According to an anecdote, Andraž Šalamun was inspired to paint the American bison after seeing it in the Ljubljana Zoo. He supposedly returned to his studio and made a large painting of the animal the same day, with this motif then accompanying him throughout his oeuvre.
The American bison is not native to Slovenia. There are endemic bison species in Europe, but the American bison can only be found in zoos here. In general, the American bison is rare in nature today. In the late 19th century, an estimated 60 million bison lived in North America. During the racist and colonial wars against the indigenous peoples, new American settlers worked systematically to almost exterminate bison, which were an important source of food, leather, and horns for the native communities. This systematic killing, the spread of new diseases, and commercial hunting caused a drastic decline in the number of American bison, and by 1889 there were only 541 left in the US. Restoration attempts have been partially successful, but will probably never manage to return the population to anything close to its original numbers.
Šalamun saw the American bison outside its native habitat, forcibly moved to another continent and confined in a zoo. Although the bison lived in regulated conditions in the zoo, with regular food and space to move, its captivity was the latest stage in centuries-long systematic human violence against its species, stemming from financial, colonial, and racist conflicts. Šalamun’s painting is an indirect consequence of the global dimensions of the bison’s massacre and its captivity.
