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language: English
country: Canada
year: 2022
form: short fiction
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 26.8.22-31.8.22
I enjoyed but also somehow wanted more from Chelsea Vowel’s Buffalo Is the New Buffalo, a collection of Métis futurism short stories based on her M.A. thesis. I should say right off the bad that each of the eight stories in the collection is conceptually fascinating — I definitely think it’s worth a read even if I thought the execution sometimes stumbled. I really hope she’ll be able to a) publish more stories in future and b) publish at least two novels (one based in the setting of “Buffalo Bird” and one as a sequel to “Maggie Sue”).
the highlights for me were “Michif Man” — great humor, great concept even though it’s about a superhero (sort of), the academic aspect was smoothly integrated into the story itself — and “A Lodge Within Her Mind”, notwithstanding the parts at the beginning that I don’t think aged super-well (it was written in April 2020 and severely overestimates what the intensity of the government’s response to COVID-19 was going to be). “Dirty Wings” was (intentionally) more opaque to me but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless.
“Michif Man” is about a Métis man who after being gored by a maybe-radioactive-maybe-spirit bison develops superpowers but is affected by “The Distortion”, which makes it so that nobody who isn’t related to him can remember him. this is interspersed with a conference paper exploring the “real history of Michif Man”, a figure alive in Métis oral tradition but whom scholars previously believed to be essentially mythical, some sixty years after he lived.
“A Lodge Within Her Mind” explores pandemic isolation: a woman clicks on a link in a spam message and ends up participating in an experiment in consciousness-uploading (sort of) as the first human volunteer, meaning the digital world she experiences is in some ways just as isolating as the “real” one she’s trapped in — except for the presence of some nonhuman kin.
“Dirty Wings” is inspired by a dream. bird-grandmothers, dream logic, meditation on authenticity, and urban Indigenous life.
I also do want to mention both “Buffalo Bird” and “Maggie Sue”. the former is an alternate history where the nêhiyaw-pwat/Iron Confederacy successfully repelled the Canadian state, preventing the colonization of the Prairies; the story, setting, and characters are all really compelling but it felt like it was kind of trying to tell two different stories at once — I hope she’ll write a novel exploring the idea further.
“Maggie Sue” is about a person who meets a fox-woman outside a Safeway in Edmonton and gets caught up in an involved plot by the spirit world to begin the decolonization of the Prairies. I extremely want a sequel — beyond the extent to which “I, Bison” (and by extension “A Lodge Within Her Mind”) are set in the same world.
most of the things I didn’t enjoy were either formal or stylistic. especially in “Buffalo Bird” but to some extent in all the stories, I found the footnotes distracting (and at times imo unnecessary). I understand why she wanted to keep them, but I think at the very least they should have been endnotes rather than footnotes, particularly the paragraph-long notes in “Buffalo Bird” elaborating on historical and althistorical context.
I liked “Maggie Sue” a lot — the concept is incredible, and at least at the beginning the narrator’s voice is really engaging. I found, though, that as the story went on it started drifting away from the Just A Guy[gender-indeterminate] of the early part of the story and more towards sounding like an academic, with the “ordinary” register only coming back occasionally, which kind of undercut the effect.
I also wish — in general — that she hadn’t glossed Cree words and phrases as often as she did. most of the time imo either the meaning was clear from context or it didn’t matter if I (as a white, settler reader) understood exactly what the Cree meant.
(edit: oh, also, every story comes with a little 2-4-page reflection, and I couldn’t just skip them, but I kind of wish they’d been at the end, too — I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like having authors’ notes on their short fiction too close to the actual stories, just as a personal preference.)
as a final thought, this is not actually a criticism but considering the podcast she cohosts (Métis in Space) I was a little sad there wasn’t actually any story about Métis in space.
moods: dark, emotional, mysterious, reflective