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| Singing Back The Buffalo Photo: George Hupka |
For countless centuries, the landscape of North America – known to its indigenous inhabitants as Turtle Island – was dominated by one large animal: the buffalo. Tahese majestic animals roamed through every environment it had to offer, enriching the land and creating a rich habitat for numerous other species, including humans. Then came European settlers, who quickly realised that if they wanted the land, the simplest way to get it was to drive those herds almost to the point of extinction.
Now, having finally reclaimed a measure of their power, indigenous nations are coming together to enable their reintroduction to their ancestral lands. Tasha Hubbard is a member of the Cree nation and her film Singing Back The Buffalo, which won Best Documentary Feature at ImagineNative 2025, charts that process.
“I started my documentary in the late Nineties, early 2000s, and I was learning by assisting an established indigenous producer and director,” Tasha tells me. “It was not long after that that I was first introduced to buffalo in that I went to visit a buffalo stone. We have them in our territory, and some of them have been destroyed. Some of them were moved after settlers arrived, but some of them remain intact, and one of them had just been rediscovered.
“After that visit, I just found myself thinking about buffalo a lot and thinking about what I'd been taught about buffalo, which was very much about how indigenous people hunted them, we used every part of them, and then they disappeared. I started to have questions about that. Our relationship would have been so much deeper than just hunter and prey. I realized through our stories and our songs that we understood ourselves and we understood other beings to have peoplehood. We had agreements with the different beings that we shared the land with, and we had agreements with the buffalo. And there's stories that explain that in our traditional ways.
I also started to question how the buffalo disappeared. And I'm like, ‘There's a curious lack of activation in that sentence.’ At that point I was working on my master's in English, and I was doing a lot of narrative analysis, and I was like, you know, ‘What does that phrase tell us and what doesn't it tell us?’ It doesn't tell us how that came to be, in the active efforts, mostly in the US but sometimes in Canada, in terms of buffalo slaughter and what's often called ecocide.
I got thinking, well, if we understand buffalo as people, and genocide is the destruction of people, it's genocide. It's our genocide because it was done to starve us out. And that did happen. Many of my ancestors’ families starved to death. And I always think about that, like, what are the odds of those of us who are still here, being here? And how hard our ancestors had to work to survive in those times. It's overwhelming sometimes. And it was at that time that we got separated from that relationship with the buffalo because they weren't there, and we were, and we had to make adjustments.
“I wanted to reconnect to Buffalo. I knew then, so many years ago, that I wanted to make a film about them, but I thought ‘I need to be ready to do that.’ And so I took time to learn filmmaking. I worked on other projects. I did my master's and PhD thesis on buffalo and buffalo stories and connection. And I started to think about it again in the mid 2010s. Then I started filming buffalo events and finally settled into, like, this is the only thing I'm focusing on, in 2021.”
By then, the process of bringing the buffalo back to the land had already begun.
“There are nations that had buffalo that started in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of those efforts are successful,” she observes. “And some of them, the people look at it like ‘We weren't ready. We weren't, ourselves, healed enough to create a good home for them.’ The Buffalo Treaty was signed in 2014, and it originated with the Blackfoot, with a woman named Paulette Fox, and Leroy Littlebear, who's in my film. They started holding buffalo dialogues with the Blackfoot Confederacy on both sides of the Canada/US border. It was there that they said ‘We're ready to help bring them back. We're going to need help from our brothers and sisters from other nations, so we need a treaty to agree to do that.’
“I started helping with the treaty in 2015 and started traveling with it and supporting Leroy and Amethyst [First Rider] and others who were doing that work. We started the film with the transfer of the 87 calves from Elk Island National Park in Canada down to the Blackfeet in Montana, which is where the calves’ ancestors originated from. I'd been helping with the treaty for about a year then, and just stayed active. I made that jump from Buffalo consciousness and trying to raise that in our minds, to actually trying to support their physical return. And I still do that kind of work in amongst trying to make other films.
“I wasn't sure how I was going to tell that story. In those years, I had been traveling with the treaty and going to buffalo gatherings and meeting a lot of the people that are in the film. These wonderful, amazing people of different generations who were adjusting and thinking creatively and critically on how to support buffalo rematriation. And that's when I realised that I wanted the film to be about people who move across these territories that my ancestors are from and would have moved through and visited. That's how I chose the geographical scope. Where did my people go? Who did my people have relationships with?
