Every Buffalo Dead, a 56 minute meditation on the intentional destruction of a species, a society and a culture.


The album can be downloaded Name Your Price here :

lessthanone.bandcamp.com/album/every-buffalo-dead



Prior to the arrival of Europeans on the North American continent in 1620, 75-100 million American bison, commonly referred to as buffalo, roamed the land, and somewhere between 18-100 million Native Americans populated the continent. By 1800, due to European disease and genocide, the Native American population had plummeted to about 600,000. By 1890, the number had fallen to around 250,000.

In the mid 1800s, The US Army sanctioned and offered bounties for buffalo to encourage their wholesale slaughter. The federal government promoted bison hunting to undercut Native Americans’ ability to survive.

Colonel Richard Dodge, wrote in 1867: “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” General Sherman stated that bison hunters “did more to defeat the Indian nations in a few years than soldiers did in 50 years.” The Secretary of the Interior in the 1870s, Columbus Delano, wrote “The rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs.”