Tasha Hubbard has devoted her academic career to studying the relationship between the buffalo and Great Plains Indigenous people.
Her doctoral dissertation was entitled “The Call of the Buffalo: Exploring Kinship with the Buffalo in Indigenous Creative Expression.” Now, the professor in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Native Studies and accomplished filmmaker is releasing a new film on the subject called Singing Back the Buffalo.
Produced with Blackfoot Elder Leroy Little Bear of the University of Lethbridge, the film captures a growing movement to repair the lost connection between the buffalo and Indigenous people — a bond that existed for millennia before it was severed by colonialism and decimated buffalo populations.
Central to the theme of Singing Back the Buffalo is the concept of “buffalo consciousness,” a term borrowed by Hubbard from Little Bear to describe the deep ties between Indigenous people and an animal that once covered the North American grasslands.
The film features the 2014 Buffalo Treaty, first signed at the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and now including signatories from almost 50 North American tribes and nations. The treaty aims to “honor, recognize, and revitalize the time immemorial relationship we have with the buffalo” and to recognize the animal as “an important part of the ecological system.”
“The grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem in the world because of industrial agriculture,” says Hubbard. “Bringing back the buffalo revitalizes plant and animal life, increasing biodiversity.”
Now screening at theatres in Canada and the United States, Singing Back the Buffalo will appear at Metro Cinema in Edmonton on Sept. 14, 15 and 18. An edited version of the film will be broadcast on CBC’s The Nature of Things sometime in early 2025, one of the first Indigenous-directed episodes to air on the program.