Rice University: Rice students launch oral history archive to preserve Indigenous Texas stories

Generations of silence are giving way to spoken truth through a new project at Rice University. In collaboration with the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project (TTBP), a nonprofit founded by Lipan Apache leader Lucille Contreras to restore Indigenous foodways and culture, Rice’s Weston Twardowski and a team of students have launched an oral history archive to preserve the lived experiences of Native Texans.

“We conducted a survey that had never been done before for Texas Indigenous lineal descendants,” said Contreras, founder and CEO of TTBP. “It covered cultural, financial, linguistic, spiritual and educational topics along with sharing who was willing to share their stories.”

The project titled “Living Memory: An Oral History Project to Strengthen Native Sovereignty in Texas” began in fall 2024 as part of the Center for Civic Leadership- funded Houston Action Research Teams (HART) program. Guided by Twardowski and TTBP, the project has already collected more than 50 hours of interviews, many from elders who had never before spoken publicly about their Indigenous identities.

“I started working with Lucille about two years ago,” said Twardowski, associate director of the Center for Environmental Studies and the Sustainability Institute’s EcoStudio. “We collaborated on a couple of different potential food initiatives, and I invited her to speak in some of my classes. We just started to build a partnership.”

That collaboration evolved into this full-scale oral history initiative, grounded in methods designed to honor Indigenous storytelling traditions.

“To work with Weston and his students has been really wonderful,” Contreras said. “So many of our people have experienced the loss of land, language and culture. This has never actually been acknowledged by the state of Texas before. These stories hold treasures of information that help tie us to our past. Our ancestors will also help lead us into the future.”

Through Zoom interviews and phone calls, students have gathered testimonies that range from childhood memories and cultural practices to contemporary challenges faced by Native Texans.

“We have always been here,” Contreras said. “And the work we’re doing, including this oral history archive, is helping ensure our people’s stories aren’t just remembered. They’re recognized.”

“A lot of these older people, they’ll look at us and midinterview they’ll say, ‘You know, I’ve never actually said that out loud,’” said Isabella Bourtin, a junior majoring in health sciences. “Or they’ll say, ‘I’m so glad I can tell you this. I’ve never just sat down and told my life story to someone.’”

Bourtin, who is Native herself and founded Rice’s Native American Student Association, said working on the project has been emotional and empowering. She joined after hearing about the opportunity from Twardowski.

“Cultural preservation and revitalizing culture is bringing back what has been lost throughout generations of trauma,” Bourtin said. “So being on this project, which is providing a place to preserve these wonderful stories and traditions in a more concrete form, it’s just so beautiful.”

The project is designed to be community-owned and culturally responsive. In addition to gathering oral histories, students are building a digital archive that will be housed at the Woodson Research Center in Rice’s Fondren Library. The archive will also include a report synthesizing the most pressing needs voiced by Native Texans and potential paths toward sovereignty and resilience. The digital archive is expected to be publicly accessible later this year.

“We really wanted to make sure that when we started this research project we were doing so respectfully and thoughtfully in conversation with our partners, knowing what TTBP’s goals and needs were and really meeting that,” Twardowski said.

The project is also one of the first comprehensive attempts to document Indigenous identity in Texas through oral histories. For student researchers like Annesha Dey, a junior majoring in philosophy, that novelty comes with responsibility.

“It’s data that’s disseminated and owned by Native Texans for Native Texans to give them the voice by telling their stories,” Dey said. “It’s basically a large collection of many experiences. In each of those experiences, people talk about the differences between what it looks like to be Indigenous in Texas.”

Dey and Bourtin were part of the team that presented the project at the HART showcase at the end of the spring semester. By then, they had completed 57 hours of interviews.

“I was just so incredibly proud because we’ve really put our heart and souls into this project,” Bourtin said. “It is so meaningful to every single one of us.”

The next phase of the project will focus on identifying common themes across interviews with the goal of helping Indigenous organizations like TTBP better advocate for community needs.

“What are some of the challenges we’re hearing?” Twardowski said. “What are some of the exciting things that we’re seeing as places of flourishing for Indigenous peoples across the state today?”

Contreras said the students’ work reflects a level of respect and care that resonated deeply with those whose stories have been documented.

“They have taken this project to heart and really tried their best to cultivate the relationship with who they are interviewing from the very beginning,” Contreras said. “Their care and authenticity has been so helpful for our Texas Indigenous lineal descendant community.”

Explore the oral history archive here.

Boot Barn: Texas Tribal Buffalo Project: Restoring Sacred Traditions to Find Healing & Strength

“This land represents a powerful return to Indigenous stewardship, allowing our buffalo relatives more room to roam and enabling our community to embrace our true Lipan Apache spirit.”

– Lucille Contreras, CEO and Founder of Texas Tribal Buffalo Project

The southern plains of Texas were once ruled by the American buffalo, and for the Native American tribes in the area, the 
bison (lyane’e) were a source of spirituality, food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and more. They were integral to both native culture and to the land they called home by promoting biodiversity, plant growth, and improving the health of the soil. In the 1800s, the bison faced near extinction. Similarly, the Native American community suffered unimaginable losses. But today, the buffalo population is steadily improving thanks in part to the resiliency of Indigenous communities and organizations like Texas Tribal Buffalo Project that are working tirelessly to revive the bison herds they view as relatives and reconnect with their sacred cultural traditions involving the buffalo.

Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is a female- and Indigenous-owned nonprofit that aims to reconnect Indigenous Lineal Descendants to their kin and to the buffalo as they care for the land, buffalo, and each other. Together, they work to heal generational wounds and restore the cherished practices of the Lipan Apache and other Indigenous communities and tribes in Texas.

A Pathway to Rematriation

Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is a pathway for Indigenous communities of Texas to rematriate, says Lucille Contreras, 
founder and CEO of Texas Tribal Buffalo Project that is modeled after a traditional Indigenous matriarchy. Following her own journey of healing through the buffalo, Contreras found her calling to establish an organization with the goal of rekindling native kinship through shared reconnection with their heritage.

“Over the years, I've been gaining my own indigeneity, my own sovereignty as a Texas Indigenous lineal descendant, she shares. When I was in South Dakota, I learned the healing power of the buffalo. How amazing that the buffalo can provide spiritual healing, mental healing, and physical healing. I wanted that for our people back home in Texas. So armed with this vision, with this dream, with this prayer, I was able to get a USDA beginning farmer and rancher loan. We purchased 77 acres and formed the nonprofit all at once. As soon as I came back home, we hit the ground running so that we were able to bring the buffalo home. The first thing that we did was a ceremony to give thanks. It was like kissing the land of my ancestors.”

Empowered by the return to Texas and the return of the buffalo to the land, Contreras was able to help other native people find their strength. Most notably, Texas Tribal Buffalo Project provided a space for the community to return to their matriarchal customs and restore women to leadership positions.

Contreras explains, The majority of our Indigenous communities are led by older women. And one of the goals of Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is to role model the aspect of being a strong Indigenous woman with leadership and guidance from the buffalo, from our ancestors, and from each other. What I want for future generations of Indigenous women are for us to love ourselves, to walk with grace and dignity, to draw upon our own wisdom and strength for leadership. That's the healing that the buffalo bring to our people, the leadership.

Izel Lopez, one of the women leaders at Texas Tribal Buffalo Project who is working on curating an online museum of native history, shares that rematriation is of vital importance in keeping their cultural traditions alive.

In our culture, matriarchs have been around since time immemorial. Men held the women to very high regard. Women held council. Through research I've learned that women went to war. Women are also our firekeepers. In essence, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. We always go back to our mothers. When we're sick, or when something's wrong, or we need someone to talk to, it's always our moms that hold that for us. In working with this project, it's been great to be able to move women outside of Western civilization and rematriate and reintroduce them back into the traditional ways of our people where women are the caretakers for everyone.”

A Community Strengthened by Restored Traditions

In addition to restoring the cultural traditions of the Lipan Apache, Texas Tribal Buffalo Project connects with the buffalo as a vessel to help native people rediscover their ancestry and ceremonial practices.

Speaking about one of the first buffalo harvests the organization held, Contreras shares, We had one buffalo that was harvested by my son, Enrique Josekuauhtli, and we had 150 Lipan Apaches from all over the state arrive. These were people who had been connecting over the years but may not have met in person. They connected through oral histories, through DNA tests, ancestry, and genealogy. For these families to come together for the first time was so healing.

