Colonial Beef and the Blackfeet Reservation Slaughterhouse, 1879–1895

In 1884, the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) built a slaughterhouse on the Blackfeet Reservation. Over the next decade, the slaughterhouse instituted profound changes in Blackfeet foodways. Trading work for prepared meat dissociated from its animal origins reoriented Blackfeet meat making from a process of collaborative hunting and butchering to an individuated procedure of exchanging labor for beef. This article explores how the slaughterhouse provided a potent force to colonize Blackfeet land and labor during the late nineteenth century.