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The return of bison ten years ago to their home on tribal lands at the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation has helped restore an ecosystem and tribal culture.

Earthjustice is using the power of the law to restore and recover wildlife — including bison.

Earthjustice to represent American Prairie in the appeal

Highlights of how Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office has leveraged the power of partnership and the law to defend communities, sacred lands and wildlife, and clean air and water.

Winter foraging north of Yellowstone Park at issue

Bison transfer to Fort Belknap tribes to proceed

Montana judge rejects effort to classify wild bison as“livestock”

Rejects unreasonable demand to return to widespread buffalo slaughter

As wild bison return to the plains, ranchers target them as livestock

Bison safety on prime spring calving grounds at stake

Rejects unreasonable demand to return to widespread buffalo slaughter

Some extra thunder rumbled into north central Montana, when wild bison finally set hooves on the ground at Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. The return was the culmination of legal efforts to restore the animals to their historic prairie habitat. Members of the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes were eager to receive them.

A group of 27 bison occupying privately owned grazing lands outside of Yellowstone National Park’s western border were detained by authorities on May 24. The group of animals included 12 newborn calves, 12 mothers, and three juveniles. The Montana Department of Livestock led the raid with support from the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and…

Bison are the only native wildlife species still unnaturally confined to the political boundaries of Yellowstone National Park for any part of the year. In 2008, more than 1,400 bison—about one-third of the current size of Yellowstone’s bison population—were captured and slaughtered by government agencies while leaving Yellowstone in search of food. Federal and state…

“Both males and females have horns”

Cattle conflict non-existent

Once numbering approximately 30 million across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, wild bison were almost driven to extinction by market hunters in the late 19th century. Montana was among their last strongholds, but the slaughter persisted until in 1903, when only about 25 of the animals remained in the wild. Those last wild bison…

The Blackfeet Nation has prevailed in a four-decade fight to fend off oil and gas development in the Badger-Two Medicine region of Montana.