Bisons & Bullets
On a hill on an island with fewer than two hundred people in occupancy was a sculpture of a bison with holes in it.
For once, it wasn’t vandalism. The holes were carefully shaped to look like the bison themselves, people holding bows and arrows, and horses. The bison were here before us in numbers far more than the herd that currently exists on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake. After being driven close to extinction and then reintroduced, they exist now in two states: the live ones grazing down by the briny shoreline and the statues fixed permanently on the hill.
You can see through those holes to the houses and the power plants and the buildings of Salt Lake City, the city that didn’t exist when the bison were plentiful. Before the bullets that would make holes in their bodies and their population soon. The city ended up existing because those bullets went straight through the animals all the way to the hearts of the Native people and the balanced ecosystem they contributed to.
I am an interloper here, but this generation of bison are used to the likes of me. A previous visit to Yellowstone had ingrained the lessons that they are wild and that we should always stay a certain distance away, but that wasn’t always possible here due to their laissez-faire attitude regarding the campground. When observing a man approaching a small bison, my eldest boy (sounding like a sixty-year-old version of himself) said “those people are getting way too close, and that’s unsafe,” and then harrumphed back into the pages of his book.
The sculptures allow us to see through the creatures here in the past and towards the future. But there’s another future out there: more city. There would already be development out here on Antelope Island had it not been preserved as a state park. But through those holes, be they buffalo shaped or human with a bow-and-arrow shaped, is more of what’s to come. The bison are members of future and past, both the live and the sculptural ones.
I see through them to the future of houses lining the shore. I see through shapes that are reminiscent of their past. The interior of the sculpture is empty and I have to believe that was purposeful. It’s a vessel through which we can see what we want to see. It’s a hollow creature that is painted white, a ghost of what it once was both in terms of its numbers and its place in the layers of life on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
Inspired by events on Antelope Island, Utah
on the land of the Western Shoshone, Goshute, and Ute people (source).