A Herd of 40 Life-Size Bison Puppets Will Stampede Through New York This Weekend to Honor Indigenous History and Resilience

Dozens of life-size bison puppets—made this summer with steel, plywood, burlap and paper—will roam the streets of New York City this weekend as part of a free art spectacle that honors both the mammal and the Indigenous communities who have revered and stewarded their herds since time immemorial. The two-day public exhibition, “Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi,” celebrates the animal’s journey from near extinction in the late 19th century to its gradual repopulation across the American prairie. The event, whose Lakota name translates roughly to “Trail of the Buffalo,” will feature two separate routes, one through Lower Manhattan and another through Brooklyn.

Poetry readings, live music, ceremonies and dancing will complement the roving stampede and contextualize the bison’s role in American and pre-American history. Although the terms are often considered interchangeable, buffalo and bison are distinct animals. Old World buffalo (Cape and water buffalo) are native to Africa and Asia, and bison are found in North America and Europe.

In this moment, we have a civic duty to come together as a community of global citizens to usher in a new chapter in America’s history, one that learns from its past, with empathy and respect for the land and all humans living on it.” The event will begin this evening in front of the National Museum of the American Indian with a performance by elders from the Lenape and Lakota tribes. As the herd roams, it will make more than a dozen stops alongside civic and cultural leaders at historic locations. Actors Sam Waterston, Rosario Dawson and Susan Sarandon are among the more well-known celebrities joining in the walks.

Members of different tribes will share knowledge and stories with observers. The stars of the event are the 40 life-size bison, each operated by three volunteer puppeteers: two inside, controlling the rear legs and head—which weighs 40 pounds alone—and one outside, serving as the bison’s eyes. Each bison’s movements were carefully choreographed over days of training, with particular emphasis on how to move and breathe both as an individual and as part of the herd.

Several commands, such as “gallop” and “regroup,” will be issued in Xhosa and Arabic, the native languages of the event’s creators. A total of 150 performers will steer the performance. Indigenous leaders were heavily involved in creating the bison, the exhibition’s choreography and the weekend’s resonant messaging.

The story of Great Plains bison and tribes go hand in hand: In the mid-1800s, both were thriving across the American prairie. But, as John Thomas, a Lenape elder of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, tells amNY’s Renee DeLorenzo, “you kill a buffalo, you kill an Indian.” Violence wrought by colonial settlers and hunters pushed Indigenous people, their culture and the animal they relied on to the brink of extinction. Once numbered in the tens of millions, fewer than 1,000 bison remained by the 1890s.