Hot Off the Shelf: Buffalo Is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel
[image description: The book cover for Buffalo Is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel. The background is an abstract painting of a blue tree that almost appears to be underwater. On each side of the tree, among the leaves, are two figures, both dressed in solid black with white stripes on their faces, arms, and ankles. The figures face each other; one sitting and one standing.]
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you’d like a copy for yourself, there’s an affiliate link at the bottom of the page.
This is a spoiler-free review, so read on with confidence.
I don’t get to say this often: I’ve NEVER read a book like this before. Not even close.
Where do I even begin with Buffalo Is the New Buffalo? This short story collection broke my brain in the best, most necessary way. First, some context from the synopsis:
Powerful stories of "Métis futurism" that envision a world without violence, capitalism, or colonization.
"Education is the new buffalo" is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, "Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?"Inspired by classic and contemporary speculative fiction, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo explores science fiction tropes through a Metis lens: a Two-Spirit rougarou (shapeshifter) in the nineteenth century tries to solve a murder in her community and joins the nehiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy) in order to successfully stop Canadian colonial expansion into the West. A Métis man is gored by a radioactive bison, gaining super strength, but losing the ability to be remembered by anyone not related to him by blood. Nanites babble to babies in Cree, virtual reality teaches transformation, foxes take human form and wreak havoc on hearts, buffalo roam free, and beings grapple with the thorny problem of healing from colonialism.
Indigenous futurisms seek to discover the impact of colonization, remove its psychological baggage, and recover ancestral traditions. These eight short stories of "Métis futurism" explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Métis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.
I have to confess, I’d never heard of the Métis people before an advance copy of this book showed up at my house. So I googled it: a Métis person is of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry; specifically, those descended from Indigenous folks in western Canada and French fur traders.
I was more familiar with the term “futurism.” A couple of years ago I went to a book event at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters where Eve L. Ewing was reading from her poetry book, Electric Arches. Eve is a Black woman and said Afrofuturism was one of the main themes of the collection. When asked what Afrofuturism meant, she said, “It’s basically the idea that Black people will exist in the future.” It sounds simple on the surface but when you consider the many-headed hydra that is racism, the idea that Black people will exist in the future is a radical and necessary one. Especially when there are white murderers carrying out mass shootings in Black neighbors, like the supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York.
So I applied the same definition to Métis futurism. Although Canada seems to have a lot more of its ills figured out than the U.S., like the U.S., it too has committed genocide, involuntary removal, family separation, violent forced assimilation, broken treaties and other heinous crimes against its Indigenous peoples, Métis and otherwise. Here again, the idea that this population exists in the future is a radical and necessary one.
Perhaps all this is common knowledge to Canadians (I hope so) since Vowel is Canadian and the publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press is based in Canada. But public school history classes in the States didn’t teach me shit about our friendly neighbor to the north, so much of what I learned in this book I was hearing for the first time. So when I say this book broke my brain in the best way, I mean to say that my personal learning curve was steep, but I’m glad I stuck with it.
What I found incredibly helpful is that the first 22 pages of the book help orient the reader to the upcoming stories. Vowel explains the significance of the title, gives a brief synopsis of each of the eight short stories, discusses how her identity inspired the stories, and shares a short history of settler colonialism. Vowel also gives an overview of the many different types of Indigenous storytelling, many of which her own stories follow. Vowel is an academic, though she’s able to apply the complex concepts she’s using to a general reading audience.
Although some might argue that including all these explanations is pandering to a white audience, I for one appreciated it. I also don’t like the assumption that all subjugated people know or are able to access the academic dissections of their subjugation. There is power in knowing one’s history and that’s why people in power want to erase, rewrite, or otherwise hide the history of the wrongs they’ve done to others from the descendants of their victims. (We see this today in the U.S. with legislators fighting the teaching of critical race theory, the anger over the removal of confederate statues, and Texas educators wanting to change the teaching of enslavement to being “involuntary relocation” instead.)
This is to say that I would chafe at the argument that Vowel is writing for a white audience just because she is generous enough with her knowledge so as to make it accessible to more people, including her own. Beyond the introduction and preface, Vowel takes it a step further and offers footnotes throughout the stories. The reader who doesn’t need the footnotes is able to skip over them while those who do can briefly glance toward the bottom of the page to avoid confusion. Though the short stories are fiction, they are meticulously researched and many of the footnotes explain Métis customs and the meaning of words in the Cree language.
After each short story, there are a couple of pages where Vowel walks the reader through her writing process, outlining the decisions she made for each story. This again makes the stories even more accessible. I liken these explorations at the end of each story to discussions with my book club. Often, we’ll each come to a book club meeting thinking the book we read was pretty good or just okay, but after hearing everyone else’s observations, we appreciate the book so much more. I’m a firm believer that understanding aids appreciation.
Out of the eight short stories, I especially liked “Michif Man,” “Dirty Wings,” “Maggie Sue,” “A Lodge Within Her Mind,” and “Unsettled.” As in nearly every instance of me reading a collection of short stories, I thought some were stronger than others. What I look for is how all the stories work together in concert and whether the overall experience of reading the collection was enjoyable. All the stories in Buffalo Is the New Buffalo work well together, traveling from past to present to future, and most of them were truly excellent.
I will admit that it did take me longer to read this collection than most books of a similar size because I had to slow down to make sure I was understanding everything Vowel wanted me to understand. Even with her generous explanations, I sometimes wondered if I was too ignorant to appreciate her book fully. And as helpful as the footnotes were, they were also at times distracting. In the first story, "Buffalo Bird” in particular, I kept having to reread passages and try to figure out how old the protagonist was at that point since the story isn’t told linearly and try to recall the definitions of the many new words (in the Cree language) that she introduces the reader to. It was a little like being thrown into the deep end and being told to swim.
But after that trial by fire, the rest of the stories become easier to understand because of the groundwork that’s been laid in that first story. I honestly don’t know what more Vowel could have done to make the book more accessible, hence why I wondered if I was just too stupid to appreciate it fully.
The parts I was able to understand I really liked and I think it’s a worthwhile book, especially for anyone who wants to understand Indigenous struggles through speculative fiction. Books like Buffalo Is the New Buffalo––and the futurism genre is a whole––are vital for Indigenous literature because so often the settler colonialist mentality that’s pushed on society as a whole throughout North America is that Native Americans are a “relic of the past” when in actuality, they’re a living, breathing community that still exists today and they deserve everyone respect and support.
If this book sounds good to you, and I hope it does, I’d appreciate it if you’d buy your copy through my Bookshop link below. Doing so supports this blog and Bookshop is an Amazon alternative that supports indie bookstores, so it’s a win-win for everyone.
