Civil Eats: ‘My Way of Giving Back to the Universe’

By Lucille Contreras | Photography by Brenda Bazán | Originally published on Civil Eats

My family is Lipan Apache, and it wasn’t until I was 20 years old that my father revealed that to me. 

I was attending the University of Colorado Boulder, and I got asked daily, “What tribe are you from?” I’d never thought about that before. I told my dad, and he said, “Oh, well, let me tell you: My mother said we’re Apache.” I said, “Dad, why didn’t you ever tell me this?” And he said, “Because my mom told me never, ever to tell anybody.”

My grandmother was born around 1890 in northern Mexico. From the time of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848, and even before, Native people were walking around with a target on their back. Apache especially.

My very first experience with buffalo was at Yellowstone when I was about 26 years old, seeing those amazing herds that live there. But during COVID, I was living in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, learning about buffalo—how they butcher, how they slaughter, the needs of the buffalo in regard to their health and wellbeing.

What was really magical to me was learning how, as two-legged people, we relate to the buffalo as a relative, learning from the Oglala Lakota relatives there about the intergenerational relationship with buffalo, how tribes once relied heavily on the buffalo for everything—survival, shelter, food, even examples of governance.

So I started finding out more about who we are as Lipan Apache and our relationship to the buffalo. It’s very similar to the Lakota. The only difference is that ours has been shrouded; we’ve had to hide things for our survival as Native people.

During 2019 and 2020, I was ready to come home, finally, all the way back to my own homeland, but with this beautiful basket of lessons and experience. We moved onto our first property in Wilder, Texas—77 or 78 acres of post-oak savanna—on March 23, 2020. By the end of that year I had nine buffalo. Today we have 34 buffalo and two ranches. 

We are the only buffalo caretaker with an online store that accepts EBT, because we want people, no matter where they live across Turtle Island, to be able to afford this delicious meat. We’ve shipped all the way to Massachusetts for EBT/SNAP sales. We also donate to food banks across Texas.