Elephants Arrive in Time For Iinnii Days Festivities

A herd of stoic elephants stands out in the grassy fields of Buffalo Spirit Hills Ranch. At a distance the shadowy figures turn heads, as they are some of the last species one might expect to find in Browning, Montana.

A closer look reveals the inanimacy of the life-size herd, covered not in grey, wrinkly skin but instead a viny, wooden-like material known as Lantana camara.

Leading up to their presence on the Blackfeet Nation ranch, word spread that elephants were coming, and people posed questions to Indigenous Led, the conservation nonprofit that helped facilitate the mammalian arrival, as to whether the elephants were living. Ervin Carlson, a co-founder of the nonprofit, said they let the curiosities linger.

“You know, they look just as real, and look real good,” said Carlson.

The herd, an art installation known as The Great Elephant Migration, is halfway through the transcontinental journey it began last year in Rhode Island. That’s in addition to the thousands of miles the installation travelled from the Nilgiri Hills in Southern India, where Indigenous artisans created the sculptures based off elephants they know by name and personality.

The artisans, dubbed The Real Elephant Collective, handcrafted the sculptures with Lantana camara, an invasive weed that has swallowed large swaths of India’s protected areas and southern elephant habitat, pushing elephants into urban areas by suppressing the native vegetation elephants feed on.

The project aims to highlight Indigenous ways of coexisting with wildlife. India’s human and elephant populations have both doubled over the past 30 years, and 80% of the elephants’ range is shared with humans where the two continually negotiate space and foster tolerance.

For now, the herd will rest at the buffalo ranch on the Blackfeet Reservation until June 16, coordinated to arrive last week in time for Iinnii Days, a multi-day festival hosted by Indigenous Led and the Blackfeet Nation Buffalo Program to honor their bison relatives.

Carlson pointed toward the elephants during the welcoming ceremony.

“You know, they were about the same plight as buffalo, trying to save them,” said Carlson.

Busloads of school children and adults gathered excitedly for the first of the four-day celebration as festivities kicked off with archery, axe throwing, stick games, tipi building and traditional knowledge sharing. Heightening the excitement, day one’s main event centered around a bison hunt and harvest, led by Termaine Edmo, a decedent of Blackfeet and Shoshone-Bannock and the Climate Change Coordinator for the Blackfeet Nation.

Edmo artfully navigated her way around the bison carcass, explaining in a loud voice to the circle of children and adults what she was doing, pausing only occasionally to sip water from a bladder attached to her back.

“This was our first anatomy lesson,” said Edmo. “We were so in kinship with it we learned our anatomy from a buffalo.”

The butchering spanned over a three-hour period during which tribal members meticulously carved out every part of the body, handing organs to elders and washing out intestines.

Camee Rides At The Door, 15, swept a small switch blade between the bison’s body and the hide, her third time helping skin a bison. Her grandparents showed her how to skin, in addition to teaching her how to hunt, how to identify and use native plants, and how to construct a tipi.

“To do what my ancestors did when they were working, I feel connected to them in that way,” said Rides At The Door. “And then seeing everyone working to get this hide off, it’s really amazing.”

A bison herd wandered on a nearby hill, seeming not to notice the bloody scene below nor the elephant herd in the distance.

The two massive mammals share more in common than meets the eye. Both species are considered keystone species to their respective ecosystems, according to the World Wildlife Fund, their size and mass instrumental in helping shape their habitats. Both are matriarchal in nature, with older females leading the herds.

“Just like in our system too,” Carlson said with a grin. In addition to his position at Indigenous Led, Carlson serves as director of the Blackfeet Nation’s Buffalo Program and president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council.

“That’s how they’re kind of almost one and the same,” he said. “Each have a matriarch that the rest of the herd follows.”

Carlson has been helping facilitate the return and coexistence of bison, or iinnii, to the Blackfeet Nation, the first herd returning to Chief Mountain in 2023 after being eradicated over 150 years ago in an attempt to starve the Indigenous peoples whose survival depended on them. Bison have historically sustained the Blackfeet, with tribal members using every part of a buffalo’s body for food, tools, lodging and clothing. The reintegration of bison in tribal lands has marked not only a return to traditional, healthy foodways, but to cultural roots and returning the favor.

“It’s returning a big part of our culture that’s been taken away,” said Carlson. “They were everything to us. They’re still here and we’re still here, so our fight is to take care of them now, how they took care of us in the past.” 

Indigenous Led is one of the lead partners of the elephant art installation, alongside the Coexistence Consortium and Lion Guardians, each operating from Indigenous knowledge that sets coexisting with big animals as the standard to inform their conservation strategies.

The migration, like the bison and elephants, is also women-led, a collective of environmentalists, philanthropists, writers and creatives, including Cristina Mormorunni, the other co-founder of Indigenous Led.

Ruth Ganesh and Shubhra Nayar, co-founders and designers of the exhibit, respectively, leave viewers with a simple wish.

“The planet is our home, and theirs,” they stated. “The herd is here to tell their story of coexistence; that there is room for all of us on this planet. We hope this exhibition reminds us of the awe we feel when in the company of wild, free animals and inspires us to better share our world with them.”

All the handcrafted elephants are for sale – calves, adolescents, matriarchs and tuskers, the adult male members of the herd – ranging in price from $8,000 to $22,000. Proceeds will all go toward a conservation NGO linked with each elephant. The goal is to sell 1,000 elephants over the next year, raising $10 million toward coexistence efforts.

The herd is currently split up, with half having gone to the Blackfeet Reservation and the other half to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole. The full herd will reunite in Beverly Hills in July for the final stop of the migration.

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To see more images of Iinnii Days, see the full gallery here