tânisi kiyawâw, I’m thrilled to share with you the book announcement for my upcoming collection of short stories Buffalo is the New Buffalo! You can pre-order it here: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/B/Buffalo-Is-the-New-Buffalo.

It’s been awesome working with Arsenal Pulp Press on this. I deeply appreciate their patience as my life fell to pieces over the course of this pandemic. Having this project to work on kept me optimistic, projecting us far into the future, and sometimes far into the past, to imagine and reimagine Indigenous presence and possibilities. It’s my deepest hope that you fall in love with these stories, and that they inspire to you “imagine otherwise”.

So many thanks to Christi Belcourt for allowing her work, “Offerings to Save the World” to grace the cover of this collection. Ever since I first saw that painting, I’ve been in love with it, and I often had it in front of me while I wrote. (I have a print, not the original!) It remains endlessly inspiring.

Description

Powerful stories of “Metis 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 Metis 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 “Metis futurism” explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Metis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.