Intervening in Settler Colonial Genocide: Restoring Métis Buffalo Kinship Memory in Amanda Strong's Four Faces of the Moon

The Buffalo (Paskwâw Mostos/Mashkode Bizhiki) sustained our ancestors for 20,000 years or more. … Their genocide coincided with our own. Their lands were stolen at the same time ours were. … I dream of seeing 60,000 buffalo roaming free again across Turtle Island. … We are so deeply connected to this nation; we have stories and ceremonies with and about them. They taught us medicines. We dream of them still.

—Christi Belcourt, "The Buffalo Will Always Be Our Education"

Michif artist Amanda Strong's stop-motion animation film, Four Faces of the Moon, makes a vital contribution to conversations on the reemergence of buffalo kinship teachings evoked in the Plains Cree and Métis-centered scholarship and art practices of Tasha Hubbard and Christi Belcourt. As Hubbard explains, revitalization of buffalo kinship teachings seen in contemporary Indigenous literatures and multimedia art practices works in tandem with the actual restoration of buffalo herds in the prairie grasslands and intergenerational Indigenous resurgence ("'The Buffaloes Are Gone' or 'Return: Buffalo'?" 76). Métis artist Christi Belcourt's luminescent buffalo paintings further honor the integral place of reanimated buffalo kinship teachings for contemporary Indigenous peoples.¹ Belcourt foregrounds the cultural, spiritual, and ecological significance of the buffalo for the Métis peoples of Lac St. Anne:

"We have songs for the buffalo, as well as buffalo ceremonies. They hold the doorway in our sacred lodges. We tell creation stories of them. Our lives were lived on the land with buffalo and entirely attuned to the rhythms of that shared earth. We travelled freely, as they did. My ancestors survived, and I am alive today, because of them."

("A Letter" 10)

Like Belcourt, Amanda Strong's visual storywork honors the deep kinship connections of her Métis and buffalo ancestors. Her visual storywork further contributes to the renewal of broadly conceived relational ethics taught through the Cree concept of Wahkohtowin, called for in the work of Métis scholar Jennifer Adese ("Spirit Gifting" 50, 53).

In Four Faces of the Moon through the device of time travel, Amanda Strong's protagonist-avatar, Spotted Fawn, journeys back across six generations of her ancestors' lived history to renew intergenerational Michif cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and ecological memory. The film's dedication introduces the first narrative voice: "I am Gidagakoons (Spotted Fawn)." This thus refers to the young adult protagonist of the film as Spotted Fawn, who manifests in both deer and human form in the first two sequences of the film. Gidagakoons simultaneously refers to the Indigenous name Strong has been gifted with, the name of her production studio, and the name of her character avatar within Four Faces. Further, Spotted Fawn's shapeshifting capacity between deer and human forms points to Michif teachings on reciprocal human-animal kinship (Adese, "Spirit Gifting" 53).

Though I strategically foregrounded Michif resurgence in my opening, Strong's central interventions in Four Faces are twofold. Through Spotted Fawn's journey into her ancestral story, Strong initiates a difficult reckoning with intersecting buffalo and starvation genocides experienced by Plains Indigenous peoples, revealing complex layers of settler colonial genocide (Hubbard, "Buffalo Genocide"; Daschuk, Starblanket, Palmeter). In concert with Tasha Hubbard's work on buffalo genocide, Strong contributes to the turn toward decolonial genocide studies that calls for more comprehensive engagement with the process of protracted settler colonial genocide. For Hubbard and Strong, this includes attention to the intersecting fates of more-than-human kin and Indigenous peoples. Strong counterbalances reckoning with genocidal losses and impacts by calling forth intergenerational Michif resurgence through collaborative, multimedia, handmade art practices that revitalize buffalo kinship memory. Doing so imaginatively reclaims place-based, cultural-spiritual-ecological-material Michif sovereignty in the Prairie grasslands. Strong's buffalo kinship memorywork in Four Faces of the Moon further resonates with the repatriation work of Plains Indigenous peoples like Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot) who have instigated the process of bringing back wild buffalo herds to the prairie grasslands, as signified by an intranational Buffalo Treaty signed in 2014 and 2015.²

As M...