Hubbard, Tasha. “Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America: ‘Kill, Skin, and Sell.’”

“Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America,” by Tasha Hubbard, describes the buffalo massacres in the American plains that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries, and argues that this project of mass violence constitutes an act of genocide. The essay appears in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, and Jeff Benvenuto, an edited volume that works to expand the term genocide to encompass different aspects of the settler colonial project. Contributions to this collection focus on measures of erasure, legislation, and onto-epistemological violence.

Hubbard discusses how, in “the language of imperialism,” during the Western expansionist period of settler colonialism, “Indigenous peoples and buffalo became conflated, both categorized as brutes that needed to be erased” (293). Derogative language became commonplace among American settlers and buffalo hunters, at some point normalising the phrase “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone” (296), revealing a general awareness of Indigenous peoples’ connection to and dependency upon the buffalo for sustenance. Hubbard’s article reveals how the macro- and meso-levels of perpetration were carried out in buffalo hunting projects. As one example, she writes about one of the main “engineers” (296) of the buffalo slaughter, General Phillip Sheridan, who had a common practice “of issuing kill orders without documentation” (295) and made killing buffalo “a patriotic practice” (296). This is an example of a macro-level process of perpetration, whereby, as Üngör and Anderson write, “the political elite has been able to wield the state’s apparatus(es) of coercion” (11), using government and militia to enforce their ideological imperatives.

By explaining these different levels of perpetration, Hubbard establishes the buffalo slaughter as a multi-tiered, systematic long-term project. Using this foundation, she discusses the complex onto-epistemological relation of some Indigenous peoples to the buffalo to argue that this project of mass slaughter is not a speciocide, but a genocide within its own right. She explains that “Indigenous peoples saw the buffalo as their protector, who took a position on the front line in the genocidal war against Indigenous peoples” (301). For some Great Plains Indigenous tribal entities, the buffalo formed part of an intricate kinship structure and were considered First Peoples, rather than a separate species. In this capacity, as a group which these Indigenous nations were bound to through specific cultural and social practices, their systematic extermination, Hubbard avers, constitutes genocide. This point has been taken up in more recent perpetration scholarship, for example Kári Driscoll’s “Perpetrators, Animals, and Animality” (2020) and Audra Mitchell’s “Decolonizing Against Extinction Part II” (2017). Hubbard’s text has been a significant intervention in studies of perpetration and mass violence and is sure to remain a foundational text for anyone interested in the intersection of Perpetrator Studies and other disciplines such as Animal Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

Author of this entry: Flora Lehmann.

Works Cited

Driscoll, Kári. “Perpetrators, Animals, and Animality.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies. Knittel, Susanne C, and Zachary J Goldberg, eds. 2020. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 192-205.

Mitchell, Audra. “Decolonizing against extinction part II: Extinction is not a metaphor – it is literally genocide.” Worldly, 27 September 2017, url:

https://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/decolonizing-against-extinction-part-ii-extinction-is-not-a-metaphor-it-is-literally-genocide/

Üngör, Uğur Ümit and Kjell Anderson. “From Perpetrators to Perpetration: Definitions, Typologies, and Processes.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies. Knittel, Susanne C, and Zachary J Goldberg, eds. 2020. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 7-22.

Hubbard, Tasha. “Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America: ‘Kill, Skin, and Sell’.” In Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, edited by Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, Duke University Press, 2014,  pp. 292–305.