“For people to have the opportunity to go to these places through the film, I really thought a lot about the visuals. What are people going to see? Sometimes I was trying to counter that belief that the prairies are empty. I grew up here, in the northern prairies, and people from the big cities of Toronto and Vancouver would say ‘Oh, the prairies, that's what we fly over. There's nothing there.’ I knew that wasn't true. I'd grown up observing all the different little beings that were there, and realising all those little beings really missed the buffalo. I wanted people to be able to experience that.”
There's a discussion early on in the film about a word that can be translated as ‘story’, but is something closer to ‘your own involvement in a happening’. How much did that perspective inform her approach to the film?
“I think it resonated because we have many words for story in our languages,” she says. “It's not just a story. It's what kind of story, you know? Is it our creation stories? Is it our long ago stories? Is it our stories of amazing happenings and achievements? It made me think, you know, we think about the stories from the past, but what are the stories of the future? What are people going to be telling the story of when they're old?”
She brought her son and nephew with her when doing this work, she says, and there were often other children present.
“Leroy would say to them ‘You need to really remember all of this because you're going to be the ones to tell the story of the buffalo coming back. And witness these really significant moments of buffalo going into spaces they hadn't gone for a long time.
“As I said, there were some places that had them, but not that many. In 2016, 2017, we started seeing this increase of interest in nations having buffalo on their lands again. There's a real movement. There's a lot of energy, and there's challenges that always arise, but I think it's an indication of just where we're at as a people. We're in recovery from the impacts of colonisation, and yet we have people that held on to our stories and our songs and our ceremonies, and there's so many of our people coming back to that, and the buffalo help us with that. So it's been a real privilege.”
Going back to what she said about her thoughts on what happened to the buffalo, and the huge amount of horror in that story and the huge number of horrible pictures from it, I note that she uses these quite sparingly in the film. Is that because she wanted to focus on the positive, and on what's happening now?
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| Tasha Hubbard and Leroy Littlebear Photo: George Hupka |
“I actually wrote a paper that talks about the genocide of the buffalo,” she says. “I built up the argument from indigenous thought and genocide theory and history. I looked at hidehunter diaries and army records and things like that. I think a lot of times, for good reason, our work as indigenous filmmakers tells difficult stories, and my previous work has done so. It's important that those stories get told. But I realised after the last film I made that telling those stories had taken a toll on me.
“It's not something filmmakers talk about that often. People go in and they're witnessing the dark side of humanity and the creations that humans create. So I got some guidance from wise people in my life that, you know, ‘You need to make something that brings you hope and makes you happy.’ And so I thought, ‘Okay, I'll keep that with me as I make this film.’
”From 2016 to 2024, in the time I'm making this film, I'm seeing the shift in perception around climate change happen where scientists and critical thinkers had already been raising the alarm, but the general public was still holding on to some [idea of] ‘Maybe it's not as bad,’ or they didn't want to think about it. And then it really shifted in those eight years to the mainstream, to reasonable political leadership going ‘Yes, this is the reality, and we have to do something.’
“It's tough, you know? I feel in myself and in others this heaviness around where the world is at. I'm not saying we need to look away. I think that's been the problem – people looked away. I think we need to acknowledge and do the work that's required. And also, here is a way forward: thinking of the land as living. Seeing the world in the way that indigenous people were and are taught to see the world, as living, as related, as worthy, as needing support.
“Humans have created some conditions here that have had consequences and the buffalo's destruction is one of them. They were the keystone species for a continent and are nearly exterminated. As I say in the film, there may be 300 or 400 left. It's enormous. That human-caused destruction is, I think, unprecedented. And we're seeing it play out in other places – the rhino, for example, these beings that have lived and survived here for so long and thrived and created abundance. The buffalo create an abundance of land. [Helping them] is an action that people can support and we can start to see very quickly the regeneration that they bring when they're brought back to the land. And I think we need those stories, too.”
I mention that I've seen things from all over the world about the importance of having larger, heavier animals just to trample down grass so that different things can grow, allowing for a more diverse ecosystem.
She nods. “Yeah. The way that conservation and parks mentality is often about the pristine – you know, you keep things unbroken. And the buffalo, when they move through and there's some herds and their big migration, I mean, they tore that grass up, their hooves made big holes. They’re seed carriers. They literally carry seeds with them. And those drop, and they're cultivating in a way that people didn't appreciate.
