Buffalo Is the New Buffalo

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.

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.

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 colo

These explorations expand this work beyond creative writing; I am “imagining otherwise” in order find a way to “act otherwise” (Voth 2018).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.