Images of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site – Alberta, Canada, taken in August 2025.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site preserves the sites used by the Blackfoot to hunt and process buffalo that they killed for their people’s subsistence. The process was handed down through time and involved herding selected buffalo into a gathering area where trained young men, posing as wolves, would skillfully stampede them down the drive lanes and off a cliff. Other members of the tribe then went to work processing the meat, bones and hides in the camp below.

The name, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, comes from a story where a young Blackfoot boy, not involved in the hunt and looking to get closer to the action, climbed up to a ledge at the kill site cliff and was swept down to the kill site by a falling buffalo. When they found the boy, his head was ‘smashed in’, thus the name.