And that's the News in Meat
Mike Smith
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As spring rides the month of April out of winter, and as the weather grows more and more suitable for barbecues and picnics, a person might almost be tempted to expect an increase in the number of quirky regional news stories featuring meat.
If a person was a little bit strange....
And, in New Mexico anyway, if a person were to have anticipated such a thing, he or she, oddly enough, would not be disappointed.
For instance, a story in the April 11, 2008 issue of the Jicarilla Chieftain—a twice-a-month newspaper based in Dulce, near New Mexico’s northern border—tells somewhat belatedly of a “Bison Meat Give-a-way” that took place more than a month before, on March 7. That day, more than one hundred residents of the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation showed up at the Dulce Culture Center, in the hopes of receiving some free meat from sixty-five bison culled from the herds of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, via a slaughterhouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
“As the Culture Center has given out buffalo meat before, many people showed up with small bags or boxes to pick up their packaged meat,” the Chieftain article reported. “However it wasn’t a small piece of meat given out. ...One half of a buffalo was distributed to over 108 individuals.”
That is to say, every person got one half of an entire buffalo—a massive slab of frozen, marbled meat, which a photograph accompanying the piece shows three adults struggling to carry.
(The Jicarilla Chieftain has no website, but a phone call will be made to them to request copies of their story’s pictures.)
The article’s conclusion, celebrating the event, begins:
Years ago men of the Jicarilla went on hunting excursions to provide meat to their loved ones. Although horses, bow and arrows weren’t used in this case, Jicarilla men used modern technology to bring home meat for the people to survive on. Cell phones and e-mail replaced the scouts, the slaughter facility did all the killing and butchering, and a heavy duty truck and 24 ft. trailer transported the meat home. Many thanks goes to Tribal Services for the loan of the stock trailer.
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