'Gory' gingerbread buffalo jump celebrates Plains hunting culture
CBC
At 2 a.m. one morning in December, Mariah Gladstone asked herself: "Did I really just make a little gory buffalo butcher scene out of Sour Patch Kids and fruit leather?"
She did.
In fact, Gladstone, who is Blackfeet and Cherokee, spent hours making her own interpretation of a traditional buffalo jump out of gingerbread.
Gladstone, who is also the owner of Indigikitchen, a cooking website, says a business just outside of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana was holding a gingerbread decorating contest last week so she signed up.
She told her mom about her idea.
"She said, 'That sounds really elaborate and hard. Maybe you should just make a gingerbread teepee village,'" Gladstone said.
Her mother may have been right since it took about 11 hours for Gladstone to finish her scene.
There's a cliff for the jump with a village below. It even features a collection of Sour Patch Kids harvesting meat from a fallen buffalo.
She says she tried to incorporate as many accurate details as possible.
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO world heritage site in southern Alberta, helps educate the public on how the group hunting strategy could unfold.
A runner would start the buffalo herd's drive toward a cliff by tricking the herd into following him by imitating the call of a calf, according to information on Head-Smashed-In's website.
It says buffalo have a great sense of smell but poor vision, making them cautious around unfamiliar objects.
Plains hunters exploited this and the animal's natural herding instincts by having hunters surround the herd from behind and scare them, it says. Some of those hunters could be wearing wolf or coyote skins to trick the buffalo.
The sheer momentum of the frightened herd would force it over the cliff.
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