This #NationalBisonDay 🦬 we celebrate and honor the remarkable and resilient American bison. Having once roamed across North America by the tens of millions, commercial hunting and loss of land in the 1800s nearly drove bison to extinction. Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times. In the early 1900s, there were about two dozen animals left in Yellowstone. Thankfully, today, the protection and recovery of bison in Yellowstone

It never gets old, watching bison. They are massive, majestic, mystifying. After years of studying them, working alongside them and helping them reclaim their place at The Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation, Stephanie Gillin, a wildlife biologist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), still finds them simultaneously awe-inspiring and relatable. “Bison remind me of Native people because of what all we’ve been through,” she says. How do bison captivate you? For more on CSKT a

Inside the museum at The Bison Range, Stephanie Gillin, a wildlife biologist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), points out bison hide used for clothes, bison hair used for rope, even a bison bladder used as a drinking bottle. As Gillin demonstrates, Native Americans “used the whole buffalo,” as the expression goes, for thousands of years, until settlers all but eradicated them from the landscape. A key principle undergirding conservation efforts by the CSKT is reciprocity—do