This post is part of the Treaty 6 at 150: Reading the Land, Reckoning the Past series, a special extension of our From Coulees to Muskeg: A Saskatchewan Environmental History Series with the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society.

As I sit on the hillside, looking due south across mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake), the sweet aroma of sage and honeysuckle swirl around me, I’m left with a distinct image of this place that comes from the past. In the early 19th century, fur traders Alexander Henry and David Thompson described “the Red Berry Hills” as being “covered with numerous herds [of buffalo], as far as the eye could reach.”¹ Today, visitors of what is now Saskatchewan’s UNESCO Redberry Lake Biosphere Region (RLBR) will still be struck by its natural beauty, but they will no longer encounter buffalo roaming these hills.

The RLBR has changed significantly over the last 150 years, with Dominion Land surveys, settlement, and agricultural development vastly altering the landscape. Yet, mihkomin-sâkahikan remains an important anchor around which land-based histories are told. For nêhiyawak (Plains Cree), collective memory is something that is “anchored in places and landscape.”² As a researcher, I will never quite know these lands like those who call them home, but I have found that my understanding of this place and its histories has been enriched by time spent exploring the hillsides and lakeshore.

Since May of 2024, I have been working with the RLBR as an undergraduate researcher out of the University of Saskatchewan’s Co-Lab: Centre for Community Engaged and Collaborative Historical Research. In our very first project meeting, we talked about what the RLBR would like to see come out of this work. John Kindrachuk, the RLBR’s former Executive Director, emphasised that mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) was once a meeting place. Anthony Blair Dreaver Johnstone of Mistawasis Nêhiyawak has worked closely with the RLBR, sharing that people and animals alike have gathered here since time immemorial. In a collaborative piece of writing with John, Anthony shared that in the past when nêhiyawak “journeyed in the spring to follow the buffalo and returning from seasons following the buffalo, Redberry Lake was a place we would gather.”³

“As we mark the 150^th anniversary of Treaty 6 and the Indian Act, I feel called to think about their impacts within the context of these buffalo and their eventual decimation.”

From this very first meeting, John and Anthony articulated a need for mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) to be understood as a gathering place. At the same time, they expressed a desire to understand why the land itself was no longer thought of as a place to share. By this, I thought both of changing ideas of ownership, and of collective responsibility and belonging.

In trying to answer the question they posed, I must go back to the buffalo that once called this place home. As we mark the 150^th anniversary of Treaty 6 and the Indian Act, I feel called to think about their impacts within the context of these buffalo and their eventual decimation.

Through my work, I’ve learned that the social, political, and environmental transformations brought about by the signing of Treaty 6 and creation of the Indian Act in 1876 fundamentally reshaped relationships between people, buffalo, and the land. The disappearance of the buffalo that once dotted the hills of mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) was part of a broader settler colonial process that fractured longstanding relationships, and made sharing the land undesirable, impractical, or even impossible.

From simply looking at this landscape, it’s easy enough to imagine why both people and buffalo gathered here. The abundance of plant life and animals, freshwater inlets, and natural shelter provided by the treed hillsides make this an observably inviting environment. In an oral history with Elder and Knowledge Keeper Ed Lucier, he stated that if he lived in this area 500 years ago, the temperature dropping below 45 degrees, that he would certainly seek out shelter close to Redberry Lake.⁴

Similar observations are found across the historic record. Deanna Christensen’s Ahtahkakoop recounts stories shared intergenerationally through oral traditions, including the words of “Chief Ahtahkakoop on August 21st, 1876, at a Chiefs Council prior to their signing of Treaty Six at Fort Carlton, Saskatchewan, on August 23rd, 1876.”⁵ Chief Ahtahkakoop described mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) as a sacred place for healing.⁶ This was where he and his people wintered, and the broader RLBR was a part of their “traditional hunting grounds” where they would gather and “build pounds for capturing the buffalo.”⁷

These records demonstrate why mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) was such an important gathering place, while simultaneously showing the centrality of buffalo to this place and people. While their hooved legs made putting pen to paper themselves impossible, they’ve nonetheless featured prominently across these kinds of records. The very thing that makes writing animal histories methodologically difficult—their lack of firsthand account or perspective—is the same thing that makes this work important.

