Iniskim

 

Narrative Short (2018)  Thunderheart Films

Shot on the real-life Blackfeet buffalo drive and inspired by a true story, Iniskim follows a young girl’s journey from trauma to recovery.  By reconnecting with the ancient power of the buffalo and the wisdom of her culture, she makes a discovery that will change her life forever.

Iniskim was nominated for three Emmy awards and won an Emmy for Photography. 

Iniskim was made possible in part by the Big Sky Film Grant.

Buffalo are our relatives and teachers, new documentary film explores

 “These ribstones reconnect us to our kinship with our families and to Buffalo,” Hubbard explains as the camera’s gaze gently details the texture and colours of the stone.  “We sang to it, and, for a moment, we thought it sang back.” 

UPDATE:

Singing Back the Buffalo, the new feature length documentary from award-winning Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard, will have its broadcast premiere March 6 at 9 p.m. (9:30 NT) on The Nature of Things on CBC TV and CBC Gem.

Singing Back the Buffalo follows Indigenous visionaries and communities who are rematriating the buffalo back to the lands they once defined.

Original Buffalo Spirit Story

By Odette Auger, Windspeaker’s Buffalo Spirit Reporter

Award-winning documentarian and Buffalo advocate Tasha Hubbard will premiere her feature-length film Singing Back the Buffalo at the 2024 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana.

The film follows the work of the people, organizations and communities working together to renew and restore Buffalo to the territories where they once roamed free.

Hubbard’s documentary looks at the Buffalo Treaty, first signed between eight First Nations in 2014, and how it is expanding and changing the Buffalo landscape. The film folds in Elder stories and prophecies to demonstrate how Buffalo people, human people and the health of the land are intrinsically linked.

She explains the parallels between the impacts of the colonial genocide on the Buffalo relatives, the slaughter of which led to their near extinction, and the lost independence of Indigenous Nations, stripped of their movement and agency through government policy and legislation.

“Cree Elders spoke of how Indigenous people, confined to our reserves, resemble the state of the Buffalo. Both of us behind fences and unable to move across our lands. We are slowly tearing these fences down through resistance and undoing the impacts of colonization,” Hubbard says in the film.

“While the depletion of the Buffalo has been understood as a contributing factor in the subjugation of plains Indigenous people, what has had less attention is the attack on the integral relationship between the Buffalo and Indigenous people,” Hubbard says.

Dr. Leroy Little Bear, a scholar from the Blood Tribe, and driver of the Buffalo Treaty, speaks with Harry Barnes, chairperson of the Blackfeet Reservation on the day Buffalo returned to that Nation's territory. From the film Singing Back the Buffalo.

The wise ones remember, says Hubbard in Singing Back the Buffalo, that First Nations people stopped singing when the Buffalo were gone.

Hubbard is a writer, filmmaker and associate professor at the University of Alberta and did her Ph.D on Buffalo consciousness.