Buffalo Is the New Buffalo
BUFFALO IS THE
NEW
BUFFALO
STORIES
CHELSEA VOWEL
BUFFALO IS THE NEW BUFFALO
Copyright © 2022 by Chelsea Vowel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.
Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.
The stories in this collection are works of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased, unless identified by the author, is purely coincidental.
Previously published:
“âniskôhôcikan,” as “nanitohtamok nanites,” Beside Journals, Green Screen, Issue 1
“Dirty Wings,” On Spec, Issue 107 (28.4)
“A Lodge within Her Mind,” Center for the Arts in Society at
Carnegie Mellon University (online), April 24, 2020
Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch
Cover art by Christi Belcourt, Offerings to Save the World, 2017, 72″ × 55.25″, acrylic on canvas
Edited by Catharine Chen
Proofread by Alison Strobel
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Title: Buffalo is the new buffalo: stories / Chelsea Vowel.
Names: Vowel, Chelsea, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210387009 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210387122 | ISBN 9781551528793 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528809 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8643.O94 B84 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
For nikihci-âniskotâpânak,
my ancestors and my descendants.
Contents
Locating Myself
Preface
Introduction
BUFFALO BIRD
MICHIF MAN
DIRTY WINGS
MAGGIE SUE
A LODGE WITHIN HER MIND
NISKÔHÔCIKAN
I, BISON
UNSETTLED
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
LOCATING MYSELF
Many Indigenous peoples share a basic protocol that requires people to identify where they come from and who their relations are. This allows people to figure out what kinds of relationships they may have with one another, and what their reciprocal obligations are to one another as kin, hosts, guests, and so on. It is a form of accountability, and it clarifies one’s positionality.
It’s important to point out that because of the history of colonization and chattel slavery, not all Indigenous people can easily answer these questions, and that this, too, is a legitimate positionality shared by many Indigenous people.
I am a white-looking, cis, queer, neurodivergent, intermittently able-bodied otipêyimisow-iyiniw (Métis person) from the historic Métis community of manitow-sâkihikan (Lac Ste. Anne). My mother is an otipêyimisow-iskwêw (Métis woman), and my father is a môniyâw-nâpew (white man) of Ukrainian and Irish background. nikotwâsik nitawasimisin, I have six children. I am a first-generation post-secondary graduate with a BEd, an LLB, and an MA in Native Studies, and no matter what other work I do, I always come back to teaching. Despite coming from a Métis community that was once multilingual, the only Indigenous language I have been able to reclaim to date is nêhiyawêwin (Plains Cree, Y dialect), and I am nowhere near as fluent as I’d like to be yet.
It is also important to understand that I come from Métis who have been dispossessed from their land, for outside of the eight Métis settlements in northern Alberta, Métis do not have communally held lands equivalent to reserves. I had access to our territory growing up only because my parents own a quarter section of land there, held in fee simple. To address this kind of lack of access so many Indigenous people experience, particularly urban Indigenous people, I cofounded the Métis in Space Land Trust with Molly Swain, and we successfully fundraised enough to purchase 160 acres in Lac Ste. Anne county. Forming a land trust ensures that this land will be held in common, for the purposes of conservation, cultural education, and research. Does it rankle to have to “buy back” land in my own territory that was stolen? You’d better believe it does, but our youth need it, and it can be held in common until such time as we no longer have to endure underlying Crown title.
Like a huge number of Alberta Métis and nêhiyawak (Cree), my great-great-great-great-grandparents were Louis Kwarakwante Calli-hoo and Marie Patenaude (his second wife). One of their sons, Michel, became headman of Michel’s Band and signed a Treaty 6 adhesion in 1878. Their daughter, Angelique “Angele” Callihoo, was my great-greatgreat-grandmother, and she married Louis Divertissant Loyer, son of Louis Bonhomme Loyer and Louise Genevieve Jasper.
Angelique and Louis had a son in 1867, Samuel Loyer. Samuel married Isabelle Gladu, daughter of Oskinikiw Joseph Gladu, headman of Michel’s Band, and Marie “Emma” Amable Belcourt. Samuel and Isabelle had my great grandmother, Katherine Loyer, who married Alonzo Bryant Teague, the first outmarriage to a non-Métis. My grandfather, Kenneth Teague, was their son.
I provide this brief genealogy to find cuzzins! It also locates me within a constellation of relations, of Mohawk, nêhiyawak, and Métis ancestors, some who took treaty, some who took scrip, and who span many different communities throughout the northwest—as well as Irish, Scottish, and Ukrainian ancestors I know much less about. These are the “kinscapes” that inform all of my stories.
Kinscapes, as defined by Métis scholar Brenda Macdougall, are “a network of family relationships knit together in a certain place and time” (Oosthoek 2017, Macdougall 2010). Kinscapes are governed and constituted by wâhkôhtowin, a complex series of relationships not only between humans, but also with nonhuman kin and all of creation.
