Singing Back the Buffalo

As a Cree girl growing up on the prairies in Saskatchewan, Hubbard would imagine herds of buffalo roaming vast open plains on which she lived. Hundreds of years ago, it was common for big herds to stretch out as far as the eye could see and take two days to pass by. Three decades later, after massive campaigns of deliberate slaughter, there were as little as 250 buffalo left from the over 60 million that moved across the continent. The impact on Indigenous plains nations, who had depended on their relative, the buffalo, for physical and spiritual sustenance, was disastrous. The buffalo’s fate forced Indigenous Peoples, now starving, into confinement on the reserves. For over a century, neither have been free to walk the lands for which Indigenous Peoples have cared for millennia. SINGING BACK THE BUFFALO follows Indigenous visionaries and communities across the northern plains who are rematriating the buffalo to the heart of the lands they once defined, signaling a turning point for Indigenous nations, the ecosystem, and all our collective survival.