Buffalo Is the New Buffalo Read online

  I refuse to exclude the potential and real Indigeneity of Black people, either implicitly or through omission. I take seriously the assertion that “the coupled structure of settler colonialism and slavery calls for new understandings of Indigeneity that can account for diaspora of Indigenous peoples and alternative forms of belonging not dependent on sovereignty over an ancestral territory” (Cornum 2015, 4). While the stories contained in this collection do not all directly address Blackness and Indigeneity, these complexities are part of the theoretical framework I am working from; they are foundational aspects of the world building that I do here and will continue to do.

  The futures I envision include expansive notions of Indigeneity, according to the principles of wâhkôhtowin (expanded kinship, including with nonhuman kin), miyo-wicêhtowin (the principle of getting along with others), miyo-pimâtisiswin (the good life), and wîtaskiwin (living together on the land) (Ahenakew and Wolfhart 1998b; Wolfhart and Ahenakew 2000; Cardinal and Hildebrandt 2000; Belcourt 2006; Macdougall 2010; Ghostkeeper 1995). When I speak of Indigenous peoples, I am not limiting myself to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit of North America, but rather to Indigenous peoples globally, recognizing that these definitions are fraught, contested, and, like all definitions of what it means to be human, often rooted in anti-Blackness (Walcott 2015, 93–95).

  Octavia Butler’s work expanded my understanding of what is possible in terms of speaking back to mainstream (and mostly white) visions of the past and future.3 Butler’s work never elides or pretends to solve racism, misogyny and misogynoir, ableism, homophobia, classism, or any other system of oppression.4 Neither do these structures forbid Black possibility; they exist as they do now, as constraints that must be contended with and resisted.

  This approach differs from that of popular mainstream science fiction, in particular, Star Trek the Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which it is imagined that in the twenty-third and twentyfourth centuries, humans have somehow solved all of these structural oppressions. Star Trek “is so invested in its liberal humanist multicultural utopian vision, that it can’t reckon with the ways in which it replicates fundamentally oppressive and hierarchical power imbalances, especially through its promotion of Starfleet as a militaristic, interventionist (in spite of the Prime Directive) organization” (Swain 2019). Unsurprisingly, this vision of the future mirrors contemporary refusals to acknowledge structural oppression or to understand the intergenerational impacts of settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

  This kind of future imagining requires a form of forgetting that Black scholars like Christina Sharpe (2016), Robyn Maynard (2017), Sarah-Jane Mathieu (2010), and Rinaldo Walcott (1997) all work to resist. Uncovering Black/Indigenous presence in the past, then asserting our existence in the present and into the future can be a way of seeing into, or even making, better futures. To me this is a major component of Indigenous futurisms.

  As the term “Indigenous” is fraught, and its boundaries expand or constrict according to who uses it and for what purpose, I have chosen to call my work “Métis-futurist” instead of simply using and accepting the broad “Indigenous futurist” label.

  The term “Indigenous” is incredibly broad, even vague, especially in an international context. It makes little sense for me to identify, individually, as an Indigenous person. I use “Indigenous” to either speak nationally and include First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, or internationally, to include all Indigenous peoples. I cannot be all those people! I am specifically Métis, and even more specifically, Métis from manitow-sâkihikan. That is where my stories come from, and other Métis from manitow-sâkihikan are the people I am most accountable to.

  Métis futurism allows me to envision a number of potential futures rooted in my history, community, and worldview—Métis futurism to me is not simply any speculative fiction work done by a Métis person. Imagining potential futures, or alternative worlds in any time, is not merely an exercise of imagining; I assert it as an act of what Scott Lyons calls rhetorical sovereignty, “the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit” (2000, 449).

  Accepting Métis cosmology and relationships as true, as science fact, offers alternatives to prescribed colonial roles for Indigenous peoples in the past, the present, and the near and far future. This opens up space and time to set goals for the future that do not privilege the colonial project, without having to provide a step-by-step plan for how to achieve these futures.

  I am not interested in being overly specific with genre outside of insisting my work is Métis-futurist. It may include elements of science fiction and fantasy—or not. I wish to, as Grace Dillon puts it, “sometimes intentionally experiment with, sometimes intentionally dislodge, sometimes merely accompany, but invariably change the perimeters” of speculative fiction (2012, 3). Existing whitestream genres are forms I can play along with, subvert, or avoid altogether.

  Given the way in which Indigenous peoples are so often forced to reactively hyperfocus on the present and on day-to-day survival, having some space to cast ourselves as far into the future is vital and potentially emancipatory. Setting these stories in contexts that explicitly reject anti-Blackness, heteronormativity, classism, ableism, patriarchy, and white supremacy is one way to think about how to overcome colonial logics. This work can and must be done in a variety of mediums; literature, music, film, art, fashion, video games, and so on.

  Métis futurisms offer up world building/prefiguration based in our otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwina, trying to get us to where no Michif has been before and sometimes reimagining where we have already been. It is my hope that these kinds of cultural productions, be they short stories, films, video games, art, or anything else under multiple suns, go beyond merely longing for a difference and a decolonial existence. I operate under the belief that, as Tasha Beeds insists, we can indeed speak/act/imagine to kwêskîmonaw, change our own shapes and forms, as well as “chang[ing] the form of the future for the next generation” (2014, 69).

