Indian Time

“The big difference is you can tell a cow what to do, but you gotta ask the buffalo nicely,” Regina Quiñones says with a wry smile. She would know. An original member of the Chumash Bison Company, Quiñones handpicked the ill-fated bison now in South County from various herds in South Dakota. The Chumash Bison Company was the brainchild of Quiñones and two men, David Saunders and Maiwo Agdeppa.

Originally, the idea was to bring a herd of bison from South Dakota to Ozena Valley in Ventura County. The buffalo would be bred for meat. Agdeppa’s band of Chumash struggle to make ends meet, even while the Santa Inez Band of the Chumash owns a casino that has proven to be a source of prosperity.

Bison ranching seemed to be a conscientious, sustainable and potentially lucrative source of revenue for the Chumash. Surprisingly, it was Quiñones and Saunders, neither of whom are members of the tribe, who traveled to South Dakota to pick out the bison.

“Maiwo, myself and David Saunders—we wanted to work with the bison medicine, work to get buffalo back into the indigenous diets,” Quiñones explains. “David Saunders and I went up and met the ranchers in South Dakota and picked them out. These animals are show-herd stock. You use them for breeding. You don’t use them for meat for a few generations and you can’t mix them with other types of bison. They’re a purer stock.”

It was a reasonable-sounding business plan. The stopover in South Monterey County was meant to be temporary—just long enough for the bison to adjust to their new climate, and to give the Chumash Bison Company time to prepare the herd’s new home in Ozena Valley. Within days of the herd’s escape into the overgrown thickets and fields of South Monterey County, the nascent Chumash Bison Company was rife with dispute and headed toward complete dissolution.

“Immediately there were a lot of problems, conflicts, disrespect to our tribe and to our elders from individuals who’ve gotten involved,” Agdeppa says. “It just turned into a big old fiasco and we didn’t want anything more to do with it. Regina chose to take ownership. They’re her problem now.”