Description
Blair Palmer Yoxall (he/him/his) is a writer and poet. His fiction has won the Striking Prose competition and the James Patrick Folinsbee prize in English and been shortlisted for the Norma Epstein Foundation Award and an Indigenous Voices Award. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Glass Buffalo, The Fiddlehead and Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology. Yoxall is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and of Métis and settler parentage. He holds an MA in English in Indigenous literature and Westerns, and enjoys fly-fishing in the Alberta Rockies. Treat Them as Buffalo is his debut novel.
During the North West resistance of 1885, Nikosis Eriksen, a Métis boy from Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles in Northern Saskatchewan, is playing a game of buffalo hunters when his cousin is abducted in broad daylight. It’s the first in a series of kidnappings of local Métis boys, about which the North-West Mounted Police have a disturbing amount of information, but have little interest in solving. The women of the Eriksen-Desjarlais family take on the desperate search for Cousin. When word breaks that a missing boy was recovered alive, but gravely wounded, the need to find Cousin becomes all the more pressing.
A confrontation with the mounted police and a mysterious trader send the Eriksen-Desjarlais family into hiding with the local resistance in their makeshift headquarters in the bush. Their leader, gun-slinger Kate McCannon, and her camp of Indigenous families and unwed mothers join the search for the missing boys even while the resistance rages on. When Niko discovers the true identity of the man responsible for the kidnappings, he is forced to grapple with his own identity and his truth, and resolves to fight to bring Cousin back from his clutches, no matter what it takes.
Told through the unforgettable young voice of Niko, Treat Them as Buffalo is a remarkable debut novel about the violent events of 1885 and the survival of a people when threat comes from the inside and the outside. This book contains 2 maps.