PROJECT   Herd         PARTICIPANT   Judith Rodenbeck       LOCATION   Bison farms Throughout the US       REQUEST   The bison or American buffalo, the largest living land-mammal of the North American continent, has a complex ecological, iconographic, and symbolic history. Its image evokes pre-contact America, first peoples, the manifest destiny of Frederick Jackson Turner, and the domestication of a nearly extinct population now seen mostly in digital images on the internet. The bison is an intimate figure of the American landscape; when Europeans first landed on the continent they called it “black with buffalo,” which roamed from sea to sea. It took only a few short centuries to reduce a population of millions to just a few thousand—a process that in the 19th century was part and parcel of a deliberate policy of cultural if not actual genocide directed at Native American peoples. Today the bison population has been revived to a small extent, and there are herds in all of the continental United States and in Canada, in some cases being farmed on speculation as free-range organic low-fat beef, in others as the fenced-in native fauna of national parks, and in still others simply as tourist attractions. Your assignment is to visit bison farms in each state you pass through on your itinerary. Your mission is to document our landscape as it is written through these nearly-extinct not-quite-free-range animals and their nearly-extinct not-quite-free-range tenders. You will gather: images of the bison; sounds of the bison; material traces of the bison; samples (material, image, audio) of what they eat; images of the people who tend them, visit them, kill them, eat them; images (and audio, if plausible) of their abodes and their modes of transportation—horse, truck, plane; interviews (with or without audio/video) with these people—you have a natural gift for this so I expect you’ll do something fantastic, but just as a beginning checklist: ask them about what did they do before the bison, how did they start, what do they think of the animals, how do the bison make them think or feel about the land, what do they hope for the future, where did they get their bison, do they know any songs about them, where do they sell them, if they process bison meat what do they do with the parts (do they use the whole animal, etc.), who else might you visit, what do they think of huge operations like Ted Turner’s (or ask Ted what he thinks of small operations), do they have a website & what do they hope to get from it, etc. plattes or maps or diagrams of the land if the bison are semi-nomadic, diagrams of their movements on the land by season images of your odometer with landscape visible through windshield. If possible, go to a rodeo or a bison roundup. If possible, get an interview with Ted Turner. (If not possible, every time you see his image or name take a picture of it.)