https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump
I've been reading about Buffalo Jumps that the American Indian tribes would conduct in the western United States -- apparently they were quite brutal. They would basically scare entire herds of bison off of cliffs which would cause them to break bones making them easier to kill (sometimes they would die in the fall). Sometimes the herds they would funnel over the cliffs were miles long (they liked to kill them all so survivors wouldn't cause other bison to become spooked by humans).
Being that they killed so many they couldn't possibly use everything from all the bison. Seeing as there can be quite a few bones (one has bones for 20,000 bison, one has piles of bones 13' deep) they clearly didn't use everything but how wasteful would one of these things have been? It really appears to go against the age old idea that when Native Americans killed animals they let nothing go to waste. It seems to go directly against the narrative I remember hearing as a kid (i.e. white people senselessly slaughtered, natives ONLY killed what they would use).
I'd really like to know what an expert has to say on the subject!
Given that there is a rich history of bison jumps spanning at least 10,000 years - see the Olsen-Chubbuck site, and covering an area from Mexico to Alberta, considerable variability is to be expected in the patterns of meat extraction. Speth (1983) notes that a common pattern throughout the plains is that cows were harvested and bulls were left to rot. However, at the Gamsey site (SE New Mexico):
the hunting seems to have taken place in late spring, and the remains of cows were left behind, suggesting it was the bulls which were slaughtered and packed away to the tribe's camps.
This harvest pattern is thought to be "because the bison cows that were pregnant or had calves would be leaner in spring". Fat was very desirable because it it is used to process Vitamin A and it provides more energy than virtually any other nutrient. I expect that the thoroughness of meat extraction at any one event could be conditioned by a number of factors, like season, settlement patterns, meat availability and group mobility.
How this aligns with the common trope of the Indians living in harmony with nature and being the original environmentalists is fairly easily discerned. No stereotypical generalizations about "Native Americans" hold value. There was too much variability between native groups, and through time to conclude much about people that occupied two continents for over 18,000+ years. Further, generalizations about one tribal/linguistic group cannot be used for another unless independent verification is completed. Finally, the perpective of Indians as non-wasteful original environmentalists is all tied up in the "Noble Savage" thing which is just another way of "othering" natives as stoic children untouched by civilization.
See: Bison Kills and Bone Counts. John D. Speth, Univ. of Chicago Press. 1983
The Olsen-Chubbuck site: a paleo-Indian bison kill. Wheat, J.B. Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology 26. 1972