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Singing Back the Buffalo follows Indigenous visionaries, scientists and communities who are rematriating the buffalo to the heart of the North American plains they once defined, signaling a turning point for Indigenous nations, the ecosystem, and all our collective survival.
As a girl growing up on the prairies in Saskatchewan, award-winning Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard (nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up) would imagine herds of buffalo roaming vast open plains on which she lived. 165 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 50 million that moved across the continent. The impact on Indigenous plains nations, who had depended on the buffalo for food, shelter, 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 takes viewers on an epic journey that has not yet been told on screen, exploring concepts of buffalo consciousness, buffalo personhood, and relationships between buffalo and Indigenous Peoples. Richly visualized and deeply uplifting, Singing Back the Buffalo is an epic reimagining of North America through the lens of buffalo consciousness and a potent dream of what is within our grasp. After their dark recent history of almost extinction, and in this time of immense environmental degradation and global uncertainty, the buffalo can lead us to a better tomorrow.
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