AI Summary
5 min readThe echo of the bison
In the 1950s and 1960s, Irvin Carlson grew up on his grandparents' cattle ranch on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, a stretch of land bigger than Delaware bordered by the Rocky Mountains and open plains. Ranching taught him to work hard, but across the reservation, jobs were scarce. "There was a lot of unemployment here, not a lot of opportunity for all of our people here," he recalls. New evidence has found that this persistently high unemployment is particularly severe among Indigenous nations that once relied on one animal: the bison.
The height data that revealed a disaster
Don Fair, an economist at the University of Victoria in Canada, was working with colleagues on a research project estimating how well off Indigenous North Americans were in the 19th century. Economic data from that time was hard to come by, so they turned to an unusual proxy for economic well-being: height. They found data collected by Franz Boas, a famous physical anthropologist, who had measured about 15,000 Native Americans across North America.
When Fair and his co-authors analyzed the data, they saw something striking. "That's when we saw major declines in height," Fair says. "That is when it started to really hit us that this was a disaster." The disaster was the loss of bison.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:39) **Setting the Scene: The Blackfeet Reservation** - The episode opens on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, introducing Irvin Carlson, who grew up on his grandparents' cattle ranch in the 1950s and 60s.
- 2 (03:12) **The Economist's Discovery: Height as a Proxy for Wealth** - Economist Don Fair of the University of Victoria explains how a research project on 19th-century Indigenous well-being led to a startling find using historical height data.
- 3 (04:09) **The Bison Economy: "They Were Everything to Us"** - The episode explains the profound reliance of many Plains nations on bison for over 10,000 years, framing it as a complete economic system.
- 4 (05:01) **The Slaughter: Technology and Intentional Destruction** - The episode details the rapid collapse of the bison population starting in the 1870s, driven by commercial and military forces.
- 5 (06:05) **Immediate Devastation and Lost Height Advantage** - The loss of bison caused immediate famine and hardship, which is visible in the biological data.
- 6 (07:18) **The Long Shadow: Economic Impact Persisting to Today** - Don Fair explains that the disaster is not just historical; the economic gap has persisted for over a century.
- 7 (09:14) **A Path Not Taken: The Role of Banks** - The episode explores a key factor that could have changed the outcome: access to financial capital.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
Fact checking by Sierra Juarez. This episode originally aired Aug. 21, 2023.
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