The harvesting of the buffalo is as much about the gathering of the community as it is about breathing new life into sacred traditions that may have been lost over the years. Contreras continues, We harvested this buffalo in a really good way, with prayers from the elders, giving words of encouragement to my son. Then after the buffalo was taken, we all sang, we gave thanks, and we prayed. And then the butchering started, and all our tribal people automatically just started organizing. That proves to me that our Texas Indigenous people, if we are given the chance to be our true selves, are leaders. We are expressing our sovereignty and our indigeneity by leading ourselves with the tools, and the knowledge, and the skills that our ancestors left us.

Each time the community applies these skills to use all parts of the buffalo according to Lipan Apache traditions, they reconnect with their centuries-old culture and find healing and strength. “When we caretake for the buffalo, we in turn are also taken care of,” says Contreras. Just as our ancestors used the buffalo, every single part of the buffalo, for survival, food, shelter, and spirituality, we are reconnecting with those ways. To be able to harvest a buffalo in a ceremonial way gives us so much strength and fortitude. Our connection is generations and hundreds of years deep with who we are as native people.

Revitalizing the Land Through the Buffalo

As Texas Tribal Buffalo Project restores the cultural practices of the Lipan Apache, they are also working to restore the buffalo to their native habitat and improve the health of the land for future generations.

Contreras explains that the buffalo’s natural life cycle benefits many other types of animal species, and that Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is focused on restoring this natural relationship between the animals and their environment.

“I often get asked what is the biggest difference between cattle and buffalo? And one of the biggest differences is the way that the buffalo live on the land. They create wallows. They create this amazing, beautiful biodiversity for other animals to come. Since we've been on this land, we have seen burrowing owls. We have seen flickers. We have a whooping crane that stops every year coming and going as the whooping cranes migrate to Canada, to the Wood Buffalo Preserve.”

To monitor their buffalo, Texas Tribal Buffalo Project uses traditional regenerative agricultural techniques that promote the buffalo’s natural role in maintaining the health of the land. Traditional ecological knowledge and skills, or regenerative agriculture, is the movement of acknowledging the earth and the soil as our relative, and acknowledging every blade of grass as our relative. If the grass is healthy, our buffalo are healthy, says Contreras. She also explains how their regenerative agricultural process allows the earth to heal naturally through the buffalo.

“We monitor the grass and rotate the buffalo. We pay attention to the buffalo's fur, horns, eyes, and [manure]. We pay attention to how the buffalo walk on the land. The buffalo are the best stewards of the earth. By being on this land, the buffalo help improve our climate. They also are the number one carbon sequestrators in the land just by existing on the earth. The way that they walk aerates the soil, and the way that they wallow creates another environment for other animals. It is true biodiversity and restoration of the land.”

Finding Healing and Strength Together

Through the work that Contreras and her team at Texas Tribal Buffalo Project do every day, members of the Lipan Apache community find a space to connect with one another, their culture, and the bison that are of vital importance to their heritage and traditions. At the same time, they are working to revive the population of buffalo back in their native land of Texas and caretake for the earth through natural practices. At Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, mutual healing can be found for the buffalo, the Lipan Apache, and the land. Together, they are a community strengthened by tradition, spirituality, and native leadership.

“I hope that the work that I do as Lipan Apache woman lives on way after my lifetime, that for generations, those that come after me, all the indigenous children will be able to know that we are strong Lipan Apache people. We are from this land for generations, for thousands of years. We have the DNA of the buffalo within us, and we rise strong with forbearance, with fortitude and walk with grace and beauty just like the buffalo do.”

– Lucille Contreras

Emergence LLC: Texas Tribal Buffalo Project

Written by Emergence LLC

About Texas Tribal Buffalo Project

Texas Tribal Buffalo Project works to restore the traditional kinship between bison and Indigenous nations in the state’s southern plains–as a pathway to strengthening tribal sovereignty. Founder Lucille Contreras created the Project to help heal intergenerational trauma in her own community, the people of the Lipan Apache, who continue to fight for federal tribal recognition after being displaced from their traditional lands. By engaging communities in returning and caring for buffalo, the Project not only provides access to healthy, sustainable foods, but catalyzes the reclamation of Indigenous language, culture, and identity. 

Challenges and Opportunities

After formally becoming a nonprofit in 2019, the Project reached out to Emergence for help with building financial resources it needed to grow. Fundraising was initially challenging, in part because the Lipan Apache are not yet a federally recognized tribal nation and do not possess a formal designated land base–making it difficult to gather and present concrete data on community needs and placing some significant grant programs out of reach. 

Approach

Team Emergence got creative, working with the Project’s staff to refine their messaging to capture the attention of a wider range of funders–including both individuals and foundations. Through strategic planning discussions, we helped to expand the scope of the Project’s vision, highlighting its potential impact on tribal nations across southwestern Texas. We also connected the Project’s work to the global climate change crisis, shedding light on Lucille’s visionary leadership and the vital importance of investing in regenerative agriculture to restore the health of both Indigenous lands and Indigenous communities. 

Impact

Lucille’s vision for the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is now capturing the support of followers and funders across the state–and well beyond. Coverage of the project in the media has grown significantly, and Lucille was recently named a member of the James Beard Foundation’s Legacy Network Program, bringing light to the Project’s mission and her vision for restoring health to Texas’s Indigenous communities. Through powerful messaging, strategic planning, and leadership coaching, Emergence continues to help Lucille and her team grow into their place at the forefront of the movement for Indigenous food and tribal sovereignty. 

“Emergence has been an integral part of our success at Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. Their team helped me take my overarching vision for the Project’s future and break it down into a strategic, step-by-step plan.

They helped us craft the narrative about the work that we do so that our communications are clear and powerful. And then they helped us get our story in front of major foundations and funders, to build connections and relationships to support us now and in the future. At the end of our first year, after having my nose to the grindstone, I looked up and was floored at how much our budget had grown.

But beyond that, I’ve been inspired to work with such a strong team of women who are all so driven and passionate about the work that needs to be done for our communities to thrive, not just now but for the next generations. It’s exciting to see the movement of women in Indian Country supporting each other in fulfilling our visions–and Emergence is very much a part of that.”

-Lucille Contreras, Executive Director.

Texas Architecture Magazine: Concept for the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project Supports Reconciliation and Re-establishment

Written by Stephanie Aranda, Assoc. AIA

I stood in a wide-open field where the tall native grasses reached to grip the horizon, the only visual stitching between land and sky. I felt connected to the earth, something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Grounded. Rooted. Humbled. Harmonious. (Feelings I most certainly do not get as I go about my daily life in the city.) As I took in my surroundings, I sensed the rest of the team also taking a moment of pause. One by one, gradually they seemed to be feeling their unity with the earth too.

Squinting our eyes in the warm sun, our team observed the site, watching the grasses sway in the wind, the eagles impressively soaring through the skies. Then we noticed something peculiar — a line of nine buffalo, standing almost shoulder to shoulder, staring back at our group.

We heard laughter to the left of us and turned to see Lucille Contreras with pure amusement on her face. She declared that she had never seen the buffalo look so curious before.

Contreras is the founder and chief executive officer of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project (TTBP), a nonprofit dedicated to developing our relationship with the Iyanee’ (buffalo, in Apache) and healing the generational trauma of the Lipan Apache and other Indigenous communities and tribes in Texas. A native Texan, Contreras spent time on Knife Chief Buffalo Nation, a buffalo reservation in South Dakota. The experience left her with a deep sense of connection to her Lipan Apache heritage; consequently, she hopes to re-establish that connection for the native peoples in Texas. Thus the TTBP was born. 

Our paths crossed when the TTBP contacted the AIA San Antonio Professional Path to Leadership Program (2PLP), a leadership course for emerging professionals, in March 2022 to gauge our interest in performing work pro bono for the nonprofit. The result was the development of a master plan for TTBP’s property in Waelder with three distinct zones: a market, a headquarters, and a campsite, each designed to support the mission of the organization through a concept related to the buffalo.

