New trailer can help Lakota people reconnect with their roots

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) - Traditionally, Native American tribes would often use every part of an animal they kill, from the bones to hair, and even the hide. Wednesday, the Intertribal Buffalo Council unveiled a new trailer that will help butchers clean buffalo while out in the fields, ensuring less waste.

The intertribal buffalo council created the cultural harvesting trailer... designed to go out into fields to assist people who are harvesting buffalo.

The objective of the trailer is to make it easier for people to harvest every part of the animal, without having to take it to town.

“Well it’s very important, you know the buffalo were everything to us at one time and every part was important. So this machine will allow us to bring all of those parts back and do what needs to be done so we can use the entirety of the buffalo,” said executive director for Intertribal Buffalo Council, Troy Heinert.

The trailer was carefully designed to meet FDA standards and serves as a way for the Lakota people to reconnect with their ancestral ways of living.

“Well, it’s important for a couple of reasons. One is we want to make sure that food safety standards are followed as we distribute meat. The other thing is just to reconnect with buffalo and reconnect with processing the way we used to,” continued Heinert.

After noticing there was a need for more affordable and transportable ways of harvesting livestock, Sentinel Trailers constructed this trailer to provide a solution.

“The biggest thing is we saw that there was a need for these butchers to get these animals to their butcher shop. A Lot of the butcher shops are getting surrounded by the city, and so they can’t kill them on their premises, and so we saw the need and we started from the ground up,” said Robert Skousen, owner of Sentinel Trailers.

The trailer includes a water tank, an instant hot water heater, three inches of insulation on all sides, and a refrigeration compartment with a rail that can hold up to six buffalos at once.

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