Ken Zontek's Buffalo Nation examines the role of Native Americans in preserving and protecting the buffalo. Early conservationists wrote the Native Americans out of the story of the buffalo's preservation. William Temple Hornaday, for example, had nothing positive to say about Native Americans. He did not see them as proto-ecologists. Yet, there would have been no buffalo to return to the plains in the first decade of the twentieth century, if some Native Americans had not saved stray wild buffalo just as they were hunted out of existence. Almost all of the buffalo in the United States today can trace their heritage to these private herds that Native Americans gathered. Zontek takes the contentious story up to the current day. ( )

A very informative book, but I think I would have liked to have seen a bit more length to it. ( )