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Article By The Nature Conservancy
November 10, 2022
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.