The filmmaker’s documentary explores “buffalo justice” and the vision of the return of the herds

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As her documentary Singing Back the Buffalo opens, Tasha Hubbard stands in a ribbon skirt under a pink sky in the windy prairies of Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.

“When I was little, I didn’t know what it meant to be Cree,” she begins.

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“I grew up in a farming family and the only time I felt connected was when we came to the Qu’Appelle Valley. I looked at the empty hills and imagined my ancestors and the huge herds of buffalo moving across the land.

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In his late teens, Hubbard was reunited with his biological family, but an unshakeable feeling of incompleteness persisted. It was only at the age of 30 that his journey took a transformative turn. While attending a wedding, she joined a group who left the reception to explore a recently discovered rock.

“It was a big rock shaped like a buffalo. He had this really nice round medicine bowl on his nose. You just felt its energy. I felt so moved. We talked about it for a while, and then they said we should sing for our grandfather, so we sang an honor song for that,” Hubbard explained in an interview.

“For a moment we thought it was singing back.”

After this experience, Hubbard’s interest in bison and their shared history with his Cree ancestors grew.

“That day I started my journey with the buffaloes,” said the famous filmmaker.

She has spent 21 summers since visiting buffalo stones and wrote a dissertation that was completed in 2016 as part of her doctoral research into buffalo consciousness titled “The Call of the Buffalo: Exploring Kinship with the Buffalo in indigenous creative expression.

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His new documentary, Singing Back the Buffalo, debuted in Montana in February and is scheduled to screen twice at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver, which runs through May 12.

Buffalo doco a goal for over 20 years

Hubbard’s roots trace back to the Peepeekisis First Nation, nestled on 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 Department of Indigenous Studies/Department of English and Film at the University of Alberta.

For more than 20 years, her goal has been to make a documentary about buffalo from a completely indigenous perspective, she said.

Buffalo, like their indigenous relatives, have endured a history of genocide. Although today experiencing a resurgence, many find themselves confined within fences and borders, deprived of the freedom to move as they once did.

“We have this deep, long-standing relationship with Buffalo that has been interrupted. Buffalo consciousness is a return to that awareness that buffalo are our kin and this is their territory,” she said.

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With distinctive grooves and depressions carved into their surface, bison ribs – also known as grandfather stones – are of cultural and historical significance to the indigenous peoples of the Plains regions. They were often strategically placed near buffalo jumps – cliffs or steep slopes used for communal bison hunting.

The film tells the Cree and Nakota legend of the Asiniy Mostos-awasis, 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 sets out to connect with his human parents and eventually starts a family of his own. However, feeling a deep desire to reunite with his buffalo family, he returns for advice.

Recognizing the historical parallels of the captivity faced by the bison and plains indigenous communities, coupled with the movement of indigenous populations onto reserves and the imposition of the pass system in Canada, Hubbard saw the correlation with each respective genocide.

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“We were literally confined to our reserves and with a low population. The same thing happened with the buffalo. They were at an all-time low and have only existed in domesticated form since then. There are a handful of wild buffalo, but confinement has been their plight for a very long time,” Hubbard said.

The 2014 Treaty of Buffalo at the heart of the film

The narrative of the feature-length documentary centers on the Treaty of Buffalo, which was first signed on September 24, 2014 on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. At the heart of the treaty, it is about cooperation, renewal and restoration.

The Blackfoot Nation, the Kainai/Blood Tribe, the Siksika Nation, the Piikani Nation, the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, the Salish Tribes and Kootenai of the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation, along with the Tsuuuut’ina Nation, were the first nations to sign.

As of February 2024, there are nearly 50 sovereign signatories.

“At its core, the film is about what we want in the future. Looking to the future, what does it mean to find balance? Hubbard said.

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“My goal has always been to want people to smell this meadow. It’s beautiful and golden, and it’s hard to describe. It’s for people who, for all kinds of reasons, have been disconnected from their country of origin. Wanting to bring people back to it on screen. And I hope they can go there one day.

Recognized as a keystone species, buffalo play an engineering role in the ecosystem, crucial for preserving biodiversity, facilitating nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and providing food for predators, including wolves and grizzly bears, according to the film.

“We need to not only bring them back, but bring them back in a way that makes them more like what they’re supposed to be,” Hubbard says.

“It’s justice. Buffalo Justice.

Kayla MacInnis is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for Indiginews. The LJI program is funded by the federal government of Canada.

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