When I refer to Métis, I mean Métis as People, not métis as mixed, although drawing these lines is neither clean nor easy (Andersen 2014; Innes 2013). At the same time, I want to push back against the nationalist rhetoric of the Métis as being a “distinct People.” Yes, we have a specific history and culture; we are “distinct” in that sense. However, the colonial-administrative effort to atomize Indigenous Peoples into clearcut, separate groups encourages us to work at odds with one another, and as Robert Innes maps out beautifully, it also negates the reality of the shared history, territories, and kinscapes we continue to occupy (2013). Where I am from, Métis and nêhiyawak are linked through familial, cultural, and political relations, through a shared history, and through territory.
As Tasha Beeds points out, Métis and nêhiyawak have “fluid kinship lines and [a] shared worldview” where she is from, and this is also true of where I am from (2014, 70, note 1). While she chooses to use the term “nêhiyawi-itâpisiniwin,” which means a Cree worldview that Métis share, I have op
ted for “otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwin” to specifically centre Métis peoples. Where I am from, most Métis will have an otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwin that is fairly similar to nêhiyaw-itâpisiniwin, but this is not true in all areas throughout the Métis homeland, and I wish to keep space open for these differences within the Métis experience. My own work foregrounds my community’s nêhiyaw-itâpisiniwin as one possible approach within the plurality of otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwina (Métis worldviews).1
Until I moved away from home at seventeen, I was raised on a quarter section of land between three lakes: Lake Isle, wâpamon sâkahikan (Wabamun Lake), and manitow-sâkahikan (Lac Ste. Anne). Lake Isle is fed from the southwest by the Sturgeon River and from the northwest by Dussault Lake and Round Lake. Lake Isle then drains back into the Sturgeon River at its eastern end, feeding into Lac Ste. Anne. Lac Ste. Anne, which is also fed by Birch Lake to the northwest, drains east into Matchayaw Lake and Big Lake before flowing into the North Saskatchewan River. Wabamun Lake is fed by Beaver Creek and Jackpine Creek and also drains east through Wabamun Creek into the North Saskatchewan River.
I locate myself geographically between these lakes and note their interconnections to creeks and rivers because these boundaries make much more natural sense than range and township roads, highways, and hamlets that have only existed for a hundred years or less. These lakes provided sustenance to Métis and First Nations in the area, particularly after the settler colonial genocide of the buffalo was almost complete. These days, the lakes are sites of ongoing cottage colonialism, where the needs and desires of non-Indigenous, mostly white people are given primacy over the ongoing relationships to land, water, and nonhuman kin that Indigenous peoples continue to maintain. Despite all of this, Lac Ste. Anne remains a powerful gathering place for Indigenous peoples every summer, as it has been for generations.
All of my stories are located within or informed by the kinscapes and land/waterscapes of Lac Ste. Anne. And just as watersheds and drainage basins are larger than any single body of water, these kinscapes land/waterscapes expand beyond Lac Ste. Anne itself to encompass all the spaces where my ancestors made relations. I clarify this to explain that while my characters are mainly rooted in and around Lac Ste. Anne, these stories are happening within a much wider time and space that, nonetheless, do not represent all Métis.
Kinscapes and land/waterscapes are also a unifying metaphor for the way that none of my work occurs in isolation, even when I am feeling isolated.
1 I am using a standard written nêhiyawêwin throughout, and my spelling of certain words may not be the same as sources I cite.
PREFACE
I have written eight short stories that explore Métis existence and resistance through a lens of being Métis, or, more specifically, being Métis from manitow-sâkihikan (Lac Ste. Anne).2 Through the creation of these stories, I ask questions about Métis presence in the past, the present, and the future, in ways that invite the reader to coconstitute potentialities with me. You don’t have to be Métis to get it! Our past was full of relationships with non-Métis, as is our present, and who knows how much more that web of relationality will expand into the future?
Each story is followed by an exploration explaining the purpose of the story and the many sources of inspiration that helped me write it, as well as some of the history and literary allusions the reader may be unfamiliar with. These explorations expand this work beyond creative writing; I am “imagining otherwise” in order find a way to “act otherwise” (Voth 2018).
Stories are an inherently collaborative experience, and all stories have a purpose. Among Métis and nêhiyawak, as with other Indigenous peoples, there are âcimowina (everyday stories), kwayask-âcimowina (non-fiction), kîyâskiwâcimowina (false or fictional stories), âtayôhkêwina (sacred stories), mamâhtâwâcimowina (miraculous stories), pawâmêwâcimowina (spiritual dreaming stories), kiskinwahamâcimowina (teaching stories), kakêskihkêmowina (counselling stories), wawiyatâcimowina (funny stories), stories that map out terrain and resources, kayâs-âcimowina (stories that pass on history), miyo-âcimowina (good stories), and mac-âcimowina (evil or malicious stories).
