. This week, the Omaha Nation students will travel mostly by bus as they retrace the final successful hunt. This morning, they will walk the first five miles to the first 1876 campsite. Their trip will include stops at schools Tuesday in Grand Island and Wednesday in Red Cloud to present other students with oral reports and demonstrations on what they have learned. Angelina Tamayo, a junior, will narrate as members of a shop class assemble a one-tenth scale model of a tepee. The class can raise the poles, tie each down and attach the cover in less than 10 minutes. "I'm really proud of being a Native American and where I came from," she said, "and am looking forward to sharing that with non-natives." She said she has been surprised by how much she didn't know about her culture. Stabler, the culture director at Omaha Nation, said she has been hearing that a lot this fall. Not only has the hunt been a good learning experience, she said, it has sparked Omaha students' interest in a cultural heritage that had been slowly dying for generations. Students are now going home and asking questions of their parents and tribal elders. In the end, the Omaha students aren't just reliving their tribe's last buffalo hunt, Stabler said, they may be revitalizing their culture. "Instead of being an ending," she said of the final hunt, "I hope it's a birth." Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. <><<<<<>>>>><><<<<> Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ <><<<<<>>>>><><<<<>
