Yellowstone Sends 213 Bison Home to Native Tribes in Its Largest Transfer Yet

In February 2026, a convoy carried 213 bison 470 miles across Montana, from Yellowstone National Park to the Fort Peck Reservation in the state's northeast — the largest single bison transfer in the park's history. As the Greater Yellowstone Coalition reported on March 12, 2026, the move is the latest chapter in a program that is quietly reweaving two things torn apart more than a century ago: the great herds of the American prairie, and the bond between bison and the Native nations who lived alongside them.

The animals being sent home are special. Yellowstone's roughly 5,000 bison are among the most genetically intact in existence, direct descendants of wild herds that escaped the near-total slaughter of the 19th century, when bison were driven from tens of millions down to a few hundred. The Bison Conservation Transfer Program rescues surplus animals that would otherwise face culling, quarantines them to ensure they are disease-free, and then rehomes them. To date it has placed 625 bison with 29 Tribes across 13 states, plus a First Nation in Canada.

“As the Greater Yellowstone Coalition reported on March 12, 2026, the move is the latest chapter in a program that is quietly reweaving two things torn apart more than a century ago: the great herds of the American prairie, and the bond between bison and the Native nations who lived alongside them.”

For the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, the bison are far more than livestock. They sit at the heart of treaty rights, ceremony and a way of life that colonisation tried to erase. The reservation now serves as a hub, holding the animals on tribal pastures before some move on to other Tribes. "I'm fortunate now," said Robbie Magnan, who manages Fort Peck's buffalo program. "I get to see what my parents and grandparents didn't get to see, and that's to live with the buffalo."

The ecological case runs in parallel with the cultural one. As a keystone species, bison shape the grasslands they graze — fertilising soil, dispersing seeds, creating wallows that hold water, and helping native plants and wildlife flourish. The program is bounded by quarantine logistics and the perennial politics of managing bison that roam beyond park borders, so growth is incremental. But each transfer restores a little more of a lost prairie and honours a promise. Bringing the buffalo home, it turns out, heals the land and the people at the same time.