#54 (?)

In the years following the civil war, when the white man first came to settle the land that is now Oklahoma, there existed, past the cross timbers to the west, epic herds of Buffalo. Often numbering in the tens of thousands, these herds stretched, beyond the eye's ability to see, from one horizon to the other. From a distance, they looked something like a vast and thundering inland sea, composed entirely of hair and dust. It was a sight almost incomprehensible to the imagination, a sight, that must have been seen to have been believed.

A sight, that has since been lost.

The Buffalo, after being almost completely annihilated, survive today as relics from another time, fenced into state parks and private preserves. They are wards of the state that provide only a faint, but very real, glimpse into our history.

The story of the Buffalo is inextricably intertwined to the story of Oklahoma, and, to us, this story is metaphor that encapsulates the conflicting relationship between the Indians and Pioneers - first people of the land.

Since the beginning of human memory, the peoples who occupied the southern plains built their lives around the Buffalo, roaming the plains in pursuit of the mighty herds. To these peoples of the Oklahoma plains, the Kiowa and Comanches, and later the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Apache, the herds served as a universal resource of which little was wasted. Meat was dried and used throughout the year. Hides were cured and used for shelter and clothing. Weapons and tools were fashioned from the skeleton. Even the animal's bladder was removed and used as a canteen.

It was a way of life that wasted nothing and used everything. It was an organic lifestyle that stood in stark contrast to the mechanized world of the white man, who with his ideas of property and ownership, sought to settle and dominate the land.

These two views of world would prove to be irreconcilable to each other.

In the year 1851 the treaty of Medicine Lodge was signed at Ft. Laramie in Wyoming, which stated that as long as the Buffalo roamed the plains, the tribes were free to do the same. Signing this treaty seemingly guaranteed to the Indians the perpetual right to maintain their traditional ways. Little did they know that within forty years the Buffalo would be gone and the plains would be fenced in.

In the decades following the Medicine Lodge treaty, wagon ruts began to appear on the vast expanses of Oklahoma prairie. Lured by manifest destiny and the promise of land, settlers began to come to Indian Territory. Once there, the indigenous people, wild herds of Buffalo, and the way of life each represented, were seen as obstacles that must be removed.

Wars were waged against the Indians of the plains, and it became federal policy to kill of the Buffalo. Later, as rails were laid across the same prairie and under the same blue sky, sharpshooters, men like Buffalo Bill Cody, sat at their windows and took aim at the Buffalo. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, or Buffalo from a train. In the course of twenty-five years, the magnificent Buffalo population that once numbered in the tens of thousands, dwindled to a few hundred individuals.

This image we have depicted in our collage is a metaphor for transition. It represents the conflict of the old with the new, of one culture with another. It shows a modern train, a steel horse, made up entirely of empty words, rolling forward across the timeless prairie, with a thousand rotting carcasses in its wake. It shows the sunset in the eye of the Buffalo implicitly telling the story of many endings. It speaks of the sorrow felt by the original people of the land as they said good bye to their connection with the past. It reminds us that we are not immune from history, and gives us a gentle reminder that we are here today at the expense of yesterday.