Blair Palmer Yoxall’s debut novel opens with a swear, and readers immediately respond to twelve-year-old Niko’s direct and impassioned voice. It acts like a bridge for readers to cross decades in an instant—all those years since 1885—sharply declaring Treat Them as Buffalo’s relevance by highlighting the boy’s relatability and the scene’s urgency.
Back then, Canada (as it’s called today) was still collecting provinces, relying on the Mounties and the transcontinental railroad to expand and secure Canada’s borders and England’s colonial power. But Niko and his family are part of the Métis nation, a sovereign people snagged in the hinge of colonization. Yoxall’s novel presents one family’s experiences—some cultural elements enduring, some changing, and some lost—at a pivotal time.
It’s a landmark for the Métis nation: 1885. Yoxall calls this period the North-West War, to encapsulate the concepts of both the North-West Resistance and the North-West Rebellion, and to include the concurrent insurgencies: between colonial forces—the Canadian police and the military, and Indigenous nations—the Métis and the Cree. (There’s a historical timeline in the back, beginning in 1869 with Louis Riel’s declaration of Métis land rights.)
But although Treat them as Buffalo is a wartime novel, Niko’s awareness insulates the reader from some of that. For instance, it opens with Niko and Cousin playing “buffalo hunters,” a game which involves play-acting scenes, but also a pony, a snowball—and trash-talking the loser. When there are more children, they play the Dominion versus Dumont (another key Métis leader). At home, there are cribbage games and, when the community gathers, there is music and dancing and drinking (a celebration typically includes a local group called the Unregistered Indian Band).
The author’s depiction of joy, alongside strife in the nation’s culture, fits with Niko’s burgeoning maturity. He naturally describes Métis traditions in indoor and outdoor scenes: from moccasins to sweetgrass braids, from bannock to controlled burns. But while some traditions have endured for generations, there’s also an interplay between traditional and colonial cultures. So, the children also play Rougarou versus mermaids, and there is a mix of styles of dress. One character wears a Métis beaded jacket, Cree shell earrings, and Sioux beaded moccasins: “clothes mixed as his own blood.” Another wears a suit jacket over her dress and her moccasins at home only.
Despite all that’s endured, the buffalo have been lost. Niko and his cousin dream of having been able to ride with the buffalo, and they witness the older buffalo hunters who mourn the loss. “I know it don’t make no sense,” Niko says: “But I’m jealous they know the pain of losing the buffalo. Means they know what it was like to have had them in the first place.” Nonetheless, the novel’s opening scene—the buffalo hunter game—is unlike any other the cousins have played: Cousin is stolen away, and Niko returns home alone.
Cousin’s kidnapping can be viewed as an act of terror during wartime, but stealing children from families resonates at another pitch in the context of Indigenous history. Consider the recent and ongoing government policies which have targeted and removed Indigenous children from their homes: from the Residential School System, to the Sixties Scoop, to the disproportionate rate of interventions in Indigenous families in the present-day child welfare system. So Cousin being stolen is a compelling plot point, but it’s also an indictment of the pattern of violence that has engendered intergenerational trauma. (Additional layers emerge when characters and readers learn more about the kidnappings.)
The success of Yoxall’s novel resides in readers’ connection to young Niko, and his language is key to character development. Yoxall uses vocabulary to root readers in a historical setting: words like “peepers”, “nowadays”, and “ain’t.” He reminds readers of Niko’s youth with imaginative but credible inventions: “tensionful”, “worser”, and “ginormungus.” And he uses not just whimsical words but descriptors: phrases like “not-as-froze-as-it-looked” mud, “breath-be-seen” afternoon, and “behind-the-back chit-chat”. (I happen to love a ten-dollars-worth hyphenated-structure.)
His depiction of childhood is solid: only occasionally does the authorial voice intrude. It’s more effective, for instance, when Niko describes what older family members remember of the past rather than outline how colonial policies have changed, more effective when he describes a family member’s blue eyes rather than saying they look European (all useful information for readers, which impacts readers’ expectations of child narrators). There are, however, characters of all ages. (My favourite is the fiery Kate McCannon, but it would be spoilery to say why.)
One could shelve Treat Them as Buffalo with the BuffaloLit, including Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025), also partially historical with some 1870 scenes, and Métis-Ukrainian writer Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge (2024). Or with books by other Métis writers: Beatrice Mosionier’s novel In Search of April Raintree (1983), Marilyn Dumont’s poetry collection A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), and Gregory Scofield’s memoir Thunder Through My Veins (1997). It also complements Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), and Anne Hawk’s The Pages of the Sea (2024): novels narrated by children who are grappling with belonging—all different ways and kinds of belonging—even before they have a word for it.
Blair Palmer Yoxall gives Niko his words and cultivates an understanding with readers: Treat Them as Buffalo isn’t all fun and games, but it’s consistently compelling, and it presses the borders of historical fiction like it’s a genre still taking shape.
FICTION
Treat Them as Buffalo
By Blair Palmer Yoxall
Algonquin Books
Published May 5, 2026