The design team consists of seven emerging professionals from the 2PLP program: Justin Chetty; Gabriel De Leon, Assoc. AIA; Josh Nieves; Oscar Prado Yanez; Ethan Ryden; Antonio Sanchez; and me. Inspired by the wonder of the buffalo, we banded together to work with Contreras to further her organization’s mission. A nomadic tribe, the Apache had a strong spiritual and survival connection to the buffalo, as did other Texas Indigenous peoples such as the Caddo, Karankawa, Coahuiltecan, Kickapoo, and Jumano. Says Contreras: “The buffalo is everything to us in life. Traditionally, it was used for food and shelter as well as spiritual strength, and so today we try to use every part of the buffalo just as we used to use it before.” 

What is the distinction between buffalo and bison? This is a common question — and for good reason. Aside from their physical attributes, geographical location is an important factor that distinguishes the two. While the definitive scientific and common North American term for the Iyanee’ aligns with “bison,” Indigenous peoples have a history of calling them “buffalo”; as part of decolonizing their language, they utilize the term “buffalo” rather than “bison.” 

As an Indigenous woman-led movement, this project is reintroducing rematriation (this term is used instead of the patriarchal term “repatriation” for the reclaiming of ancestral remains, spirituality, culture, knowledge, and resources) and kinship between Texas Indigenous communities and connection to our buffalo relatives. Trauma endured by the Indigenous community includes scarcity, murder, loss, and displacement. Despite this, the TTBP aims to help re-establish the traditional homeland of the Lipan Apache and other nations, as well as the home range of the Southern Plains Bison. Preservation of buffalo in Texas is an example not only of wildlife protection but of strengthening and reclaiming connection to the lands and to traditional knowledge.

Contreras hopes that the TTBP will provide modern Indigenous communities of Texas with a means of cultural reconnection and with a pathway for tribal and food sovereignty. Additionally, she hopes that any visitor can feel a sense of kinship with the land and the buffalo. What the team felt during the initial site visit is just what Contreras had envisioned people would feel when they visit the ranch — the gravity of their relationship and reconciliation with nature. From the Indigenous perspective, we are all creatures of the earth. We are all relatives of the buffalo.

The 2PLP team visited the ranch in Waelder on a beautiful day in April. Contreras walked us around the site, pointing out every special feature and detail of this seemingly sacred place. She walked us through large grass fields, to dusty areas under a low tree canopy where the buffalo like to roll, around the pond, and through man-made structures that serve as the organization’s headquarters. Contreras gleamed as she talked about TTBP’s vision for the future and how that could translate to physical space and experiences.

The scope of the project was simple: Develop three unique zones within the site that promote the mission and growth of the TTBP. We were tasked to design so minimally and humbly that you barely notice the transition between interior and exterior. The design philosophy is to allow the architecture to recede so that the experience of the land remains most prominent. Each zone is centered around a fundamental quality that the buffalo provide — nourishment, knowledge, and connection.

Zone 1 addresses nourishment. A small portion of the property at the southwest corner, near Highway 1296, has remained fenced off from the buffalo. The idea for this zone is to create a small market for pop-up events where local vendors can sell goods and to better connect the work of the TTBP with the local community. The market stand would be built of simple and durable materials that match the existing aesthetic and meet functional needs. The market would create a street presence for TTBP and serve as a safe space from which to view the buffalo, as it would be located close to the safety fence and would frame a view of the animals. 

Zone 2 encompasses the headquarters and is designed around knowledge acquisition. A humble homestead central to the site, along with a nearby home and a small hempcrete structure, currently serves as the TTBP’s official headquarters. The design objective for this area is to create and develop facilities for the compound. Guided by the vision, volunteer housing, a community kitchen and garden, an art studio, and a barn will be added and made available for both volunteers and visitors to learn about the buffalo through different mediums.

Zone 3 provides the most hands-on experience with buffalo through direct connection. This zone, known as the camp, surrounds the property’s large pond. The camp will tailor and enhance the visitor experience by providing campsites, a boathouse, outdoor office space, and trails. The hope is to attract people who want to interact with nature and the buffalo, as well as people who want to work remotely among the buffalo for a day. 

Development of the three zones serves as a small but powerful act of rematriation and stewardship. While the trauma Indigenous peoples have endured can never be undone, the TTBP emphasizes and re-establishes the importance of the relationship with our buffalo ancestors for a modern era. Health and healing are instrumental objectives that radiate from the mission into each zone and into the spatial and architectural design — alleviating disconnection, invoking curiosity, and setting the stage for a cohesive cultural narrative.

The organization welcomes the curious to visit the ranch. To learn more about the stories, mission, and voices of the TTBP, visit texastribalbuffaloproject.org.

Stephanie Aranda, Assoc. AIA, graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Drexel University in 2021. She is currently working as a designer in San Antonio.

Ms. Aranda has helped Texas Tribal Buffalo Project receive the Texan by Nature Certification 2023

KENS 5: 'Feel the energy, feel the healing': Woman returns buffalo to native land east of San Antonio

Written by Alicia Neaves

The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project in Waelder sits on 77 acres with 15 head of bison. After nearly three centuries, the buffalo are roaming once again.

WAELDER, Texas — The pandemic gave many of us the chance to reflect on our circumstances -- and in many cases, our heritage and background.

For Lucille Contreras, it provided an opportunity to restore her connection with her Lipan Apache roots. 

In a modern way, she's working to recreate the environment of her ancestors where they once lived in South Texas. This includes bringing the buffalo back to their native land.

As we close out Women's History Month, KENS 5 shares her story as part of our series: Together We Rise.

March 23 was a sunny and windy day in Waelder, Texas when we drove a little more than an hour to meet Lucille Contreras.

That Thursday happened to mark the two-year anniversary of living on her ancestral land.

"We are living on 77 acres with 15 head of bison, which we consider our relatives," said Contreras. "Our Lipan Apache group and communities, we are buffalo nation people."

Born and raised in San Antonio, Contreras built a career in IT.

In 2013, she committed to a seven-year focus learning about buffalo caretaking as a way of life. She lived on the Pine Ridge reservation in Porcupine, South Dakota, starting her own experience of rematriation.

"Rematriation is a movement right now across the United States, which we also call Turtle Island, where many tribal people, indigenous people across the land, are becoming closer to our own indigeneity in regards to food sovereignty, land access, land acquisition, caretaking of the buffalo as relatives," Contreras explained.

It was then, she created the non-profit Texas Tribal Buffalo Project as a pathway to come back home. The non-profit's mission is committed to healing the generational trauma of Lipan Apache descendants.

Contreras didn't return to Texas empty-handed. She brought back the gift of the buffalo. The first in the herd has genetics from Caprock Canyon, which is the state's herd. Named 'Bubbas', the male buffalo was gifted to Contreras by an anonymous donor.

The next three bison she acquired were females, born on a ranch in Carrizo Springs. Currently, Contreras has 14 female and 1 male bison on the land.

"Their scientific term is 'bison', but we as indigenous people have embraced and we claim the word 'buffalo.' Or, in Lipan Apache, iyanee," said Contreras.

The Lipan Apache claimed Texas as home in the 1600's, the farthest east of all Apache tribes. When anglo settlers came to Texas in the early 1800's, the Lipan Apache welcomed them and traded bison, venison, hides, pecans and other staples. By 1880, smallpox, food shortages and war forced the tribe and its buffalo to scatter to avoid being hunted and killed. 

According to the Texas Parks & Wildlife (TPW), between 30 and 60 million bison once roamed the North American plains. TPW estimates fewer than 1,000 head of bison remained in North America in 1888.

Contreras pointed to a map on display in her house that shows the immerse herds of bison lining the length of Texas. 

"This is documented 1836," she explained.

Nearly two centuries later, on the Texas homeland of the Lipan Apache, the buffalo roam again -- treated with reverence.

"They survived generations. They survived massacres, decimation of their population. So did the indigenous people of Texas," said Contreras.

Right now, Contreras believes all 14 female buffalo are pregnant.

"People can come and feel the energy, feel the healing. Don't you just feel something special?" she asked, as we were sitting in her UTV, with the buffalo herd to our right. "They're medicine."

In May 2021, a ceremony was held on the land in Waelder which included an offering of a traditional bison harvest.

