Buffalo deserve an epic film about their history — so I decided to give it to them

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This Hot Docs 2024 edition by director Tasha Hubbard focuses on her film Singing Back The Buffalo.

Our relative, Buffalo, deserves an epic film. Singing Back the Buffalo combines my academic work with my goal to tell compelling Indigenous stories in a visual and connective way. Interwoven and layered throughout the film are key themes: Buffalo kinship; genocide; confinement; women and Buffalo; and finally, return, or rematriating Buffalo to their ancestral lands. I wanted to tell the history of Buffalo and Indigenous people from a completely Indigenous perspective, a goal of mine for over 20 years. 

In 2003, I was invited by some elders to visit "something special" outside of Regina. It was a Buffalo ribstone, a large stone in the shape of a buffalo with a delineated spine and ribs. There was a large medicine bowl by the buffalo's head. 

Visiting this sacred stone caused a significant shift in the direction of my life. I began to constantly reflect on what it had meant to Indigenous peoples and the land to lose this integral keystone species, to lose our benevolent relative with whom we had been in reciprocity for millennia. I switched the focus of my master's thesis project to Buffalo and decided that one day I would make a film about them.

Several years later, I was working on my PhD on how Indigenous creative expression shows the cycles of our relationship with Buffalo. My aunt found out what my topic was and told me that I needed to meet Narcisse Blood. "He loves Buffalo as much as you do," were her words, and so I reached out to the Blackfoot scholar-historian-filmmaker.

Narcisse told me that he had been waiting to hear from me, and we found a location to meet. We sat and talked about our connection to Buffalo for hours. I told him about my goal to make a film, and in 2014, we agreed it was time to start on a collaboration that would focus on the plains buffalo.

Tragically, he passed away in a terrible car accident in early 2015. A deep grief descended on everyone who knew him, as his influence was felt in many directions. I was told that he would want me to continue to do the film, but I wanted to wait. 

Later that year, I met Leroy Little Bear and Amethyst First Rider, and a few months after that, Martin and Pam Heavy Head — all elders and knowledge-holders from Blood Tribe, with Pam originally from Maskwacis. I began working to support the Buffalo Treaty, a compact signed between Indigenous nations to agree to support one another to return Buffalo to our lands and back into our everyday lives. My academic work continues to be in support of Buffalo, as I had intended from the start.

In 2016, I began to develop the film once again, and I was invited to film a historic transfer of Buffalo whose ancestors were orphan calves saved in the late 19th century. They were about to be returned from Elk Island National Park to their original territory on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. It was the longest shooting day: we were up at 4 a.m., ready to film at 5 a.m., and finished at nightfall with 87 buffalo calves safely across the Canada–U.S. border and under the care of the Blackfeet. 

I began to work on the treatment, thinking this was going to be the next four years of my life. Then Gerald Stanley shot and killed Colten Boushie. I felt deeply obligated to make nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up in response. 

My films, like We Will Stand Up, direct a lens on some of the most urgent and timely issues for Indigenous peoples in Canada: police violence, the child removal system and the deep systemic racism that impacts our children's lives. The cumulative emotional impact of making them led my traditionally adoptive father to advise me that it was time to make a different kind of film. I woke up one morning at 5 a.m., two months into the pandemic caused by the depletion of global natural ecosystems, with a sense of urgency that it was time to return to the Buffalo film.  

Singing Back the Buffalo is the film that I had been dreaming of making since that first visit to the Buffalo stone. I worked with my longtime producer Bonnie Thompson and DP/producer George Hupka. I always wanted to work with producer Jason Ryle, and he became as fascinated with Buffalo as the rest of us. We worked with a combination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous crew, including a wildlife cinematography team. 

I have been fortunate to spend hours observing Buffalo, especially in Grasslands National Park, and I want people to have a sense of how these beautiful beings live and act in their kinship groups: as families and communities.

Our crew followed the path of the buffalo, especially during the spring, summer and fall of 2022. We moved back and forth across the border, and were welcomed into nations and reservations across the Northern Plains. The profound beauty of these lands was always apparent, but I would always imagine the big herds moving across the lands, and it struck me that as much as we miss the buffalo, the land misses them just as much. Buffalo's role in land health is integral in this time of climate change.

This was especially apparent on my trip to Banff National Park with four other Indigenous women. We, along with two Indigenous women crew members and two women with extensive backcountry experience, including our associate producer Marie-Eve Marchand, walked over 100 kilometres to visit the herd. It was my second time attempting to see it, and our efforts were rewarded: the buffalo herd matriarchs responded to our songs and stayed with us almost the entire trip. Banff biologists told us they are mapping the way the buffalo are rejuvenating the spaces they move through.

Leroy talks about the deep time relationship we have with Buffalo — that they have been here longer than we have, and thus hold wisdom that we have learned from and must continue to learn from. His concept of Buffalo consciousness has profoundly influenced my academic work and now it is the nucleus for the film, which focuses on stories from Indigenous people and communities who love Buffalo and have dedicated their lives to them.

I now realize that this film is a continuation of my previous work. Singing Back the Buffalo is inherently about justice; the injustice that was done to Buffalo; and how we can work together to restore their rightful place on their territory. Buffalo bring balance, and this film — made with beauty and hope in mind — brought balance back into my life.

Singing Back The Buffalo screens at Hot Docs 2024 on April 26th and 29th. More information is available by clicking here.