As historian Harriet Ritvo notes, “a great deal of the evidence about the nature and experience of historical animals comes from the testimony of the people who observed them, interacted with them, and exploited them, and most of the rest comes from bones, skins, and other physical remains … Attempts to make room for animals by displacing people must struggle with the distortion and diminution that inevitably accompanies such filtering. The stronger version of this agenda—the claim to give other animals a voice—is still more problematic, requiring a greater leap of both empathy and imagination.”⁸ The aim of this work then isn’t to claim to give animals a voice, but to recognize them as valid historical actors. We can’t speak for buffalo, but we can use the records that exist to try and understand their relationship to settler colonialism. This work requires tracing the kinds of collective, relational shifts that occurred during this time of immense change across the prairies.

Nêhiyaw scholar Neal McLeod described his câpân kôkôcîs (Great grandfather Peter Vandall) as living “at the cross-roads of great historical and social changes,” and as having “the good fortune of being able to sit with people who had experienced the changes of the 1870s and 1880s first hand.”⁹ kôkôcîs learned that in “times of upheavals,” buffalo travelled in the thousands to Redberry Lake, across it’s thin ice, where they fell through to their deaths.¹⁰ kôkôcîs “used the expression ‘ê-mistapâwêhisocik,’ which could be translated as ‘they drowned themselves’.” This is to say that the buffalo were responding to land loss, instigated by policies intended to clear the land for settlement, such as the Indian Act.¹¹ Read alongside stories of nêhiyawak expulsion from the land, we recognize that the buffalo existed within this shared landscape of “alienation, exile, and confinement.”¹² To recognize buffalo as historic actors within this context does not require we equate their experiences with that of nêhiyawak, but it is useful to recognize the interconnected nature of these histories.

Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan scholar Vanessa Watts’ work helps frame our understanding of animal agency. Drawing upon Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee concepts of Place-Thought, Watts begins from the premise that “land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans [like buffalo] derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.”¹³ Her work emphasises that agency is not the exclusive property of humans, that buffalo live in relation with us, with the land, with one another. An 1878 entry in the North-West Territory’s first newspaper—the Saskatchewan Herald—emphasises as much.¹⁴ Along the Dominion Telegraph line, approximately 150 kilometers northwest of Redberry Lake, buffalo encountered, and disrupted, the new telegraphic infrastructure. The paper’s anthropomorphised heading “Buffalo as Telegraph Operators” attempts to make light of the clash between human technology and animal instinct, but it instead draws attention to the physical landscape changes that buffalo encountered and even pushed back against.

Telegraphic advices from ‘Buffalo Coulle,’ about midway between Battleford and Hay Lakes, inform us that buffalo in vast herds are there and amusing themselves by turning operators in a way peculiar to themselves. For some days past the line west had been broken, and on an employee, in search of the trouble, reached Buffalo Coulle he found several large bands busily employed in the highly amusing pastime of rubbing down poles and dragging the wire over the prairie on their horns. The repairer, on reporting the matter to Battleford, asked, ‘have you let any new contracts lately?’ On being told ‘no,’ he replied: ‘Well, it’s strange. When I arrived here this afternoon, I saw an old bull rub down a pole, put the wire on his horns, and start southward towards Fort McLeod; so I thought perhaps Government had concluded to run a loop in there, and had employed these buffalo to do the work, to see If they could make a better job than the other Government contractors’.”¹⁵

As buffalo met settler infrastructure, it became even clearer how impractical land sharing would become within the context of this incoming settler society. Buffalo agency, as explained by Watts and evidenced above, makes it possible for us to understand how buffalo have been active participants in our histories, without superimposing human voice or consciousness.

To deny buffalo agency, and to view nature more broadly as external to us, is part of how the Nation State replaced a thriving buffalo economy, founded on interdependence and respect between Indigenous peoples and buffalo, with one of settler colonial domination and commodification. This change should be understood as both an economic and social transformation. Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast documents how this exact “reduction of an ecological space, in all its complexity, to a source of commodities” was a facet of colonialism and imperialism in the context of the Bering Strait.¹⁶ Demuth’s work challenges anthropocentricism by arguing that rather than separating the human and nonhuman worlds, institutions of “capitalism and socialism” reveal specific “ideas about time and value that shape particular relationships,” such as that between bowhead whales and foreign whalers, or those between buffalo and fur traders.¹⁷ In a world that has reduced its ecological wonder to commodities, relationships become dictated by economic value.

