Sask. Métis village grapples with child abductions, North-West Rebellion

Major events and big personalities can overshadow the lives of ordinary people, but even the youngest and seemingly least important members of a society can help shape communities.

In Treat Them as Buffalo, Blair Palmer Yoxall has portrayed various characters in a Métis village in 1885 Saskatchewan through the life of a 12-year-old boy named Nikosis (Niko) Eriksen and his interactions with relatives and friends in the context of a community crisis and Louis Riel’s rebellion.

Yoxall is an Alberta Métis writer and poet with a master of arts in English in Indigenous literature and westerns. His fiction has won a range of prizes and landed on a number of short lists. His prose and poetry pieces have appeared in Glass Buffalo, the Fiddlehead and Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology. Treat Them as Buffalo is his first novel.

The novel follows Nikosis (Cree for “my son”) as he attempts to sort out the events occurring in his home community, Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, Sask., in 1885. Several boys, including Niko’s cousin, have disappeared from the town, with some reappearing mutilated or dead. Niko’s mother, grandmother and aunt try to protect him, while other women in the community attempt to find their missing sons and grandsons. Meanwhile, a fierce fighting woman named Kate McCannon seeks to resolve the situation, offering to help with the search and rescue operations.

Suspicion falls on various members of the community as more boys disappear and later, Niko’s home is set on fire and burns to the ground. Niko and the other characters are unsure who to trust; it seems even close relatives are capable of violence against people they are meant to protect.

The issue of trust runs through Treat Them As Buffalo as Niko struggles to determine who is really trying to help and who wishes him harm. A practical demonstration of trust from one of Niko’s relatives helps underscore the idea.

Family ties are important in the story, especially when Niko worries about his missing cousin, Guillaume. But Niko soon realizes that even his closest relatives can betray him. While his relatives and others in the community try to keep him out of danger, he is drawn into a violent struggle between kidnappers and the rescuers who are trying to return the boys to their homes. The story ends with the situation still only partially resolved.

Treat Them as Buffalo is a vivid portrayal of life in 1880s Saskatchewan, including the interactions between the Métis and their non-Indigenous neighbours. The narrator includes details about of the history of Louis Riel and the formation of Manitoba as a background to explain the tensions in his community and how Riel fits within the story. Meanwhile, Yoxall gives vivid characterizations of the people around Riel, including a Métis man torn between working in the police force to earn money for his family and being loyal to the community, which distrusted the authorities.

Treat Them as Buffalo is a compelling but often disturbing novel of life in Canada during the tumultuous years of the North-West Rebellion of 1885 and the Battle of Batoche. The young narrator sometimes uses invented vocabulary such as “ginormoungous” and “outhaled” (exhaled), which lend authenticity to the story. The text also includes many vivid but oddly punctuated terms to evoked sounds, such as “slurrp!ed.”

Other than some of these oddities and the violence that dominates the last few chapters, the book flows well, offering insight into local life in the last decades of the 19th century. Yoxall includes a vocabulary list of Cree terms as well as notes on Métis history and the terminology commonly used in the 1880s.

Yoxall has penned an exciting and insightful debut, offering a riveting window into Métis and Indigenous culture in the 19th-century Prairies.

Susan Huebert is a Winnipeg writer and pet sitter.