EAGERLY ANTICIPATED documentaries by Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard and Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson are finally being released this spring. Hubbard and Jackson take Indigenous experts as their subjects, one focusing on the conservation of buffalo in North America and the other focusing on star lore and astronomy. Both films feel urgent, capturing revitalized knowledge before it’s too late.
Singing Back the Buffalo (2024) combines two of Hubbard’s passions, film and buffalo. Having directed documentaries since 2004, with such highly regarded films as Two Worlds Colliding (2004), Birth of a Family (2017), and nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (2019), Hubbard has now turned her lens to efforts of Indigenous communities in North America to re-introduce buffalo to its former lands.
Two Worlds Colliding was in the edit stage when Hubbard went to a wedding in Regina, and, at the reception, author Maria Campbell asked her if she wanted to come see something special. It was a recently uncovered rib stone (a stone carved into the shape of a buffalo’s rib cage).
