Skip to content
Grist home
All donations doubled!

Articles by Indigenous Affairs Reporting Fellow Taylar Dawn Stagner

Taylar Dawn Stagner is the 2024-2025 Indigenous affairs reporting fellow at Grist. Prior to joining Grist, she contributed radio reporting to NPR and, as a podcaster, won an Edward R. Murrow Award. She’s worked at Wyoming Public Radio and High Country News, writing about Indigenous affairs.

Taylar Dawn Stagner Headshot srcset="https://grist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/grey-square.png?quality=75&strip=all

Featured Article

Jason Baldes drove down a dusty, sagebrush highway earlier this month, pulling 11 young buffalo in a trailer up from Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. His blue truck has painted on the side a drawing of buffalo and a calf. As the executive director of the Wind River Buffalo Initiative and Eastern Shoshone tribal member, he’s helped grow the number of buffalo on the reservation for the last decade. The latest count: the Northern Arapaho tribe have 97 and the Eastern Shoshone have 118. 

“Tribes have an important role in restoring buffalo for food sovereignty, culture and nutrition, but also for overall bison recovery,” he said. 

The Eastern Shoshone this month voted to classify buffalo as wildlife instead of livestock as a way to treat them more like elk or deer rather than like cattle. Because the two tribes share the same landbase, the Northern Arapaho are expected to vote on the distinction as well. The vote indicates a growing interest to both restore buffalo on the landscape and challenge the relationship between animal a... Read more

All Articles