Buffalo leaving Elgin a sad story

The city of Elgin can't make ends meet? Just ship the buffalo to an American Indian reservation - problem solved. This sad news broke just days before my son and about a dozen of his classmates from Elgin Academy leave for a week of giving back at Re-Member, an organization on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Maybe the Oglala Lakota Nation there will take the mounting buffalo debt off our city's balance sheet.

Here's a quick glimpse of what these students and the buffalo will find there. As of 2007, unemployment was 80 to 90 percent, bringing the per capita income to $4,000. Life expectancy on the reservation was second lowest in the Western Hemisphere falling right behind Haiti. But even with this bleak picture, the people there would take in our buffalo and treat them with respect because we are all related - Mitakuye Oyasin.

Thomas Mails, in "The Mystic Warriors of the Plains" wrote "If God was the creator and overseer of life; if the morning star, moon and Mother Earth combined their talents to give birth and hope to the Indian; if the sun was the dispatcher of wisdom and warmth, then the buffalo was the tangible and immediate proof of them all, for out of the buffalo came almost everything necessary to daily life."

Plains Indians used almost every part of the buffalo to survive, but took only what they needed from the vast herds once estimated at 60,000,000 to 75,000,000 head. As Elgin was settled and the railroad headed west, the indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo left the Indians destitute, a state that sticks with them to this day.

When you think of it that way, we shouldn't look at this as an expense, really seems more like an obligation.

Mike Kemmler

Elgin