"There were approximately 100 Lipan Apaches here," Contreras recalled. "It was the first time in generations that Lipan Apaches were able to gather in safety without being persecuted, hunted or put through very traumatic situations."

Contreras purchased the Waelder property with a USDA Beginning Farmers and Ranchers loan. She's licensed to sell bison meat, which helps support programs for the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project.

Contreras says while there are other buffalo ranches in Texas, very few indigenous women are practicing the buffalo relative restoration and rematriation way of life.

"We're creating a sustainable model that hopefully can be replicated," she said.

When asked about the most challenging part of managing the buffalo, Contreras looked out to the mesquite on the land. She says the mesquite robs gallons of water and precious grass away from the buffalo. 

"We could use some help in that," she explained. "The reason why Texas and other places really suffer with this overgrowth of mesquite is because the buffalo were taken away from this landscape. They were persecuted, they were hunted down. Buffalo are the best stewards of the land. They're the best caretaker of the land. They're a keystone species, but because that balance was disrupted that mesquite just grew to what you see today."

In early March, Contreras rallied in Washington, D.C. as lawmakers prepared to vote on the new farm bill.

Right now, only federally-recognized tribes have access to agriculture resources. Contreras is asking for a seat at the table.

"We do know that we are from here. We have our oral history and we're able to trace our roots back to this very land that we're standing on," said Contreras. "As indigenous people, regardless of federal recognition or not, we have every right to claim our own sovereignty."

There are three federally recognized tribes in Texas: Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo and Ysleta del Sur Pueblo.

During the summer, Contreras hosts summer camps at Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. There, children and families learn more about the Lipan Apache heritage and spend time among the buffalo. 

She and her staff hope to begin planting USDA hemp in the near future, as the non-profit recently acquired their hemp license. They also secured two larger USDA grants to help them do work in food sovereignty. A feasibility study is underway for a meat processing facility at Texas Tribal Buffalo Project.

According to the Lipan Apache tribe's website, the current registered population of the tribe is about 4,500. Contreras is hopeful that with data decolonization, they will discover more of their brothers and sisters who are living among us.

March 3, the Biden administration announced a $25 million pledge to return bison back to tribal lands.

Sustain the Mag: The Return of Buffalo in Texas, Providing Medicine to the Land

Written by Reza Cristián

It’s a bright sunny Texas day as I head to the ranch owned by Lucille Contreras, Chief Executive Officer of The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project founded in 2019. Lucille invited myself and my team to see where the buffalo live and to talk more about the important work she is building there and across the state. As we arrive just an hour outside of Austin, we are greeted by two beautiful herding dogs Homie and Little Bro immediately.  

Lucille Contreras, Chief Executive Officer of The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project

Lucille, a Lipan Apache member, created The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project as a non-profit organization committed to healing the generational trauma of Lipan Apache descendants and other Native nations. Lucille started this project to help reconnect Indigenous communities to the land and bring back such a vital animal that historically has provided so much in the past. 

“I feel the buffalo are medicine and I know that if we are good caretakers to buffalo then we in turn are taken care of by the buffalo, mentally, physically and spiritually,” said Lucille Contreras. 

It is the buffalo that provided everything from food, housing, nourishment, spirituality, art and culture. Now after Lucille has lived on her ranch for over two years she is building this all back with the buffalo that live with her. Right now, she is entering a great time in Texas for her project with amazing opportunities to provide and heal the Texas Indigenous communities to each other.

After getting to meet Lucille for the first time, you can see how much she cares for the buffalo and is so intrigued by how they live. Her passion is infectious as she takes us out on an UTV to get up close and personal with the animals. Lucille told us that a baby buffalo was just born a day prior to our arrival and how grown they are already. Lucille feels guided by her ancestors and the power by Native prayer, which is offerings to land. 

One of the main focus points of the project is that Lucille is currently leading grant decolonizing data to gather this information across the state on food, education, and housing. The disconnection of Texas Indigenous communities to the land, food and culture has caused generational trauma, which Lucille hopes to rebuild with bringing the buffalo back to this land. 

As she continues to build on this, Lucille is building on great partnerships with organizations with a local Farm to School Network, a non-profit helping increase access to local food and nutrition education to improve children’s health. By entering this relationship with them, Lucille can supply ground buffalo meat and curriculum to schools.

“We hope next year to be able to do our own processing with the USDA certified facility using mobile units at our ranch and in the process looking for additional land for the buffalo,” said Contreras

For Lucille, she is just getting started, with lots of great opportunities in the near future. She hopes she can spread the buffalo out to other Texas Indigenous communities by either selling meat or teaching them buffalo care so they increase buffalo range across the state. 

“Currently, I'm excited about both Texas Indigenous education as well as grazing management, a more traditional ecological knowledge regarding buffalo caretaking of the land.”

The buffalo ranch and project she is building is for everyone. She hopes to bring people to meet the buffalo, invite folks to stay where she has built a tiny home for non-profit orgs to rent out on Airbnb. Other future arrangements that she hopes for is to invite Native chefs to collaborate on buffalo meat meals and allow them to have a place for these chefs to do teachings on traditional Native cooking.

The big question for allies on how to support is providing land back. Lucille has reached out to people who are 4th or 5th generation Texan and no longer live in the state. For these Texans who’s families still have ownership of land in the state, she invites them to give their ranches back to Indigenous communities. These land donations will help build out more buffalo ranches and land bases for tribal gatherings.  

On top of this, another way for the state of Texas to support these communities is by actually designating Texas Indigenous Peoples Day. 

The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is creating a safe space for Indigenous peoples to keep their Native teachings in the state of Texas. With the climate crisis affecting our state from winter storms to scorching hot summers, it is Indigenous knowledge that will help keep Texas alive during the crisis as well as across the globe.  For thousands of years, Native Americans have relied heavily on the buffalo for survival, using every part for food, clothes, tools and so much more. The buffalo isn’t just an animal, but such an integral part of this land and the Indigenous people that take care of it.

Texas Parks & Wildlife: Bringing Back the Buffalo

Written by Eva Fredrick

In 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, Lucille Contreras stood in the grass of a property between San Antonio and Houston and breathed in the fresh air. She imagined the millions of buffalo that had once passed over this very land. This was the spot, she thought to herself.   

After years spent away from Texas, where she was born, Contreras was excited to come home — and it was a homecoming for more than just her. On the 77 acres of land, which she bought shortly after she first saw it, Contreras has provided a home for around 20 bison (also called buffalo or the Lipan Apache word, Iyanee’), an animal that roamed the area for thousands of years.

As a member of the Lipan Apache tribe, Contreras feels an ancestral tie to the animals.

“The buffalo are everything — our home, our spirituality, medicine, food, shelter — really everything,” says Contreras. “The buffalo survived near-extinction, but so did the Texas Indigenous people. They are really very parallel lives and destinies.”

Contreras’ acreage outside Waelder is the home base of her nonprofit organization, the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. The project aims to reconnect Native Americans with the buffalo through meeting the animals, learning about them and interacting with them as their ancestors once did.

Contreras first decided she wanted to bring back buffalo after working with the animals at the Knife Chief Buffalo Nation Society in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

“Spending time with the buffalo really provided a sense of healing and calmness that I had never experienced before aside from riding a horse,” says Contreras. “I felt that if I feel this way, how amazing would it be for other people? What they will feel, the other Indigenous people of Texas? We have been separated from the buffalo as Native people in Texas for so long.”

The project started with nine buffalo and a USDA Beginning Farmer and Rancher loan. The Nature Conservancy donated five more animals; then more came from an anonymous donor. Soon, Contreras had 20 buffalo on her 77-acre property.

Contreras connects Native children with the buffalo through youth camps and events. She finds attendees by partnering with various organizations such as Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend, Fuerza Unida and Circles in Da Hood. At her camps, the students learn outdoor skills such as fishing or how to humanely harvest a meat rabbit; they also get to interact with the bison and spend time in nature.

“They get a chance to reconnect and be on the land and be able to not worry about technology or violence and or possible dangerous situations,” she says. “It’s great [for them] to be able to just be here and be kids and run and have fun and play, as well as learn about their culture and their history.”
The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project also sells buffalo products such as frozen meat, providing local communities with a traditional food staple. Recently they partnered with a local school district, Florence ISD, to provide meat for school lunches.

