Cree filmmaker explores `buffalo justice'
As her documentary Singing Back the Buffalo opens, Tasha Hubbard stands in a ribbon skirt beneath a pink sky in the windy grasslands of Saskatchewan's Qu'appelle Valley.
“When I was a little girl, I didn't know what it meant to be a Cree person,” she begins.
“I was raised away by a farming family and the only time I felt connected was when we would come to the Qu'appelle Valley. I'd stare at the empty hills and imagine my ancestors and the massive herds of buffalo moving across the land.”
In her late teens, Hubbard reunited with her birth family, yet an unshakable sense of incompleteness lingered. It wasn't until age 30 that her journey took a transformative turn. While attending a wedding, she joined a group that left the reception to explore a recently unearthed rock.
“It was a big rock in the shape of a buffalo. It had this really beautiful round medicine bowl at its nose. You just felt its energy. I felt so emotional. We talked about it for a while, and then they said we should sing for our grandfather, so we sang an honour song for it,” Hubbard shared in an interview.
“For a moment we thought it sang back.”
After that experience, Hubbard's interest in the buffalo, and their shared history with her Cree ancestors, grew.
“That day, I started my buffalo journey,” the acclaimed filmmaker said.
She's spent 21 summers since visiting buffalo stones, and wrote a dissertation that concluded in 2016 as a part of her doctoral research on buffalo consciousness entitled The Call of the Buffalo: Exploring Kinship with the Buffalo in Indigenous Creative Expression.
Her new documentary, Singing Back the Buffalo, debuted in Montana in February and is set to screen twice at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, which runs until Sunday.
Hubbard's roots trace back to Peepeekisis First Nation, nestled in Treaty 4 territory amid the serene sea of prairie grasses in the Qu'appelle Valley of southern Saskatchewan. She currently resides in Edmonton, and is an associate professor in the Native Studies/ department of English and Film
at the University of Alberta.
It has been a goal of hers to make a buffalo documentary from a completely Indigenous perspective for more than 20 years, she said.
Buffalo, like their Indigenous kin, have endured a history of genocide. While they are experiencing a resurgence today, many find themselves constrained within fences and borders, deprived of the freedom to roam as they once did.
“We have this long-standing, deep relationship with buffalo that got interrupted. Buffalo consciousness is a return to that awareness of how buffalo are our relatives and how this is their territory,” she said.
With distinctive grooves and depressions carved into their surfaces, buffalo ribstones — also known as grandfather stones — hold cultural and historical significance for Indigenous people within the plains regions. They were often placed strategically near buffalo jumps — cliffs or steep slopes used for communal buffalo hunting.
The film recounts the Cree and Nakota legend of the mostos-awasis asiniy — also known as the Buffalo Child Stone. It follows the story of a boy who grew up alongside the buffalo, only to realize his own humanity one day when he saw his reflection in the water. Seeking to understand
his identity, he leaves to connect with his human kin and eventually starts a family of his own. However, feeling a deep longing for his buffalo family, he returns seeking guidance.
Recognizing the historical parallels of captivity faced by both the buffalo and plains Indigenous communities, coupled with the displacement of Indigenous populations to reserves and the imposition of the pass system in Canada, Hubbard saw the correlation with each respective genocide.
“We were literally confined to our reserves and at a low population. The same thing happened with the buffalo. They were at their historic low and have primarily only existed as domesticated since then. There are a handful of wild buffalo, but confinement has been their fate for a really long time,” Hubbard said.
The feature-length documentary's narrative centres on The Buffalo Treaty, which was first signed on Sept. 24, 2014, at the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. At its heart, the treaty is about co-operation, renewal and restoration.
The Blackfeet Nation, the Kainai/blood Tribe, the Siksika Nation, the Piikani Nation, the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Tribes of Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of Fort Peck Indian Reservation,
the Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation, and the Tsuuuut'ina Nation were the first nations to sign.
As of February, there have been almost 50 sovereign signatories.
“At its heart, the film is about what we want in the future. Looking ahead and going, what does it mean to have things set back to balance?” Hubbard said.
“My goal was always to want people to smell that prairie. It's beautiful and golden, and it's hard to describe. It's for people who have, for all sorts of reasons, been disconnected from their homelands. Wanting to bring people back there on the screen. And, hopefully, they get to go there one day.”
Recognized as a keystone species, buffalo serve as ecosystem engineers, crucial for preserving biodiversity, facilitating nutrient cycling, seed dispersal, and providing sustenance for predators including wolves and grizzly bears, according to the film.
“We need to not just bring them back, but bring them back in a way that they can be more like how they're meant to be,” Hubbard says.
“It's justice. Buffalo justice.”