Join Chapter One Book Store, Hamilton Community Cinema and Teller Wildlife Refuge as we celebrate the conservation of wild places and creatures through storytelling.
Being Caribou and Iniskim: Return of the Buffalo filmmaker Leanne Alison will discuss the life and legacy of her late husband, collaborator, author and wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer. Heuer passed away in November 2024 but one of his many contributions to conservation has been chronicled in Buffalo Lessons: How Bison Returned to Banff National Park a book he authored until his death when it was finished with the help of Alison and other contributors.
This event will include a screening of Alison's film Iniskim: Return of the Buffalo and a discussion of Heuer's book and legacy as a wildlife biologist, author and conservationist. Kascie Heron film maker and organizing director at Wild Montana will moderate the discussion.
Iniskim: Return of the Buffalo premiered at the 2023 Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula. The documentary tells the story of a group of puppeteers and their artistic and intercultural response to the return of the buffalo. A trailer can be viewed here.
More about Buffalo Lessons:
The breathtaking true story of the return of wild bison to Banff National Park, as told by the wildlife biologist who helped lead them there.
Featuring behind-the-scenes photographs from one of North America’s most ambitious conservation projects.
For thousands of years, wild bison numbering in the millions roamed across a range spanning half of North America. Then, in the 1800s, they were nearly exterminated by European settlers. Buffalo Lessons shares the story of their triumphant return to a mountainous corner of their historic range, nearly a century and a half after they last walked the land.
Karsten Heuer, the conservationist tasked with leading the project, chronicles the groundbreaking reintroduction of plains bison to Banff National Park, beginning in 2017, when ten pregnant females and six males were airlifted into an enclosed pasture. It was a complex and ambitious project, designed to restore North America’s largest land mammal to its important ecological role in the landscape and its cultural role for Indigenous peoples. Despite meticulous planning, Heuer and his team found themselves repeatedly “buffaloed” by the animals, who had a knack for doing the unexpected, and teaching the humans lessons along the way.
Heuer packs his narrative with thrilling moments: a horseback chase to tranquilize a bison, a helicopter-assisted translocation into the rugged backcountry, and the tense tracking of wayward bulls that scale steep, treacherous terrain. Throughout, his encounters with these massive creatures—both awe-inspiring and humbling—force him to confront his assumptions about control, nature, and conservation.
In 2024, Heuer was diagnosed with a terminal brain condition, and he completed the manuscript for Buffalo Lessons in the weeks and days before his death. His narrative ends seven years after the initial introduction, with a thriving population of around one hundred bison and the organization of the first Indigenous hunt in the region in over 150 years. Buffalo Lessons stands as a testament to the resilience of bison, and as the culmination of a life’s work in conservation.