These genres within Métis/nêhiyaw (Cree) literary tradition have their own forms and literary conventions, some of which I use in my stories. I blend these with whitestream genre writing without necessarily making the Métis/nêhiyaw allusions and conventions legible to non-Métis/nêhiyawak, such as in “Dirty Wings,” where I use seasonal rounds, allude to specific âtayôhkêwina (sacred stories), and reference Elders’ counselling discourse patterns, which “work rhetorically to effect learning in the reader” (MacKay 2014, 357). In this way I am making space to respond to mainstream speculative fiction either by Métis-fying it (adding Métis literary conventions and allusions/history/cultural aspects) or subverting it by switching observer-subject roles.
It is important to understand that within otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwina, stories, like all language, have power. Language is not merely a tool of communication, but also a place where reality can be shaped. Language is transformational; “our breath has the power to kwêskîmot, change the form of the future for the next generation” (Beeds 2014, 69). My writing seeks to engage in that transformation, making space for Métis to exist across time, refusing our annihilation as envisioned by the process of ongoing colonialism, and questioning the ways we are thought to have existed in the past.
Through stories like these, I wish to extend Métis existence beyond official narratives, beyond current constraints, and imagine what living in a “Métis way” could look like in spaces and times we haven’t (yet) been. This challenges the divide between fact and fiction, as Métis people assert a reality that is perceived as impossible in mainstream thinking. If Métis people say a thing is possible, who gets to determine that that thing is fictional?
Grace Dillon first coined the term “Indigenous futurisms” in 2003, seeking to describe a movement of art, literature, games, and other forms of media which express Indigenous perspectives on the future, present, and past. More specifically, she argues that all forms of Indigenous futurisms “involve discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world” (2012, 10).
Indigenous futurisms are not merely synonymous with science fiction and fantasy, despite how they may be viewed as such within the mainstream. Indigenous futurists express their ontologies in various forms, and as Grace Dillon puts it, “our ideas of body, mind, and spirit are true stories, not forms of fantasy” (2019). For example, Tsilhqot'in filmmaker Helen Haig-Brown’s short film The Cave is listed on IMDb as being science fiction, but it depicts a traditional Tsilhqot'in story told to her by her great-uncle, Henry Solomon (2009). Indigenous futurisms offer an alternative genre to Indigenous creators that allow us to foreground our worldviews and realities.
Although Indigenous futurism has only in the past decade taken root as a named and self-reflective movement, it does so with inspiration from—and is indeed indebted to—the path-breaking work of Afrofuturists such as Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Janelle Monáe, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, and so many others.
Afrofuturisms—so named in 1994 by Mark Dery, but referring to works beginning in the late 1950s and arguably much earlier—explore the intersection between the African diaspora and technology (1994, 179–222). Afrofuturism centres Afrodiasporic experiences and cosmologies across a vast range of themes, offering alternatives to Western views of Africa and of the African diaspora (Esteve 2016).
Dillon points out that science fiction as a genre “emerged in the mid-nineteenth-century context of evolutionary theory and anthropology profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology” (2012, 2). These themes are exhaustively explored in whitestream science fiction, exposing particular settler colonial anxieties and aspirations that tend to erase or completely ignore the experiences and perspectives of Bla
ck, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC). In (re)imagining history, whitestream speculative fiction is particularly adept at repressing the violent histories of colonialism from the public imaginary (Gaertner 2015). This does not mean that the topic of colonization is absent from science fiction—far from it (Rieder 2008). We find constant dichotomous reframing of settler colonials as agents of space-faring Manifest Destiny or the inevitable subjects of colonization at the hands (tentacles, squishy pseudopods, or furry appendages) of aliens (Justice 2018, 149–152). Whitestream science fiction insists that colonialism is inevitable. It’s “us or them,” and it had better be “us.”
Increasingly, BIPOC are becoming content creators, operating from within worldviews that exist beyond the whitestream. Much of this work involves switching observer-subject roles, so that instead of BIPOC being under the external gaze of the white anthropologist/colonizer (the subject), we are viewing the outsider through our own cultural lenses (the observer). This is not merely a pushback against the colonizing narrative of whitestream speculative fiction; it can also be a form of social justice organizing. As Walidah Imarisha puts it, “whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction” (2015, 3). Dillon takes the transformative potential of the work even further, stating that “this process is often called ‘decolonization’ and as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maori) explains, it requires changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts” (2012, 10).
Before I get into explaining what I mean by “Métis futurisms,” I want to acknowledge what Lou Cornum rightfully points out: that the term “Indigenous” is often used in a way that implicitly excludes Black people from its definition, either denying the Indigeneity of Black people or avoiding the question altogether (2015, 3–5). Speaking of the “space Indian” as a diasporic figure, Cornum suggests that Indigenous futurists can “participate in complicating our notions of home, Indigenous identity, and shifting relationships to land and belonging” in ways that “evoke similarities with other diasporic figures … specifically … the Black diasporic figure” (2015, 3).