Contreras’ work to connect Native people with their buffalo history is a healing practice for people and buffalo alike.

“The destruction and the slaughter of the great buffalo herds was a direct result of wanting to acquire land that Indigenous people lived on,” she says. “Certainly there are other buffalo ranches and caretakers in Texas, but none that I know of that are coming from a point of view of Indigenous restoration of land and communities in Texas, based on the relationship that Texas Indigenous people once had with the buffalo.”  

The Nature Conservancy Magazine: Coming Home

Written by By Dylan Baddour, Freelance Writer

Lucille Contreras set out to reconnect her Lipan Apache community with its heritage. She brought buffalo back to Texas Native American land.

Lucille Contreras stepped onto the porch of her white wooden ranch house and blew a tone through a conch shell horn. The two dozen kids camped in her yard finished their breakfast tacos and gathered to listen.

Under shade from the summer Texas sun, Contreras called the children up front and told them about a promise she’d recently made. She’d signed a treaty with other “buffalo nation” tribes at an intertribal gathering in Wyoming just a few days before.

“I’m going to take care of the buffalo for the rest of my life,” she said with measured enunciation. “Just like I’m taking care of you children by inviting you to my land.”

Then she called on two kids to lead a morning song. In the pasture nearby, a small herd of buffalo wandered. It was day three of the first official Lipan Apache summer camp at the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, a new nonprofit based on a ranch in the rolling prairie of rural south-central Texas.

Contreras, an energetic mother and information technology manager from San Antonio, founded the project in 2020 with visions of creating a place where Native peoples could practice culture and heal. All along, her dream was to bring her community out for days at a time to let the children bond with one another, the land and the buffalo.

“These young people are our focus and priority,” Contreras said, looking out at the kids who had gathered despite the 100-degree heat. “They are seeds, and we are putting in the water and nutrients so they will grow.”

Generations of trauma—genocide, forced relocations, destruction of culture, mockery in old movies, poverty and more—left the Lipan Apache and other Native peoples dissociated and disconnected from the land, Contreras said. Their culture once revolved around the buffalo, but they’d slowly lost that connection along with the buffalo. Now she’s trying to turn things around.

The Texas Observer: Labeled ‘Hispanic’

Written by Dylan Baddour

The moment seemed to call for drastic action. Lucille Contreras’ youngest son was on his own, ranching buffalo on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota where both lived. Her other kids were financially stable. For the first time, this mother of three didn’t have to consider what anyone else wanted.

The COVID-19 pandemic had her locked down and looking every day at the heaping stack of U.S. Department of Agriculture loan application papers that had lingered on her desk for years. Finally, she decided. It was time.

The career computer information tech worker from San Antonio would return to Texas and start to ranch buffalo, just as she’d learned in six years living with the Lakota. She believed her own people, the Lipan Apaches, needed buffalo too.

The Lipan Apache, historically based around Central Texas, are recognized by the state—but not by the federal government. They have no reservation and no unified representation. That means thousands of people with Lipan heritage, like Contreras, live scattered across a state that has historically labeled Native Americans as Mexican immigrants and taught school children that Texas’ tribal people were long gone. 

Contreras wanted to show that those myths were false, and that South Texas cultural staples, like the roasted cow heads consumed in barbacoa tamales, the heirloom metate her grandma used to grind corn for tortillas, and the colorful parties thrown for young women coming of age didn’t originate in Spain, but trace back to a time when buffalo roamed all across Texas by the millions. “There’s one thing for sure: The buffalo survived,” Contreras said. “And we as Indigenous people, especially Texas Indigenous, we also survived.”

Since her people didn’t have a reservation to use as a cultural center, Contreras decided to buy land. She acquired 77 acres near the tiny town of Waelder, gathered a small herd of bison, and started the nonprofit Texas Tribal Buffalo Project in March 2021, using a mixture of $580,000 in loans, grants, donations, and support from her Native American activist community. 

Her project is only the latest example of the steady re-emergence of the long-hidden Lipan Apache culture in Texas. Thirty years ago, there were no openly Lipan groups here, but several robust communities have since been formed by a generation of people who organized around common oral stories of South Texas Apache ancestry. All are dedicated to rediscovering and reclaiming their pre-colonial roots.

Today, two major Lipan Apache groups have thousands of members: the Lipan Apache, based in tiny Brackettville, 30 miles outside Del Rio, and the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, based in McAllen. Two other smaller groups call themselves the Lipan Apache Nation of Texas and the Apache Council of Texas. Contreras is enrolled as a member of the Band. 

Contreras, a college graduate, has never been wealthy: She has long been a single mother who worked in elementary school computer labs and later on a college campus. 

During a 2021 interview, Contreras smiled warmly as she walked the fenceline of her ranch on the prairie, 80 miles east of San Antonio. A life in agriculture is a dream come true. 

“This is the first time in hundreds of years that Lipan Apaches and Southern Plains bison have been right here, on this land,” she said, pointing to the tall grasses beneath her high leather boots.

She said her project comes at a time of reawakening for Native American identity and communities nationwide. Indeed, in Texas, U.S. Census figures show a robust Native population emerging from concealment. Today, more Texans identify as Native than ever before. 

Back in 1950, the U.S. Census showed a population of 2,736 American Indians in Texas, of whom 142 were living on the Alabama-Coushatta reservation in the Piney Woods of Polk County—the only reservation in Texas at the time (two more small reservations in the state were founded in 1969 and 1985). 

Census takers were instructed back then not to ask about race but to decide for themselves. That was never easy to determine, especially in Texas, where centuries of wars and competing territorial and imperial claims left a complex mixture of overlapping cultures.

They used Texas history as their guide: Texas territory was long linked to Mexico, first under Spanish rule from about 1690 to 1821, and then as part of an independent Mexico from 1821 until the Texas Revolution in 1836.

The idea that original Texans were all Mexicans or Hispanics lingered among U.S. census takers long after Texas rejoined the United States in 1870 after the Civil War.

“Since Texas was part of Mexico, they decided all the Indians were Mexicans,” said Bernard Barcena, chairman of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, who traces his own ancestry to Lipans who settled in San Antonio missions after they were built by Spanish monks in the early 1700s. “They were looked at not as Indigenous people but as Mexican immigrants.”

After the U.S. Census changed in 1970 and race became self-reported, the number of identified American Indians began to rise both in Texas and nationwide. 

Figures for Texas show the self-reported American Indian population has grown over 1,500 percent, from 18,000 in 1970 to 295,000 in 2020. They account for one percent of the state’s population today.

Many American Indians in Texas, like Contreras herself, also identify as Hispanic, which on the census is a separate category that can be chosen by people of any race. Most of those people did not grow up or live on one of Texas’ three tiny reservations.

Many more Texans know they come from Native roots but lack information to claim their heritage, said Hector de Leon, a veteran Houston-based organizer who has been analyzing demographic data on his website and in community talks for decades. 

De Leon calls himself Hispanic, but when he talks about Texans’ confusion with Native American racial identity, he speaks from his personal struggles. De Leon gets six options when he fills out the race section of the U.S. Census: Black, White, American Indian, Asian, “two or more races,” or “some other race.” None of  these feel right.

His grandparents were rural farmers in Mexico. He was born in the city of Monterrey in Nuevo León, Mexico, but spent the last 50 years on the same street in Houston. He has high cheekbones and a dark earthy skin tone.  A test he took a few years ago from 23andMe showed his DNA as 67 percent Native American.

He had always considered marking himself as “American Indian.” But the census asks respondents to specify a tribe and de Leon has no idea.

So instead, he marked “White,” like more than two-thirds of Texas Hispanics in the 2010 Census. He also checked “Hispanic or Latino origin.” He pointed out that about 99 percent of Texans who identified as “Some Other Race” in 2010 also identified as Hispanic—suggesting that many share de Leon’s struggle with whether to select American Indian.

But that struggle is not shared by all Texas Hispanics. For example, de Leon’s wife comes from Cuba. When she took the genome test, it showed she was 100 percent of Southern European origin. She considers herself white and Hispanic. Many others like de Leon, who descended from Spanish colonists and from Native Americans, consider themselves mestizo, an option that isn’t listed on census forms.

“When they talk about the mixed-race population in the U.S., they don’t include me there, they include me in the category of Hispanic,” he said. “So the fact that I am native to the Americas gets lost.”

