Bison moving upstream in Banff’s Red Deer Valley through an area that was prescribed burned two times in preparation for their reintroduction. Routine fire use by Indigenous peoples provided corridors for bison to move deep into mountain valleys.
In 2017, Parks Canada working with Indigenous peoples, restored 16 bison to Banff’s eastern slopes. The great shaggy beasts had been extirpated from the region for over a century to valleys on Banff’s eastern slopes, and they were returned to valleys that been recently prescribed burned to restore prime grassland habitats. By 2024 the herd had grown to over 100 animals, and Indigenous hunters were welcomed back into the park to restore the ancient human role of hunting that shaped bison abundance and behavior patterns. Modern ecologists refer to this process as a “rewilding” as per the graphic below, but project is more accurately term a “de-wilding” as both Indigenous peoples and the buffalo returned to their homeland of longer than ten millenia.
Ecologists perceive bison restoration in the remote Red Deer Valley of Banff National Park as an “ecocultural rewilding”. It is better described as “dewilding” by restoring a long-term Indigenous homeland where use of fire and hunting structured the long-term ecosystem.
Historically, the long-term fire regime in Banff National Park—dominated by Indigenous burns—created frequently burned corridors that stretched from the plains up the main valleys well into the mountains. Along the corridors were meadows, shrublands open Douglas-fir forests and young gladed pine forests that provided prime winter and spring habitat for bison. Early European travellers like David Thompson or James Hector mapped trails long-trodden by both bison and Indigenous peoples that linked these habitats to the plains. In cold winters, a phenomenon called the “rising of the buffalo” occurred as biting winds and freezing temperatures drove them off the plains and up into wooded foothills and the aspen parklands. In the foothills and mountain valley buffalo foraged on nutritious rough fescue grasses that later fed the cattle industry. When roaming herds reached the foothills, Indigenous peoples could then drive them further westward into pounds for immediate hunting, or even further west into the deepening snows of the narrow mountain corridors where the large shaggy beasts could be more easily located for later sustenance. In fact, intense human hunting in these narrow mountain corridors of the mountains likely created the western edge of buffalo range as evidenced by no archaeological or historical evidence of bison occupying the broad grasslands of the Rocky Mountain Trench on the Pacific side of the continental divide since deglaciation.