Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard's Singing Back the Buffalo surveys a movement of rematriating buffalo to their ancestral lands.Supplied
The latest documentary from Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard (Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, Birth of A Family), Singing Back the Buffalo, surveys a movement of rematriating buffalo to their ancestral lands, finding cultural and historic kinship between the subjects and displaced Indigenous peoples. The film combines Hubbard’s dissertation on buffalo consciousness and Indigenous creative expression with the work of community leaders, activists, and scientists, as well as animated sequences to reveal the animal’s fraught history in North America.
Hubbard documents buffalo in the Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan and the Banff National Park in Alberta, as well as the signing of the historic, intertribal Buffalo Treaty at the Blackfeet Reservation in 2014, which ensures the restoration of bison to 6.3 million acres of land between the United States and Canada. She begins by recalling her own ancestral relationship with buffalo in the Qu’Appelle Valley in 2003, where she encountered a sacred Buffalo ribstone and medicine bowl that, when sung to, seemed to sing back.
Two centuries ago, between 30 and 60 million buffalo roamed the Prairies and woodland. By 1890, the buffalo numbered less than 300 owing to cattle disease, hide hunters, and targeted efforts by governments and military. Their bodies would become articles of the industrial age: factory belts and military boots were created from their hides, while their bones were ground into fertilizer and fine china. The ecological and cultural fallout from this extermination was dire and the buffalo, once held in total reverence as relatives of the land’s caretakers, are now scant and confined. Owing to restoration efforts, there are presently 2,200 plains buffalo and 10,000 wood buffalo roaming free or in protected areas around Canada.
“A thousand years ago, to think that there were hardly any buffalo would have been unimaginable. We can’t change the fact that it happened, but we can bring them back,” says Hubbard during our interview. “I think about justice a lot throughout my work and most times it’s justice for Indigenous people, but in this case it’s justice for the buffalo.”
Hubbard and Blackfoot Elder Leroy Little Bear.DOWNSTREAM PICTURES/Supplied
Featuring affective testimony from advocates such as Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear and Jason Baldes of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Singing Back the Buffalo seeks “a balance in the relational networks among humans.” We see this tipped equilibrium slowly reinstated through new migration efforts, with 87 buffalo yearlings airlifted from Elk Island to the Blackfeet Nation reservation in Montana in an effort to repopulate widely.
The film is in memory of Narcisse Blood (Tatsikiistamik), a Blackfoot elder, academic, and filmmaker with whom Hubbard began developing the film in 2014, shortly before his sudden passing in 2015. Hubbard would return to the project in 2022, with a crew following the path of the buffalo across the Northern Plains.
The film’s visual language is attuned to the literal and figurative enclosures unduly placed on the buffalo and Indigenous people alike; one especially striking image involves a clump of buffalo wool caught in barbed wire, swaying with the wind but unable to whirl away. “Fences are so ubiquitous and people don’t really stop to think about that – they’re a bizarre claim on our shared ecosystem. I’ve been long interested in that image of fencing and barbed wire, that element of confinement.”
Behind the scenes of Singing Back the Buffalo.Supplied
Hubbard gleefully recounts a memory from filming with the Wolakota team in South Dakota that confronts the colonial worldview where progress takes the form of domestication: “We were in TJ Heinert’s [the buffalo caretaker] truck and he was showing us the 28,000 acre range when he went ‘Oh, hold on a second,’ jumped out, grabbed his wire cutters, and began cutting the fence.” The Wolakota Buffalo Range had previously been occupied by cattle owners, who built fences along the property, but Heinert’s commitment to dismantling these limitations to the buffalo’s movement was a pivotal step in human-buffalo reharmonization.
Another staggering moment takes place when Hubbard accompanies four other Indigenous women to Banff, where two of them, Kyra Northwest and Glenda Abbott, are said to have sung buffalo ceremony songs during their hike. A monitoring system reveals that these songs – which the film’s title refers to – summoned the buffalo closer as they were being sung. But in place of any image or audio, a black screen reveals that these songs “cannot be recorded.”
“I learned quickly what is and isn’t within the realm of the filmable. The Western documentary tradition is that everything is accessible to audiences, which is where some of the ethnographic origins come into play, with the non-white group as the object of study and the audience thinking they should see whatever they want,” says Hubbard. “There are certain things that are for us and just don’t belong in front of a camera. We get that question sometimes – how come we can’t see? – but they haven’t earned the right to know, hear, or see that.”
Buffalo singers perform in Singing Back the Buffalo, which opens in select theatres Sept. 15.Supplied
The crucial messaging of Singing Back the Buffalo maintains that buffalo rematriation is a shared project in which we are all implicated. The rehabilitation of the prairie ecosystem and the cultural restoration of Indigenous tribes promise a healthier collective future for us all, provided we are willing to learn and act.
“The hope is always that people walk away toward a potentially different paradigm of how we view the land we live on and the beings that live on it,” explains Hubbard. “When you stop and think, what if we’re not at the top of the hierarchy or at the centre of the universe, and are instead part of a functioning and healthy ecosystem. What would that mean?”
Singing Back the Buffalo opens in select theatres Sept. 13, expanding across Canada throughout the fall.