10 Dollars - Elizabeth II American Buffalo

The American Buffalo design reproduced here originates from James Earle Fraser's 1913 Buffalo nickel — itself modeled on three live bison and, according to Fraser's own account, a composite of multiple Native American figures he sketched in New York. Cook Islands has issued a long run of these Fraser-tribute pieces, leveraging its legal authority to produce commemorative coinage under New Zealand's currency arrangement without those coins ever entering domestic circulation.

The rectangular planchet with rounded corners is the telling detail — a format Cook Islands adopted for several bullion-adjacent issues of this period to differentiate shelf presence in the collector market.