  2 Métis people have been referred to and refer to ourselves in numerous ways, including Métis, Half-Breeds, Bois-Brûlés, otipêyimisow, âpihtawikosisân, Michif, and so on.

  3 These books include: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Kindred (1979), Wild Seed (1980), Clay’s Ark (1984), Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), Imago (1989), Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998).

  4 “Misogynoir” is a term created by Moya Bailey and further developed by Trudy of Gradient Lair. It describes misogyny directed toward Black women, thus reflecting race and gender.

  INTRODUCTION

  “Education is the new buffalo” is a metaphor that has been widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to our survival and ability to support ourselves, as once Plains nations supported ourselves as buffalo peoples. Variations of the phrase have sprung up with increasing frequency, including a particularly vomitous version, “pipelines are the new buffalo.” The premise is that many of our pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, and we must accept this and adapt. The phrase “buffalo is the new buffalo” however, asserts that we can and must do the work to repair our kinscapes, basing our work in wâhkôhtowin (expanded kinship) to restore our reciprocal obligations to our human and nonhuman kin. Instead of accepting that the buffalo and our ancestral ways will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?

  Buffalo Bird

  A work of historical speculative fiction, “Buffalo Bird” is set in the mid-to late nineteenth century, before Canada violently colonized the Plains. Following the life of Angelique Loyer, a Two-Spirit Rougarou (shapeshifter), as she tries to solve a murder in her community and later joins the resistance against Canada, this story imagines that the nêhiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy), a political alliance among Cree, Saulteaux, Nakoda, and Métis, successfully stopped Canadian expansion into the West.5

&nbsp
; Michif Man

  Set in the mid-twentieth century, this is a story about a Métis superhero, Franky Callihoo, who is gored by a radioactive bison and granted super strength. However, he is also plagued by The Distortion, which causes everyone except those related to him by blood to immediately forget about him. Years later, in the twenty-first century, Indigenous scholars push back against the notion that Michif Man was simply a folk myth and present evidence that Franky Callihoo actually existed and served his community in a variety of ways.

  Dirty Wings

  Informed by Métis metaphysics, “Dirty Wings” occurs in the hazy present and asserts Métis reality in a time when our otipêyimisow-itâpisiniwina (Métis worldviews) are supposed to be fading away. This is a dreaming story that witnesses Métis ontologies bleeding over and superseding settler colonial control.

  Maggie Sue

  Told in the first person and set in Edmonton, our protagonist literally stumbles into a fox who has taken human form and falls deeply in love. The fox is headed for a showdown with Elder Brother, and the protagonist must make sense of the chaos that ensues.

  A Lodge within Her Mind

  Pandemic isolation dulls the senses and drains hope. Facing the possibility of having her consciousness uploaded into a digital space where she is the only human being present, a queer Métis woman finds a novel way to escape.

  âniskôhôcikan

  A work of science fiction set in the near future, “âniskôhôcikan” challenges the notion that Métis are anti-technology, demonstrating how we will continue to innovate without compromising our self-determination. As the Cree language continues to decline, Métis and nêhiyawak (Cree) parents have their unborn children implanted with nanotechnology to ensure they will grow up as mother-tongue speakers.

  I, Bison

  When Gus returns to her home community for her cousin Angie’s wake, she discovers that her cousin’s consciousness was nonconsensually uploaded before her death. The community believes Angie cannot pass into the spirit realm while she still exists in digital form. Gus is tasked with freeing Angie.

  Unsettled

  To solve the global energy crisis, a technique is developed to induce deep hibernation in humans, with small teams rotating to ensure critical infrastructure continues running. A group of Indigenous youth who have volunteered to work one such shift ponder the implications of having the opportunity to rid Turtle Island of settler colonizers. Will settler anxiety be validated? Will the oppressed do unto the colonizer as has been done to them?

  5 (Hogue 2015; Vrooman 2013). The nêhiyaw-pwat, also known as the Iron Confederacy, or Iron Alliance, was a political and military alliance among Cree, Saulteaux, Nakoda, Métis, and Iroquois (who had moved into the west) during the height of the fur trade. The nêhiyaw-pwat acted as a barrier to US and Canadian expansion until the genocide of the buffalo and decline of the fur trade.

  BUFFALO BIRD

  18546

  She found herself on the shore of a vast freshwater lake that seemed to have swallowed up everything before her. The gunmetal sky met quicksilver at the horizon, confusing the eye, blurring boundaries or perhaps merely rejecting them. Instead of sand beneath her feet there was long prairie grass rasping quietly around her naked thighs, colourless and out of place, stretching behind her for an eternity. Thunder rolled above her head, deep and booming, filling her chest but failing to crack her apart. Reflexively she pawed at her side, seeking tobacco to light to bolster the strength of the Thunderers as they battled once again to prevent the world from being destroyed, but her hand found only her own cold flesh.

