November 3, 2026

By Sara Millhouse

Photo by Bill McCollough

When Izel Lopez led this year’s harvest for Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, she briefly worried that she had taken a bad shot. When the bull fell, nearby Buffalo began “pushing, pushing, pushing at him, trying to get him up,” she said.

Her shot had been true. When the bull didn’t rise, the whole herd gathered around him. “It was almost like they were saying their goodbyes,” Lopez said. “We waited and we didn’t approach. We gave them their time.”

After the final Buffalo left the body of the bull, deputy director Lopez and others from Texas Tribal Buffalo Project approached to harvest the meat. Hundreds attended the harvest ceremony, with the butchered meat donated to San Antonio Health Equity Network and Meat for Mamas.

Lopez felt humbled by the sense of community among the Buffalo. “It was strange for me, being human,” she said. “They revered that life that was taken, I think more than humans do.”

Photo by Bill McCollough

This lesson of reverence from Iyane’e (Buffalo) is at the heart of work by Texas Tribal Buffalo Project, which seeks to rematriate the southern plains of Texas, led by Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan and other Texas Indigenous lineal descendants. In Texas, most tribes are unlanded and non-federally recognized. 

Founder Lucille Contreras sees her work as building a web of connections for justice, building on the knowledge of her Lipan Apache ancestors. “How do you leverage our intelligence in agriculture, as matriarchs, as women, carrying that leadership of the mother, of the grandmother, of the sister?” she asked. “How we care about, not just the plants and the animals, but the soil and the water, and how all of that relates to a baby being born, carrying water in your body.”

In just over five years, Contreras has grown her vision of rematriation into a thriving organization with two ranches and a herd of 34 Buffalo. “Many of us women, many of us Texas Indigenous lineal descendants, for years, decades, generations have had the dream of living on our own traditional homeland, providing for our families through farming and ranching,” she said. “So many of us have wanted the opportunity to connect with each other, and Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is sort of like a magnet. We’re creating this movement.”

Contreras learned Buffalo caretaking at Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation in Pine Ridge, S.D., and applied for a USDA Beginning Farmer/Rancher loan to bring what she’d learned home to Waelder, in South Texas. “The ability to submit and have my Beginning Farmer and Rancher loan accepted opened the pathway to us to reacquiring land in our own traditional homeland,” she said. 

Photo by Bill McCollough

With the support of the Conservation Fund, Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is purchasing a second ranch in Floresville, Texas, from the Swift-Carney family, whose matriarch reached out to Contreras in the hopes that the ranch’s 150 acres would remain intact. “Her family acquired the land in something like 1725,” Contreras said. “That’s when my families, our families, were literally still living on these lands and being pushed out.”

Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is proud to be the only bison caretakers to sell Buffalo meat online and accept EBT. It also supplies Meat for Mamas, which delivers or ships Buffalo meat monthly to pregnant and postpartum Indigenous mothers.

Deputy director Lopez also raises cattle and poultry and runs a small farm store in Atascosa, Texas, with her husband, a fourth-generation rancher. She started as an AmeriCorps volunteer with Texas Tribal Buffalo Project in 2021, and her role has grown with the organization.

Photo by Bill McCollough

Growing leadership is part of Contreras’s vision of building kinship through and with Buffalo, and building workforce in regenerative agriculture for Texas Indigenous lineal descendants.

Now, the organization is expanding with a three-year, $900,000 Social and Economic Development Strategies (SEDS) grant from the federal Administration for Native Americans to build a modular, USDA-certified meat processing facility at its Floresville ranch. It is the first Indigenous-led, land-based workforce training program in Texas.

“That is going to enable us to create a workforce program where we will teach other people how to caretake for the soil, caretake for the Buffalo, do regenerative agriculture, process these beautiful Buffalo in a good way,” Contreras said. “This is creating the next generation of Buffalo caretakers, of USDA-certified butchers and meat processors. Now, we’re creating socioeconomic justice.”

With each new calf born at the Waelder and Floresville ranches, Contreras dreams of “inching toward” a free-roaming Buffalo corridor, while Lopez sees her own children entering adulthood with animal science on their minds.

“We’re setting this work up so that the next generation can come in and take this over from us,” Lopez said. “It’s never just for us, you know. It’s not just for us in our lifetime. It’s for our future.”