Carry the Kettle high school students participate in Bison Project to support bison health

High school students from Carry the Kettle Nakoda Nation’s Nakoda Oyade Education Centre are studying bison herd health in an effort to protect and grow the number of bison in a local herd. The Bison Project, which is run by Canadian Light Source (CLS), aims to discover what bison are eating that is unhealthy for them and find a way to replace these things with other healthier items. Participating students gathered bison hair and soil samples from the grazing areas, as well as the plants the animals were eating, and analyzed them at the CLS with the IDEAS beamline. “We don’t want them to go extinct,” said student Armin Eashappie. “They helped us with everything. We got our tools, our clothes, our food from them. We used every single part of the buffalo, nothing was left behind…they even helped us make our homes – the teepees – we used the hides to cover them up.”