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The great story of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

Broadcast Date: May 11, 1991

The stampeding buffalo are looking for an escape from harm's way. Instead, they encounter near-certain death as they tumble en masse over the edge of a great foothill. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump was in use about 500 years before the Great Pyramids of Egypt were even built. In this 1991 report from CBC-TV's Wonderstruck, a Blackfoot Indian explains how her ancestors dressed in animal hides to lead the buffalo over the cliffs and an archaeologist tells us why this ritual was necessary.

The great story of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

• A buffalo jump is a cliff formation which North American Indians historically used to kill masses of buffalo (or bison), so that they could use the animals for food, clothing and shelter. The practice of luring the buffalo to the cliff was considered a communal event and began as early as 12,000 years ago. It continued until at least 1,500 AD, around the time that horses were introduced in North America. In this report, Linda Eagle Speaker, a Blackfoot Indian and an interpreter at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, gives a detailed explanation of the systematic routine that resulted in the killing of the buffalo. She tells of young men that "dressed up in animal hide (and imitated) the sounds of animals like a wolf or a coyote" and says it was the buffalo's instinct to flee these predators. They were lured down a narrowing "driveline" and ended up meeting their demise as they fell en masse over the cliff. Tribe members waited below with spears and bows, to finish killing the badly injured buffalo.

• According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is "one of the oldest, most extensive, and best preserved sites that illustrate communal hunting techniques and the way of life of Plains people who, for more than five millennia, subsisted on the vast herds of bison that existed in North America." UNESCO notes that the site has great cultural, archaeological and scientific significance.

• Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981.

• The site's interpretive centre was a $10 million venture that opened in 1987. As shown in this report, it is built directly into the side of the ancient sandstone cliff. It has five distinct levels "depicting the ecology, mythology, lifestyle and technology of Blackfoot peoples within the context of available archaeological evidence," according to the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump official website.

The site unearths several interesting bits of buffalo trivia:
• An estimated 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains at the time Europeans first arrived in North America.
• Stampeding buffalo can sustain speeds of 50 kilometres an hour.
• Herds were led by one or two females.
• One use for buffalo meat was to make it into pemmican, a portable and long-lasting concentrated mixture of fat and protein. After being sun-dried, the meat was pulverized with a stone maul and mixed with buffalo fat and grease. The pemmican was sometimes flavoured with fruit such as chokecherries.
• Buffalo horns were scraped and formed into spoons.

• Jack W. Brink, the archaeologist featured in this report, is the author of the book Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains.

The great story of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

Medium: Television

Program: Wonderstruck

Broadcast Date: May 11, 1991

Guest(s): Jack Brink, Linda Eagle Speaker

Host: Bob McDonald

Duration: 6:03

Last updated:
May 14, 2010