Reclaiming their Texas Native heritage has taken decades of effort and a revolution in identity for leaders in the Lipan communities of Texas. Leaders of the generation who organized today’s Lipan groups grew up at a time when Indigenous ancestry was often kept secret.

“We grew up thinking we were Hispanics because that’s what we were always being told,” said David Garza, 55, as he flipped chunks of cabrito on a wide charcoal grill outside an old family home in Brackettville, around 20 miles north of the Rio Grande, in February 2022. “It wasn’t until my adulthood I realized why [my parents] kept it from us. They were afraid of getting killed.”

He was grilling on this Sunday morning for a monthly Lipan family reunion. He roasted two cow heads overnight in an underground pit to make barbacoa tacos like his dad used to do. About 45 people turned out, with families drove in from Houston, San Antonio, and Del Rio to this same wooden house where they’ve gathered for more than 50 years. 

Garza’s long curly hair spills out of his felt hat, stuck with a feather. A knife hangs in a decorated leather sheath from his belt. He grew up in this town of fewer than 2,000. His parents were sheep shearers. Four generations of his family are buried in a cemetery only a short walk away. Still, as a child, he wondered where he belonged. The Anglos made fun of his English and the Mexicans made fun of his Spanish. 

When Garza was a teenager, an uncle used to sometimes visit from Dallas, and he would say Garza’s grandparents described their family as Apaches. But Garza’s father always denied that. 

Garza knew only what rural Texas public schools taught him: The Apaches were long gone. It wasn’t until the investigative efforts of other leaders of his generation that he learned the history of Brackettville and of the nearby Indian War fort around which it was built.

When he was a kid, there was no Apache culture evident at family gatherings. But at their gathering today, women wear Apache dresses and the boys beat homemade drums, tanned hides stretched over kitchen pots. A White Mountain Apache man named Shawn from an Arizona reservation had married into the family. Each month for a year now, he has built a sweat lodge and led prayers in his Apache language. Fifteen boys and men aged 12 to 65 sing Apache songs they’ve practiced for these gatherings. Later, they break for tacos as a remix of Selena’s Tejana cumbia plays over a loudspeaker.

Garza said he is most grateful that his two daughters now know they are Apache, and that they feel an older cultural tie to their homeland they can tap into for both wisdom and peace. 

“Our family is still alive. They didn’t slaughter everyone,” Garza said. “We are slowly starting to come back.”

On the bison ranch in Waelder, Contreras cherishes the wildflowers and mesquite that remind her of youth. But she believes if she had never left the state she might not have discovered her cultural roots. She learned in San Antonio public schools in the 1980s that all of the Indigenous peoples of Texas were gone—and they didn’t seem to have anything to do with her.

When she went to college in Boulder, Colorado, in 1986, she met few Hispanics but found many other people who looked like her. They were Lakota, Navajo, and Hopi, and they asked what tribe she came from. She told them she didn’t know. Her family came from Mexico. Her new friends told her to go home and ask.

Back in San Antonio, she questioned her dad, Joe Contreras, who was born in 1927 in Laredo. His own father had died when he was only three, leaving his mom, originally from a village in north Mexico, to raise four children while picking cotton. Joe spent most of his adult life on U.S. Air Force bases in South Texas after a stint in Korea.

“Mi mamá siempre decía que somos Apache,” he told Contreras. My mother always told us we were Apache.

Stunned, she asked why he’d never told her about her roots before. Joe answered: “We weren’t supposed to tell anybody that we were Apache.”

Contreras had met her grandma, Ramona Rodriguez Contreras, a rough lady born in 1890, as a little girl. Rodriguez Contreras made a lasting impression when she popped the eyeball from a steaming baked cow head and ate it as the rest of the family sat around making tamales. It was extra weird since Grandma Ramona also had a glass eye.

But Grandma Ramona had died when Contreras was only 10; there was no chance to ask more questions. Instead, Contreras would spend her adult years trying to unpack, honor, and draw strength from what little her father could tell her. 

In 1999, Contreras visited Grandma Ramona’s tiny northern Mexican town of Candela, Coahuila, and found papers with Ramona and her family’s names on a document stored inside wooden chests in the church archive. Ramona Rodriguez Contreras was 12 when she, her parents, and siblings registered in the village—the only time anyone in the family did so. Records showed they lived miles away in the rugged Pajaros Azules mountains.

It wasn’t much, but this was a piece of a larger history that began to come together for Contreras in the early 2000s. At that time, she was living with her husband Enrique Maestas, who identifies as Lipan Apache and was doing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, studying the history of native people in South Texas (the pair divorced in 2006).

In 2003, Maestas finished a 680-page dissertation about the Lipans, telling the long story of the tribe’s displacement from Central Texas across the Rio Grande until they and the other remnants of the Indigenous peoples of Texas were hunted by the U.S. Army to their final holdouts in the rugged highlands of northern Mexico, the same area Contreras’ grandmother had lived in as a girl. 

Many other Texas tribes were granted reservations through treaties—the Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico in 1873, the Tonkawa in Oklahoma 1885, the Kiowa Apaches and Comanches in Oklahoma in 1901, the Tiguas near El Paso 1969, and the Kickapoo near Del Rio in 1985. The Lipans were said to have vanished and got nothing.

Instead, Lipans had dispersed, intermarried, moved across the border, or just hunkered down and stopped talking about their traditions—except among close family members, Maestas learned in his research.

“This study tells of Texas Indian and Native American survival,” Maestas wrote in his 2003 dissertation. “Writing them off as mestizos perpetuates exaggerated reports of Texas Indian extinction.”

Lipan Apaches played a prominent role in early Texas history that still doesn’t appear in state textbooks. They were an easternmost band of the mighty Apache, an interrelated group that spoke similar languages and conquered a wide country from the Rio Grande to the Grand Canyon several centuries before the Spanish arrived. The Lipan lived hundreds of miles east of their more famous cousins—the Western Apaches, led by figures like Geronimo who fought the U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico well into the 20th century. 

The Lipan Apaches followed buffalo on the plains that swept through Central and South Texas and into northern Mexico. In the late 1700s, they were early settlers at the first Spanish missions in Texas, where they sought refuge from raiding Comanches, their most dreaded foe. In the 1800s, some bands of Lipans in Central Texas fought alongside Anglo newcomers in the war with the Comanches, and rode with the Texas Rangers. But that service wouldn’t earn them any place in the new Texas, as Maestas wrote in his dissertation, now stored in the online archives of the University of Texas.

Anglos filled up the Lipans’ Central Texas homeland and pressed the bands towards the Rio Grande. After independent Texas joined the United States in 1845, the U.S. Army brought its Indian Wars to the southwestern frontier. It built a line of forts to fight the conglomerated remnants of displaced tribes that still raided white settlements in Texas. 

The Army seized key water sources in the arid country, including Las Moras Springs in Brackettville, where cool water from underground nurses a green grove of ancient live oaks in the otherwise yellow-beige scrubland. 

Here, the Army found a band of Lipans in 1853, whom they evicted to build Fort Clark. But there’s no mention of attacks on local Lipan villages in the small history museum standing today at the fort, a sprawling, 2,700-acre complex of neighborhoods, resort-style amenities, and a historical site. One exhibit notes the archaeological evidence for 6,000 years of human habitation at the springs, and one small placard says some Lipan scouts served the Army but were forced to flee or conceal their identities. 

Only records stored in the dusty archive room behind a rustic padlocked door and in a row of metal drawers tell the story of Lipans who were forced from the springs, and about the subsequent military campaign against them. Those records recount how cavalry detachments dispatched from Fort Clark sought and attacked local villages where Lipans lived with Kickapoos, Kiowas, Mescaleros, and even their old enemies, the Comanches. Soldiers burned their lodges and all the possessions they couldn’t carry, yet many inhabitants escaped. Increasingly, the Indigenous people went into hiding or sought refuge in Mexico. 

Frustrated, the Army in 1873 called in a star “Indian fighter,” a West Pointer from New York City named Ranald Mackenzie. Mackenzie’s right-hand man, an officer named Robert Carter, wrote a book published in 1935 about the subsequent massacres and their other exploits:

“When you begin, let it be a campaign of annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction, as you have always in your dealings done to all the Indians you have dealt with, etc. I think you understand what I want done,” were the orders that Mackenzie received when he reported to Fort Clark. 

