Unknown photographer, American
A pile of about 40,000 buffalo hides at Wright’s Buffalo Hide Yard in Dodge City, Kansas, 1874
During the 1800s a bison genocide was occurring in the central plains of North America. The mass slaughter of bison by white settlers demonstrated a variety of injustices: it symbolized the related genocide against Indigenous people, the destruction of food and cultural systems, and a speciesist injustice against the bison themselves. Once a central pillar to a way of life, bison were nearly eradicated in a show of white male dominance. Before the rise of settler colonialism there were 30 million bison. In 1884, there were 325. Today, 500,000 bison are present in North America. Label by Jordan Hadlock