Buffalo Is the New Buffalo

Vowel's book melds the past with the future, the known with the unknown. Vowel wants to preserve ancestral ways, protecting them and ensuring their survival for future generations. She extends the future of Metis people, considering what it might be like while taking readers on fantastical journeys. -Edmonton Journal

Meticulously researched and thoughtfully created, these stories inform as well as entertain, engage as well as challenge. Rich in place, culture, history, and language, Vowel has offered a series of mamahtawacimowina, miraculous stories, that will undoubtedly endure as we head into the future, just like the powerful characters that live within these pages. -David A. Robertson (Norway House Cree Nation), author of When We Were Alone and On the Trapline

Buffalo is the New Buffalo is a deeply important collection of stories that masterfully weaves our history, our language, and our kinship systems with present-day realties while challenging colonial assertions. The work erases the imposition of gender binaries and re-establishes matriarchy in the past as if it was never removed, as if the buffalo were not wiped out. It empoweringly erases the erasure of our people and reminds us we can create a new future. Meticoulously researched, the stories present an alternate reality for Metis people while maintaining and strengthening what we would consider to be the important parts of ourselves, such as our Metis nehiyawak beliefs and knowledge of the world and our place in it. It's a deeply felt work of love for our people and for the babies to come, one that helped me to see things in a new light and shifted my thinking, as only a great work of art can do. -Christi Belcourt (manitow-sakahikan apihtawikosisan / Lac Ste. Anne Metis), visual artist

Indigenous visionaries imagining Indigenous futures: this deeply held and age-old principle is powerfully realized in this extraordinary new collection that speaks to our time, as well as others. In Buffalo Is the New Buffalo, Chelsea Vowel takes land, kinship, and community seriously - not simply as metaphors or motifs, but as profound and motivating values for imagining restorative Metis futures beyond the limitations of the settler colonial imaginary. These remarkable stories of constellated Metis kinship across space and time are haunting, hilarious, harrowing, and healing in equal measure; the characters are alive, complicated, and compelling, and Vowel's work insists on the vibrant now, then, and tomorrow of Indigenous possibility. The stories will linger with you long after you finish the book, in all the very best ways. I can't recommend this book highly enough. -Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

These eight Metis Futurism short stories defy genre by blending the past, present, and future to create liberating possibilities for Metis and Indigenous futures where Indigenous peoples are very much present. -Buzzfeed News

Doing speculative and science fiction through a Metis framework, Chelsea Vowel challenges, entertains and becomes the voice of Indigenous futurism. -Ms. Magazine

By focusing not only on imagined futures and pasts, but on the here and now as well - the act and process of writing - Vowel explores the possibilities of Metis and Indigenous futurism, and the ways in which speculative fiction can shape how we live in the world today. -Book Riot