In one bloody raid, Mackenzie marched about 400 men 30 miles into Mexico to strike the Lipan, Mescalero, and Kickapoo village at El Remolino. Carter recounts that he accidentally shot two toddlers there. Though Mackenzie reported 19 killed, Carter wrote, “Many more were counted by several officers at various distances from the villages, and in and out of the way places where they had fled for safety. … The exact number will never be known.”

The raids from U.S. Army detachments based at Fort Clark continued, attacking Native villages in northern Mexico. After a band of Lipans killed and robbed settlers in Texas, an Army detachment chased them to Coahuila’s Burro Mountains. 

Here they spied the Indian camp some two miles distant in a rough and broken country. … At daybreak [General] Bullis and his scouts rushed the Indian village. By complete surprise, they slaughtered the Lipans and recovered the loot. 

There was no major Lipan resistance in Texas after that. 

Today, Lipan Apache teepees can be seen again near Las Moras Springs. They are set up one weekend each March, when Fort Clark hosts a living history day. The public turns out for U.S. Army reenactments, live cannon fire, live music, and carnival food. 

Over the last decade, the event has also become a sort of Lipan family reunion. In March 2022, members of the Lipan Apache traveled here from Louisiana, Los Angeles, and Mexico for the weekend of Apache culture amid a celebration of military history at the old Indian War fort. 

On one sunscorched day, Contreras sold buffalo steaks from a shaded table with her eldest son, Josekuauhtli. Nearby, Garza raffled off handicrafts made by Lipan elders in Brackettville. 

As curious visitors approached, they were met by Richard Gonzalez, the towering vice chairman of the Lipan Apache, who dressed for the weekend in special regalia: He wore calf-high moccasins he made from an elk he shot, a satchel he made from a javelina skin, and a red neckerchief like his father and grandfather always wore.

Gonzalez told visitors he got some dirty looks when he first started setting up his teepee at Fort Clark 17 years ago. One man pressed the brim of his rustic cavalry hat close to Gonzalez’s forehead and asked him if he didn’t feel outnumbered there.

But Gonzalez, a burly Vietnam War veteran and retired career police officer, isn’t easily spooked. He said he’s dealt with that sort of thing all his life. His purpose wasn’t to fight or accuse anyone—just to stand up for his people’s right to exist and rectify their omission from history. After a short exchange, the man in the cavalry hat walked off, but later returned to apologize and Gonzalez considered their encounter a success.

Inside the teepee, visitors could find the display boards that Gonzales and his wife, Anita, set up about 30 times each year at schools or cultural events to speak up for South Texas Lipan history.

There’s an old photo showing the sad eyes and weathered face of Gonzalez’s great grandmother, Juanita González Castro de Cavazos, who was seven years old when Mackenzie’s expedition from Fort Clark attacked her village of El Remolino. She walked 325 miles to San Juan, Texas, with a small band of survivors, and later bade her own 14 children to leave Texas and never reveal their Apache roots. That’s how Gonzalez’s family ended up picking crops in California.

Next to Juanita is a photo of her daughter, Richard’s grandmother, Paulita Cavazos de Lozano, born in 1890 just south of Reynosa. Then 72, she wore an Apache dress and lived in a farmworkers’ neighborhood of Fresno, California, in 1962 on the day she told 12-year-old Richard her mother’s story.

There’s also a photo, scanned from a book, of men in northern Mexico holding five severed Apache heads that they would turn in for bounty in 1930. 

That photo, he said, explains why his parents’ and grandparents’ generations kept their Apache heritage secret, even from their children. “If they would have attempted to continue to practice their culture, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. 

This is a case Gonzalez has spent decades assembling. When he retired in 2003, he kept diving deeper. He moved to San Antonio in 2007 and then bought a house in Fort Clark, where he flew a Lipan flag—even though vandals pulled it down at night. He scoured the state for almost 20 years, drawing information from small San Antonio historical societies, Latin records from Spanish missions, data from Mormon Family History Centers, and heaps of documents from other local archives and museums.

There are records of births, baptisms, border crossings, marriages, deaths, deals, and petitions, documenting six generations of Gonzalez’s family back to the Lipan Chief Castro de Cuelgas, who appears in early Anglo stories of the friendly Texas Lipans. It’s all spelled out on three yards of poster paper with more than 300 names in a giant family tree that students at the University of Texas at San Antonio printed using Gonzalez’s genealogical records as part of a class exercise. 

In the beginning, all of this effort was aimed at earning federal recognition for the Lipan Apache—legal affirmation of their continued existence and access to funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But, as that bureaucratic effort stalled for years, the archive became more meaningful for him as proof that his own family’s roots were real. Now, it’s bundled into various fire-proof safes and filing cabinets in his house alongside family heirlooms and the artwork Gonzalez makes.

He was striking back against people like the secretary at a San Jose public school in 1990 who used Wite-Out where Gonzales had written “Lipan Apache” for his son’s race and  instead wrote “Hispanic,” then explained the change was “because of your last name.” He was providing proof to his own descendants and the youngsters of his community so they could claim their roots sooner than he did. 

Almost 100 Lipan Apaches turned out for the 2022 weekend at Fort Clark. After the public exhibitions ended, they went to a nearby campground to share an extended family meal of venison stew and a taco bar. Around a bonfire at night, a group of Apaches visiting from an Arizona reservation danced the sacred Apache crown dance for the Lipans and led them in Apache language songs, which many of the Brackettville youth had been practicing.

Contreras is grateful to Gonazalez and the leaders who made the Lipans of Texas into the community they are today. She looks forward to being part of the emergence of a new generation of women leaders.

Specifically, she wants to share the buffalo culture she learned from the Lakota during her six years on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where she worked and studied with the Knife Chief Buffalo Nation Society. The Pine Ridge Reservation is a hallowed spot in Native American history, a final holdout of free natives and the place where the Plains Indian Wars ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. More than many other tribes who were crushed early on, the Lakota kept big parts of their culture intact, Contreras said. 

The Lakota “hold so strongly to the Buffalo Nation teachings,” she said. “The Lipan Apache are Buffalo Nation too, but we’ve been dissociated from our land, from each other for so long.” 

The idea for a Texas buffalo ranch brewed long in Contreras’ mind.  She believed that that kind of exhibition of Native American culture—and that feeling of inspiration—was missing in Texas, and Contreras wanted to help bring it back, starting by reclaiming one plot of Lipan land. 

Early morning on Good Friday in April, Contreras opened the door of her white wooden ranch home to find a new bison calf suckling its mother in the tall spring grasses of her pasture. It was the first birth since she started her small herd in 2021. 

She has only 77 acres and now ten bison, but believes that someday, with the way things are going, she or her descendants will have many, many more.

Native News Online: Five Buffalo Returned to Lipan Apache Lands

Article By By Pauly Denetclaw

Lucille Contreras made her way back into her home after spending the morning with the recently rematriated buffalo in early February. Five buffalo were returned to Lipan Apache lands in Texas through a program by the Nature Conservancy that has given 270 bison back to Indigenous nations throughout the country. 

“It feels like the prophecies of our ancestors are being fulfilled by the rematriation of our relatives and reconnecting with each other as Indigenous people here in Texas,” Contreras said. “It feels like answers to prayers.”

The five buffalo joined the herd of four that call the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project home in Waelder, about 80 miles east of San Antonio. When the buffalo were introduced to one another, they were initially separated to ensure that the two herds would come together harmoniously and there would be no conflict. The buffalo almost immediately broke through the barrier separating them and created a herd of nine.

“We currently have… one bull and eight females,” Contreras said. “Every day I spend time with these bison. I can tell you, I see a lot of low bellies on the females. It's so exciting. Such a blessing. Praying that we have some healthy babies born in the spring and early summer here.”

This spring the project may welcome as many as eight new babies into the herd. 

In 2020, the Conservancy made it a priority to return a number of buffalo back to Indigenous nations. The Conservancy works with the Tanka Fund, which financially supports the transfer. Both organizations work with local nonprofits or tribal governments on the transfer: So far, 12 nations have received buffalos through this partnership. 

