As lawmakers in Washington, D.C., are on the cusp of ending the government shutdown, tribal leaders on rural reservations across the Great Plains have been culling their cherished bison herds to help fill the gap left by cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
About one-third of tribal members on the reservation in Fort Peck, Montana, depend on monthly benefit checks, Chairman Floyd Azure said. That's almost triple the rate for the U.S. as a whole. They've received only partial payments this month after the Trump administration halted SNAP funds because of the shutdown.
Officials said they anticipated such a moment years ago, when they were bolstering their herd with animals from Yellowstone National Park over objections from cattle ranchers worried about animal disease.
"We were bringing it up with the tribal council: What would happen if the government went bankrupt? How would we feed the people?" said Magnan, the longtime steward of Fort Peck's bison herds. "It shows we still need buffalo."
In October, the tribal government authorized killing 30 bison — about 12,000 pounds of meat. Half had been shot by Tuesday. A pending deal to end the shutdown Wednesday night came too late for the rest, Magnan said. With Montana among the states that dispersed only partial SNAP payments, Fort Peck will keep handing out buffalo meat for the time being.
Tribes including the Blackfeet, the Lower Brule Sioux, the Cheyenne River Sioux and the Crow have done the same in response to the shutdown: feeding thousands of people with bison from herds restored over recent decades after the animals were hunted to near extinction in the 1800s.
Fort Peck tribal members Miki Astogo and Dillon Jackson-Fisher, who are unemployed, said they borrowed food from Jackson-Fisher's mother in recent weeks after SNAP payments didn't come through. On Sunday they got a partial payment — about $196 instead of the usual $298 per month — Agosto said.
It won't last, they said, so the couple walked 4 miles into town to pick up a box of food from the tribes that included 2 pounds of bison.
"Our vehicle is in the shop, but we have to put food on the table before we pay for the car, you know?" Jackson-Fisher said.
Native American communities elsewhere in the U.S. also are tapping into natural resources to make up for lost federal aid. Members of the Mi'kmaq Nation in Maine stocked a food bank with trout from their hatchery and locally hunted moose meat. In southeastern Oklahoma, the Comanche Nation is accepting deer meat for food banks. And in the southwestern part of the state, the Choctaw Nation set up three meat processing facilities.
Another program that provides food to eligible Native American households, the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, has continued through the shutdown.