Buffalo Is the New Buffalo

Your intersectional score was a like a reverse credit score; the higher the number, the greater financial risk you were to global stability, were you to be compensated for your suffering.

When rich people write up their weird ideas it doesn’t get called a manifesto; instead it was his “vision for the future” He was lauded for his “sacrifice” even though there were rumours that the wife hadn’t actually consented to the procedure, and of course, his investment portfolio meant they’d wake up the richest people on earth.

And what were they to one another? Five strangers, now co-workers, who were also roommates and among a tiny percentage of humans left awake on Earth.

A whole industry arose to protect the empty properties of those who were able to go into hibernation; heaven forfend that the unhoused have any opportunity to change their situation.

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 the

That’s the thing about fiction: it allows us to imagine otherwise, and sometimes what we are imagining isn’t pretty, or even something we’d ever want to see happen in real life. We can write things that seem really negative, but that contain so much hope, it cannot be contained.

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.

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.

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.