  Mixed with the fetid odour of silt and vegetative rot was the sharp tang of blood, and under it a hint of the unintended intimacy of fluids from deep within the body; it came in waves, carried somehow in the absence of wind, a miasma that filled her nostrils, infusing itself into her skin and hair. Death was coming, and she felt fear bubbling up inside her, weakening her control, coursing in painful jolts through limbs that did not want to obey.

  There was a dark spot in that heavy sky. No, she realized, it was touching the waters of the lake. A slow fog appeared there, where the water met the sky, rolling forward, towering like a fort wall built to enclose the world, as though it were consuming air and liquid both, blocking out everything but that tiny black figure.

  The Thunderers continued to make their presence known, a steady reverberation now more felt than heard. Instead of comfort, she felt it was a warning. Perhaps this time they would not be able to protect her People. She realized she could not move, not even to blink, helplessly watching that black figure cross the lake at an impossible speed. There was bile in the back of her throat, and a terrible familiarity. She wanted to turn and run; she wanted to vomit. She felt a terror so complete it seemed to liquefy her insides. As though outside of herself, she could hear her own strangled whimpers. The figure was only a few canoe lengths away now; that wall of mist had eaten the world, leaving only a small semicircle of smooth slate against the shore.

  Cowled in thick black wool robes, the being that glided toward her did not quite touch the water; its face and shape were obscured, and it was difficult to gauge its size. It seemed distorted somehow, as though viewed at the bottom of a shallow stream. Inexplicably, she smelled smoke and heard a high-pitched howling.

  With a sudden disorienting wrench her perspective flipped: the figure was not coming toward her—she was falling toward it, cold wind howling past her ears. Spasming in shock, she finally regained control of her muscles, shooting her arms in front of her to protect her head as she fell. At that moment, thunder split the world.

  Her eyes flew open in the near-complete darkness, the full-body convulsion that was her rejection of impact with that cowled figure echoing in her muscles. There was something wrong with her hands: the fingers fused together, hardening; the muscles in her arms twisted, pulling away from bone. She struggled against the pain, refusing the change.

  Angelique lay on her pallet, worn buffalo hide kicked off during her night terrors, gradually perceiving the cold in her extremities, despite having slept in wool pants and a long linen shirt, and panting while her heart slowed and her limbs relaxed into familiar forms. Her vision adjusted to the faint reddish glow from the dying embers in the clay oven.7

  A bright flash seared her eyes through the rawhide windows and growing chinks in the clay and buffalo-hair mixture cemented onto the exterior of the logs of her cabin, gone before she’d registered it, but leaving its imprint throbbing at the back of her skull.8 Thunder again ripped the sky asunder almost simultaneously, and the prairie heavens let loose a torrential downpour that began battering the sod roof.

  The door rattled fit to be torn from its rawhide thongs—her heart leaped once again into her throat. With the strange clarity of memories retrieved from the edge of consciousness, she realized that someone had been pounding at her door for some time now. She pulled the buffalo robe up over her head, a ridiculous attempt to pretend absence, like a child hiding during a telling of the Rolling Head story, fear still a shameful tang in her mouth.9 She bit her own lip in anger at herself. The pain galvanized her to stand, wrapping the hide around herself and groggily feeling her way across the open, packed-earth floor to the door.

  She reached the door as it endured another thrashing from whatever was on the other side. The rain so occupied the soundscape that she was barely able to make out muffled shouting. She bit her lip again, the pain a goad. It had been a dream—there was no cowled monster waiting for her, though she couldn’t imagine what else would be out in this weather. Unwrapping the long rawhide strap that kept the plank door secured, she was knocked back a step as a bulky shadow slammed their fist into the wood and became unbalanced by the lack of resistance, nearly falling across the threshold. Something clattered to the ground, evoking a string of curses from the intruder.

  “Cyprien?” Finding her balance, she pushed him aside none too gently and struggled with the door, whipped by wind and rain before manag
ing to force it closed again against the nearly horizontal sheets of rain.

  “I dropped my lantern. Don’t move, let me find it.” His voice was raised so she could hear him over the bedlam outside. She acquiesced and waited for him to bump around, searching for the small metal cage on the floor. The faint glow from her oven did not reach that far, but when he crossed in front of it, blotting out even that tiny illumination, she shivered; the fading stamp of dream fear lingered enough to make the darkness feel cloying.

  “What are you doing here?” she finally thought to ask. Realizing he may not have heard her over the din of the storm, she raised her voice. “Wait, did you ride? Is our auntie’s horse out there?!”

  “No, no, I walked.”

  A greasy yellow flame flared up, casting huge twisted shadows before quieting into a steady glow. She jumped. Cyprien was all the way across the room, by the oven. He’d fished out a piece of bison tallow wrapped around a braided grass wick from his fire bag and stuck it on the spine meant for fancy wax candles, which they usually didn’t have, then lit it with a coal scooped quickly from the hearth. In the dim light she could see what a sorry state he was in, soaked to the bone and shivering. He left the lantern perched on the oven.