Mother Jones illustration; Algonquin Books; Blaire Russell
The traditional western format has long featured the “Cowboys vs. Indians” archetype. These are often tales of good vs. evil, where a gun-slinging cowboy leaves a trail of dead, “savage” Indians in his wake as he traverses the wild American West. But what if the cowboys were also Indians? This is the question that Métis writer, Blair Palmer Yoxall, ponders in his debut novel, Treat Them as Buffalo, out this week.
Through the eyes of a 12-year-old Métis boy named Niko, Yoxall tells the story of the Northwest Resistance of 1885, when the Métis and some First Nations peoples led an armed rebellion against the Canadian government. Set in the fictional town of Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, the events of the Northwest Resistance are the backdrop for young Niko’s world, where he and his cousin play buffalo hunters. But when his cousin and other young boys start to go missing, one at a time, a string of violence destroys Niko’s understanding of his world, his family, and himself.
As the police show little interest in investigating the boys’ disappearance, a coalition of Métis women in Niko’s community takes on the task of finding them. They set up camp near a remote lake and hide out from the kidnappers. There, the women organize daily and nightly search parties, scouring the area for the abducted boys and protecting those still in their care. Riding horses and armed with guns, the women perform patrols and devise plans to save the captured boys and apprehend their kidnappers. In Treat Them as Buffalo, Yoxall creates a community where tenderness and mutual care abound, even amid tragedy and high tensions.
Yoxall drew his inspiration from traditional western novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing, but he resented how they portrayed Indigenous people—as scalped, killed, raped, or stupid. He wondered, “What’s the fucking point of this other than watching myself die?” as he put it in our interview. From that question came Treat Them as Buffalo, which Yoxall calls an “anti-western,” working against the stereotypes that have saturated the genre.
Ahead of the publication of his novel, I spoke to Yoxall about Indigenous cowboys, building community, and writing the Métis experience. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk to me about what led you to write this story. I know you’re Métis yourself, so were there family histories or personal stories that inspired you?
Growing up, I loved westerns because the land was familiar and the people were familiar. I wanted to capture that feeling of being in awe with westerns, but also by being angry. I wanted to write something that showed Indigenous people being powerful and us winning, and to represent something that felt more authentic to my family and to where my family’s from. I just wanted to write something where we could be proud of ourselves. We could bring our own perspective to history. The Métis Nation didn’t win our conflict with Canada. We’re talked a lot about, but we’re not talked to a lot, and over the years, that means that we’ve lost a lot of our own histories, and I wanted to bring that back.
Yeah, you weave a lot of Métis history and culture into the story. How are you able to take creative liberties as a fiction writer within the constraints of actual historical fact?
The constraints of history and geography—that’s not limiting. I have all this structure to work with and around, and it’s like a fun house that I get to play in. I’m also working with a part of history that is mythologized in Canada, but not very well understood, even among Métis people. But this history did affect Indigenous people all across the northern plains. When you’re reading, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s real and what’s not and what came out of my mind and what came out of a newspaper. I really like that sense of “Holy shit, did all of this potentially happen?” So for me, working with history was so much fun because I knew the consequences. I knew what the outcomes were going to be, but I had no idea what the experience was in reaching those outcomes. I really wanted to recreate that sense of experiencing history as it’s happening.
I found myself thinking about the characters when I wasn’t reading, especially the protagonist Niko, who is 12 years old and being thrust into adulthood. It’s heartwrenching to watch him grapple with this kind of colonial violence and also family secrets. Why take a 12-year-old’s point of view?
I wanted readers to take the agency of children seriously and take their experiences seriously, and to trust that they are the experts in their own lives. Kids are gonna have a crazy world exposed to them—whether you want it to happen or not—especially during these colonial projects. I wanted us as readers to kind of struggle with that agency and to demonstrate that kids are people too. We, as Indigenous people, have had our families being broken up from Indian Residential schooling, and here in Canada, we did have sterilization campaigns for Indigenous women. So I really wanted to put the power of parenthood back in our own hands, but I also wanted childhood to be taken as a serious aspect of life.
I’d love to talk more about the community that you’ve built. Does it feel reflective of the communities that your family comes from?
One of the super important aspects of the cowboy identity in the book is from my family—all those Indigenous people are also cowboys. So one of the things I wanted to demonstrate is that Indigenous people have complex enough cultures that we can have subcultures too—an Indigenous community could be a cowboy community. We’re not stereotypes. We’re not caricatures. We’re full human beings. We’re going to disagree with each other. In books, I want to demonstrate how important feeling safe and at home in your community is for building a sense of community and obligation. I wanted the characters to be diverse enough to really demonstrate the diversity that we have in our own cultures and our own communities. We’re not a monolith. Community is a very complex and complicated—but intensely restorative—aspect of identity and growing up. In the book, this community can only save itself by taking care of itself, by putting itself first, and being unapologetic about it. Niko could only be saved by his community.
What impressions do you hope readers come away with after finishing?
It sort of depends on who’s reading it. I just want us to be seen as human beings. One of the things that I struggle with as an Indigenous person is being reduced to a product of the land or an artifact of history. And I wanted to really demonstrate that we’re just as human as every other human being. I’m hoping that non-Indigenous readers have a more human understanding of how Indigenous people see each other and how we see our communities. Conversely, for other Indigenous readers, I just want us to feel seen and inspired. We can start claiming space without needing to re-traumatize ourselves. A story can be both joyful and difficult.