In the mid to late 19th century, mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) was increasingly being imagined in terms of its new economic possibilities. An overseas demand for furs and delicacies drove the commodification of the buffalo to unsustainable heights. Elder Ed Lucier describes fur traders as being “after one thing … wealth,” whereas their people had long histories of following the buffalo across their traditional territories, not remaining in one place.¹⁸ My understanding of Elder Ed’s words here, is that they had a kind of stewardship formed through experience and relationship, which fur traders tended to lack. He also suggested that a rediscovery of these histories of the buffalo might provide us a “better understanding of why things are the way they are … and why they were the way they were.”¹⁹

The new settler economy changed how buffalo were used, how they were valued, and under what conditions they were—or were not—able to exist on these lands. The growing incompatibility between the buffalo and the emerging settler landscape is captured in an article taken from the Saskatchewan Herald on April 7th, 1879. A journalist representing the New York Tribune, travelling through the North-West’s wheat belt, seemingly suggested the incompatibility of buffalo with the modernization of the prairie.²⁰ They wrote that this “still remoter wheat field is soon to be reached by the locomotive, for the Canadian Pacific railroad is being constructed[.] [A]nd although the land beyond is now the home of the buffalo, civilization is moving on with gigantic strides.”²¹ Here, buffalo are positioned as something to be removed to attain civilization, but not everyone shared this opinion.

Indigenous people’s interdependence with bison necessitated the care and maintenance of this important relationship. During the negotiations of Treaty 6 in August of 1876, Chief Mistawasis asked those in opposition of Treaty if they could “’suggest anything that will bring these things back for tomorrow and all the tomorrows that will face our people?’”²² He and his people were starving, and the buffalo were declining at rapid rates. Treaty promised protection from starvation, and it provided a chance to work collaboratively towards the protection of the buffalo.²³ Though, as historian Bill Waiser’s work demonstrates, neither would be fulfilled.

On March 22nd, 1877, “An Ordinance for the Protection of the Buffalo” signified an attempt on the part of the Dominion Government to “protect … and preserve” the drastically declining buffalo populations, but their concern was predominantly for the success of their own settlement.²⁴ There seemed to be no relational responsibility to buffalo or Indigenous peoples, with the latter excluded from any form of consultation throughout this process.²⁵ It’s critical to note that “the government was not simply concerned with Indian hunting rights, but aimed to reduce their dependency on bison.”²⁶ Speaking to the House of Commons, Prime Minister John. A. MacDonald stated that “‘the utter disappearance of the buffalo’ was not a bad thing … So long as there was a hope that buffalo would come into the country, there was no means of inducing the Indians to settle down on their reserves.”²⁷

Chief Beardy’s demands several years later would speak to a fundamentally different understanding of what protecting buffalo meant, and what it would look like for the government to fulfill their Treaty promises. On January 27th, 1879, an article in the Saskatchewan Herald reported: “The Beardy demanded that all that had been promised in the treaty should be given at once, regardless of the non-fulfillment on his part of the conditions on which the promises were based; that two miles around Duck Lake (which is all settled) be given to him as a reserve, that all present occupants to become his tenants and pay him half their crops; any one going to the plains this year to be arrested, this being to secure the buffalo a season of rest; free access to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s and Stobart’s stores. If these demands are not complied with, he threatened to enforce them, and closed with some disloyal and impertinent remarks respecting the Government and the Governor.”²⁸ The article noted that a Mr. Richardson, Stipendiary Magistrate, held a session of the District Court where Chief Beardy reportedly appeared with these above-mentioned demands.

The importance of the buffalo to nêhiyawak as a means of subsistence and economic security is clearly reflected in in Chief Beardy’s demands. In terms of food provisions alone, a two-thousand-pound male buffalo “could provide the hunter with as much as a thousand pounds of dressed meat,” with a female buffalo providing “much less, about four hundred pounds,” which was still a substantial amount.²⁹ For Chief Beardy the survival of the buffalo meant the survival of their people. A season of rest within this context is not the regulation of hunting in the manner that the Dominion Government suggested—through the banning of pounds or jumps.³⁰ It was about the relational responsibilities to his people, and the buffalo.

