"People sure want this meat," says Jonette Sam, marketing manager for the Picuris Pueblo Bison Program, a tribal-owned and tribal-operated venture.

During the summer, Sam goes most weekends to the upscale Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, where she sells the tribe’s buffalo meat — $6.50 a pound for ground bison, and up toward $20 a pound for the best cuts of meat. Now, the market has scaled back and moved indoors for winter, but Sam says she still sells a lot of meat to her regular customers.

The bison program at Picuris — one of New Mexico’s smallest and most isolated pueblos, with 350 members — began in 1992 with a single donation of a pregnant bison cow from Taos Pueblo. Now the herd, about 60-strong this winter, brings enough money into the tribe to feed about 250 of its members four times a year.

"This isn’t really a for-profit venture," says Sam. "We do this for our people, so they can have meat."

Four times a year, the tribe distributes bison meat to its members — about 200 tribal members who live at the pueblo, and more who come from Santa Fe or Albuquerque for feast days.

The sales of the meat at market pays for the program, Sam says, so the tribe can feed itself.

"We raise the animals as a nutritional food source for our community, to help with diabetes and heart disease, to return to a more indigenous way of eating," she says.

This fall, the pueblo is in the process of putting up fences for another 7,500-acre parcel to run the bison, and is adding 24 animals from South Dakota into the herd. Last spring, 16 calves were born, and they are hoping for more in spring 2006, Sam says.

"Eventually, we want to distribute meat once a month to tribe members," she says. "And hopefully we’ll even have extra animals, so we can have surplus animals for sale."

The program has an annual budget of about $100,000 and employs four people. Jonette Sam is the marketing manager, and her husband Danny is the herd manager. Two other Pueblo members are employed working fences and doing other work with the bison.

The bison is all grass-fed — no grain is given at all — "because we’re trying to raise the animals in as natural an environment as possible," she says.

Traditionally, the Picuris people crossed over the Sangre de Cristo mountains to hunt bison on the eastern plains of New Mexico, bringing meat back to the tribe. Now, the buffalo can’t run the plains, but they can be kept in a way that honors that history, she says.

"We try to let them be as wild as we can — we don’t make pets of them," Sam says.