Lower Manhattan’s everyday routes were turned into a moving memorial on September 18, when 40 life-sized buffalo puppets processed from Bowling Green through the World Trade Center and into Chinatown. The performance, titled Return of the Buffalo, Tatanka Owe Akupi, Lakota for "buffalo trail home," explicitly commemorated the 38 Dakota men executed in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862.
The project was developed by theater writer and director Amir Nizar Zuabi in collaboration with descendants of the Lenape and Lakota elders. Organisers routed the puppets through a curated sequence of historic public sites, pausing at Broad Street Plaza, Zuccotti Park and eight other locations, where Native dance troupes, gospel choirs and Lenape youth added layered performances. Those stops turned streets and plazas into moments of ceremony, interrupting commuter flows and commercial rhythms with sustained acts of public remembrance.
Immediate Medium’s artistic director JJ Lind, Cherokee‑Shawnee, said elders steered the work’s shape. "We just followed the elders’ lead in who they wanted involved, what they wanted to be said, really letting them shape the conceptual backbone of the work," he said. Lind also described community feedback sessions that informed the activities staged along the procession route.
Organisers linked the pageant’s buffalo imagery to the species’ nineteenth‑century slaughter and its later recovery, highlighting the role Native activists and conservationists in that restoration. By tracing those histories alongside the 1862 executions, the production framed a long arc of violence and resilience, making a direct connection between past state violence and contemporary Indigenous activism.
The event ran in two legs, and the second and final segment will proceed into downtown Brooklyn on September 19. By moving a ceremonial herd through dense commercial and memorial landscapes, the creators shifted who controls public memory in those spaces, placing Native elders and youth at the centre of decisions about what civic gestures should convey.