“The narrative in North America is that indigenous people wandered aimlessly, that we were nomads, like we were wandering around in the dark. The reality is so different. We knew our land so well and so wide. We knew where we needed to be at certain times of the year because we harvested things. We knew, ‘Oh, we need to be here at this time.’ And we could tell when that time would be. We knew the buffalo migration paths, and they kept the same paths. We had extensive trade networks. Studying the buffalo and thinking about the buffalo has made me see that in really, really beautiful ways.
“I think part of this is also reclaiming our own narratives of our history that were overwritten and simplified. We were infantilised. And the buffalo, too, have had their stereotypes. They were characterised as stupid. This was tragic. They were characterised as stupid because if one of theirs was shot, they would stop and try and help it. They would try to prop it up. You know, if it was gone, they would circle and give their ceremony to say goodbye. And the hunters, and even William Hornaday, who's seen as this great conservationist, he was like, ‘Oh, they're stupid because they don't run.’ But then when you look, it's because they love each other. They're not all running away. They're going ‘Oh, one of us is down. Let's see if we can help them because we love them.’ I want both buffalo and indigenous people to be viewed for the beautiful and complex beings that we are.”
I ask her about the organisation she’s been working with, the International Buffalo Relations Institute (IBRI). She notes that if you’re interested, you can get t-shirts like those worn in the film on its website.
“That came out of the work we were doing on a volunteer basis with Leroy,” she explains. “We were already doing this on a volunteer, informal basis. And then we thought, well, let's organise so that we can bring in some resources, direct them to community, be able to support the treaty and its message. And so the nonprofit, the International Buffalo Relations Institute, was created. When I started the film, I didn't have that intention. I was still just making the film on all of these other people. And my producers were like, ‘You know, I think you should include the work that IBRI’s doing and that you're doing.’ And I was like, ’Oh, yeah, I guess we should.’” She laughs.
“We're just trying to keep the message of buffalo out there, and buffalo education is really one of our goals. And also, just supporting nations in their efforts and lobbying for better policies. We recently facilitated the transfer of Yellowstone buffalo across the border into Canada for the first time. We were – behind the scenes – finding a recipient, dealing with the different border agencies and agriculture and all of these policy things to where we were successful. And it was the first time that it ever happened.
“People were trying to bring sperm across, and we're like, ‘You know, let's not interfere in the buffalos’ choices.’ They know what to do. Let's just move them around so that they can still decide. We're not taking that out of their hands. Let's respect their body sovereignty as much as possible. We have to move them because we need buffalo to come to other places and they can't naturally migrate, but let's not actually invade their bodies. Let's just bring these different genetic groups to mix with different groups. It was a small herd, but it was start. We were really happy that everyone arrived safely and they were very well welcomed by the nation on the Canadian side. And it was a beautiful gift of the treaty. The nation in the US who gave the buffalo, that's how they looked at it. This is our way of honouring that treaty. That's all supported by IBRI as well.”
We talk about ImagineNative and I ask if she feels that this is a story that has relevance for other groups of indigenous people around the world, and the situations that they're in.
“I think so. I think we all have relationships with the more than human that have been affected in the same way that we've been affected, by colonialism, by imperialism, all the extractive and resource-taking. And so I think it will resonate. It's not that everything goes smoothly in this work to bring buffalo back. There are challenges and people have to be creative to get around them, but it is really a story of working past boundaries. Those can be tribal boundaries, those can be provincial boundaries, those can be country boundaries, those can be thought boundaries. The buffalo and its significance to us transcends that. So it's putting aside any differences and trying to work together.
“Human beings are complicated and there's always something, but it's constantly reminding us what's at the center and what needs to happen. I think it can be an inspiring story for many people. ImagineNative has been a part of my life since its beginning, it's been a big part of my career. I was so happy that it got in, that we're going to be able to bring it to other indigenous peoples from all over the place.
“Given that you're in the UK, I also think about the rewilding projects that are happening in the UK and in Europe, and the effort to save the European bison and to bring back species that have been extirpated. This is a story that can resonate across the water. Speaking of another boundary.”
I mention that we recently got beavers back and that they’re doing really well.
“That's it,” she says. “Animals are smarter than us. They can thrive. They just need to be back in their territory and they remember exactly what they're supposed to do and where they're supposed to be and how to live well. They're so resilient and I love stories like that.”