“The buffalo helped to maintain the health of the prairies and the grasslands because they’ve been there traditionally, and the grazing behavior is important to promote natural biodiversity,” Suzanne Scott, state director for the Nature Conservancy in Texas, said. “They're critical to the health of a variety of species and plants.”

Before colonization, millions of buffalo roamed the Great Plains. They were important to many Indigenous nations for cultural and practical reasons, providing food, leather, and fur. 

In Texas, hundreds of thousands of buffalo were slaughtered in the 1870s and 1880s so the transcontinental railroad could be completed, virtually exterminating them from the state. The only buffalo that remained were protected on government property or private ranches. 

“I felt so much healing and strength from being with the buffalo,” Contreras said. “If I feel this way, I know many other people that are part of the buffalo nation back home, here in Texas, could benefit from reconnecting with the buffalo as well.”

Before becoming the founder and CEO of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, Contreras worked in the information technology sector for 27 years. During the pandemic, she didn’t feel safe at work, and worried about catching COVID-19. So she left her job to pursue a new passion. 

For six years, Contreras lived on Oglala Lakota lands in Porcupine, South Dakota, and there she connected with the Knife Chief Buffalo Nation Society, a nonprofit that is “committed to caring for members of the buffalo nation as relatives and learning from them.” This is where she learned, from caretaker Edward Iron Cloud III, how to care for and maintain a buffalo herd. For three years, an application for a U.S. Department of Agriculture “Beginning Farmer and Rancher” loan sat on her desk before she finally submitted it. 

In August 2020, she applied for a loan and was granted one. Contreras began looking for land to purchase on the traditional homelands of the Lipan Apache. The Lipan Apache are not state or federally recognized. They have their own officials and enrollment, with 745 members, according to their website. The Lipan Apache is separate from the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. 

“Our programs are not specifically for the Lipan Apache, but also to include other Texas Indigenous groups who have similar experiences,” Contreras said. “The Lipan Apache consists of many various bands and clans, but we are still one nation growing together in our unity.”

With lots of prayers and offerings, Contreras chose 77 acres in Waelder, where the herd of buffalo now roams. The goal of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is to heal intergenerational trauma by helping Indigenous people of Texas reconnect with the buffalo. The project invites any Indigenous person from Texas to come and visit with the buffalo.   

“We always welcome and invite folks to come out here and visit and spend time with the buffalo,” Contreras said. “That's truly the best medicine I feel. These bison are the number-one stewards of the land, and we can learn a lot from them.”

The Nature Conservancy has more than 6,000 bison that roam 113,000 acres of land in ten different states. It is the largest private buffalo herd in the country. To ensure the lands the buffalo reside on remain healthy, the buffalo herds have to be managed, and surplus buffalo are sold. The profits from the sale of 1,500 buffalo a year go back into local conservation efforts and the operating budget for local chapters of the Conservancy.

Texas Standard: Return of buffalo to Texas’ Lipan Apache tribe symbolizes an era of healing

Written by By Jill Ament

It’s been more than a century since buffalo were bred and herded by Texas’ Lipan Apache. The animal was once an essential resource for that tribe, but they were slaughtered in the 19th and 20th centuries as a way to cut off that resource from Native people.

Now, a member of Lipan Apache, Lucille Contreras, recently became the owner of several buffalo through federal grants and donations, and many of those buffalo are pregnant. And her organization, Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, aims to bring buffalo-raising and -herding back to Indigenous tribes across the state. Listen to the interview with Contreras in the audio player above or read the transcript below to learn more.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity. You can listen to the interview here.

Texas Standard: Tell us how you were able to get a buffalo herd under Lipan Apache ownership.

Lucille Contreras: I, first of all, began with prayers and offerings to my ancestors for guidance and strength. And from there, I submitted a USDA beginning farmer and rancher loan. It’s been away from Texas for a long time, but as a lot of people know, when you leave Texas, you really still longed for a home and the land in the country. And so we moved back and we were relocated back here in March of this year, and we received our first bison bull in June of this year.

I understand that there are some bison within your view this morning, is that right?

That’s right, yes. I’m very blessed to have a small herd of nine bison, one bull and eight females, and they graze on 77 acres. And sometimes they come and visit me in the morning, very close to my front porch.

So you are somewhere between Houston and San Antonio, south of Austin – is this Lipan Apache land, or is this your personal property? Where is this herd exactly?

All of the above. Lipan Apache, traditionally, their territory is actually all over the state of Texas. And our herd that we have here is comprised of buffalo that are indigenous to Texas – just like we are – from the state herd [at] Caprock Canyon. These buffalo didn’t come directly from there, but they are descended from that area. And so, yes, Waelder is centrally located, and I do live in my traditional homeland of the Lipan Apache, or Nde, as we say.

What will the the buffalo be used for? And this isn’t just for the Lipan Apache people; this is also a commodity, as I understand it, right?

Yes. Well, our mission and our goal is to reconnect with our relatives. The irony, the buffalo as part of being Buffalo Nation people, Buffalo Nation goes all the way from Canada to northern Mexico, and there are all the Indigenous tribes that lived with the buffalo. So when the buffalo were slaughtered, our way of life was absolutely decimated as well, and even more so here in Texas for a lot of different reasons.

So our buffalo is a way for us to reconnect with each other. We have a place here where Native, Indigenous people from Texas and non-natives can come here, visit, spend time with the buffalo, be able to reconnect with their mind, their body and soul. And so our nonprofit is also sustained by selling frozen bison meat. The bison meat is from a herd in North Texas, actually, that is on a much larger ranch. But that’s a way that we’re able to sustain our nonprofit.

What about the buffalo that you have there, the buffalo that you can see? Are they going to remain on the land? What are your plans for them?

Yes. So these buffalo here are, they’re here as our teachers; they’re here as our relatives. So, we don’t do ranching in a traditional, Western way. We do ranching, we do caretaking, rather, of these bison. So we’re developing a relationship. We will harvest some of them. But because our herd is small, and hopefully we will have – I believe, all the females are pregnant, so next spring it’s going to be pretty busy around here. But our harvests will not be commercial; they will be more spiritual and cultural, to feed our people and the other Indigenous folks throughout Texas.

You’ve hinted at this when you’ve talked about the spiritual connection between your people and the buffalo. And I’m wondering if you could say a little more about the importance for Indigenous tribes in Texas and across the country to be able to breed and raise buffalo herds again?

Absolutely. There is a prophecy among Native Americans that the returning of the buffalo will also be the returning of our strength as Native people throughout Turtle Island. Turtle Island is how we as Native folks call our, this continent that we live on. And so the buffalo returning really does signify the strengthening of the nations again. And so we’re healing. We’re all healing through through the generations, each generation, as I was taught by my parents, and they were taught by their parents – each generation, we’re trying to regain and heal ourselves so that we can be as strong people like we once were. And we still definitely are strong, and we have survived just as the buffalo.

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Buffalo Treaty: Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is Honored to Become a Signatory

Written by the Buffalo Treaty

The Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is honored to announce their intention to become signatories of the Buffalo Treaty.

The Texas Tribal Iyanee'/Buffalo Project is a non-profit committed to healing the generational trauma of Lipan Apache descendants and other native nations bordering traditional Lipan Apache ranges.

The Texas Tribal Buffalo project have also recently completed an intertribal internship with Southwest Bison company and were by Tim Fraiser, (our mentor), members of the southern Cheyenne Arapaho Tribe from Oklahoma, the foremen, and managers of the Burgess -Herring ranch in North Texas.

Read more about what is going on in Texas and with the Lipan Apache Buffalo project on their website and with this blog: Connecting with our relatives….4 Legged and 2 legged.

Look at their online store to as donations go towards the care and raising of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project’s (“TTBP”) buffalo. The TTBP is embarking on a project to restore the historical relationship and cultural identity implicit in the Lipan Apache-bison relationship, to restore bison as the primary source of proteins for Lipan Apache Texans and to make bison meat and other products accessible to all South Texans and perhaps other states. As part of the restorative process they will begin to offer the San Antonio and surrounding communities the soul recharging experience of being around our magnificent 4 legged indigenous relatives. They are developing a program to provide urban youth an opportunity to observe an example of restorative agriculture, and to learn the relationship between the land, animals and humans and the interdependent wellbeing of all.