Okay, Ill cut it.

Ill cut the long piece.

Here.

Taste it.

Dont want to taste it?

Okay.

So today we are doing a bison meat distribution, along with a community feed with that bison meat that we harvested yesterday.

I like to make people aware of the fact that bison also went through their genocide, along with the Native people.

What they said is that for every dead bison is a dead Indian.

So Native people and bison share a genocide.

And I think that oftentime gets overlooked when we talk about bison restoration, land back or indigenous sovereignty.

Is that a huge part of that is also bringing the bison back and having bison in their ancestral lands as well.

We can go out to King Soopers or Whole Foods and get bison meat, but it's not culturally sustained and it's not culturally obtained.

For us, I think it's more of bringing that knowledge back to our children, to our elders, to our young people, of how do you harvest a bison and how do you bring ceremony into that as well?

Im Chayenne... The connection is pre-colonization relationship with the bison and Native people.

Some of our elders talk about how there's no difference between a Native person and a bison, because we ate so much bison that we share the same DNA.

But I think once the settlers, the colonizers came, that relationship changed because the way that the Native American person was removed from their land, the bison was as well.

It was a way to starve Native people into submission.

And we had the whole community attend the bison hunt.

We did a little ceremony prior to taking the bison down.

Everything from the hide to the hair on its head, to the tail, to the bones, even their hooves we use.

And I think that's a way to pay respects to that bison for sacrificing his life to feed our people.

I think it's a way to heal ourselves, to heal our communities, to regain the knowledge of our ancestors, and to pass that knowledge down to our youth, so that maybe someday they won't prefer pizza over bison that was harvested by their grandparents or their parents.

I think this day, most of all, it represents community.

If you look around, there's a lot of people here.

Everyone's helping.

Everyone's kind of doing their part to help distribute this meat.

And I think that's also a huge part that got lost when the bison got taken away and when they were hunted to near-extinction... is we lost a lot of community in that.

You know the colonizer, the white man's goal was to eradicate us and take our culture.

Ayo!

You cut me.

Who me?

And a day like today shows that they did not succeed and that we're still here and we're still going strong.