Bathsheba Demuth’s observations about whales provide a keen insight into the difference in how buffalo are understood and valued by Indigenous peoples and a settler government. “All rights to claim [buffalo] as property and sell them for profit occurred when [buffalo] parts become commodities … Thus, even with the words extinction and extermination in their conversations, the value of a [buffalo] was in present death. There was no entry in the accounting ledger for future [buffalo, nor Indigenous] lives.” The crisis here was not just the disappearance of buffalo, but the imposition of a fundamentally different way of life, impacting these lands, animals, and peoples. For Indigenous peoples, the survival of the buffalo was tied to the strength of their own communities. For the new settler economy, the buffalo grew more valuable through their death, as their decimation supported the transformation towards a settler agricultural economy.

Elder Ed Lucier was right, then, in his assertion that the histories of the buffalo might provide
us a “better understanding of why things are the way they are … and why they were the way they were.”³¹ This history of mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) makes clear that the disappearance of buffalo was not simply an inevitable ecological event. The disappearance of buffalo from mihkomin-sâkahikan—into mihkomin-sâkahikan—was part of a broader transformation of relationships between people, animals, and land. Treaty 6 and the Indian Act were central to this project and should be understood relative to the relationships they disrupted, including those between the Indigenous peoples and buffalo who called mihkomin-sâkahikan home. This buffalo history not only explains why they no longer roam these “Red Berry Hills,” but they show us how the land came to be thought of us something to be owned and settled, rather than shared.³²

“askiy wahkohtowin is a fitting name when thinking about the importance of this region as a meeting place, and it seems strongly positioned as a place where humans and nonhumans alike can share in its natural wonder.”

Returning to the questions that John Kindrachuk and Anthony Johnston posed about the land of the RLBR and how it might once again be thought of as a place to share, I turn to Sylvia McAdam’s Nationhood Interrupted. McAdam’s work provides a framework for understanding Treaty 6 within the context of nêhiyaw legal systems. The author writes that “In nêhiyaw law, the treaties were adoptions of one nation by another. During the Treaty 6 making process, the nêhiyawak understood it was adoption of the Queen and her descendants, binding the two nations together for all time. We became relatives.”³³ And according to nêhiyaw law, “animals are regarded as persons in their own right; the relationship between the Cree and animal-persons is governed by the same legal considerations that govern human relationships.”³⁴ Under Treaty 6—under manitow wiyinikêwina (Creator’s laws)—a law has been broken.³⁵ When a law is broken “against anything other than a human being,” this is called “ohcinêwin.”³⁶ As a settler and a Treaty person, I am always learning. I will not pretend I have the answers, but I will point to McAdam’s words, that “the remedies to address the broken laws are diverse and many.”³⁷

While I love to imagine the hills of mihkomin-sâkahikan (Redberry Lake) covered with buffalo, I don’t imagine that our way forward will be returning to an untouched, imaginable past. I would think that a way forward might be grounded in what this place was, and what it still is: a gathering place. Maybe these histories of mihkomin-sâkahikan and the buffalo can help us move past the questions of land ownership, towards stewardship. Towards living on this land together. The name askiy wahkohtowin was gifted through ceremony to the RLBR’s new interpretive site at their grand opening this July. askiy wahkohtowin “literally translates to ‘land/earth kinship’ but really refers to the process of helping to foster deeper kinship relationships with the land, water, air and our plant and animal relatives.”³⁸ askiy wahkohtowin is a fitting name when thinking about the importance of this region as a meeting place, and it seems strongly positioned as a place where humans and nonhumans alike can share in its natural wonder. I’m confident that the past, present, and future of askiy wahkohtowin will be shaped by all who gather here.

Feature Image: Hillsides of Redberry. Photo by Sara Pilon.

Bibliography

Christensen, Deanna. Ahtahkakoop: The Epic Account of a Plains Cree Head Chief, His People, and Their Vision for Survival, 1816-1896. Ahtahkakoop Publishing, 2000.

Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Henry, Alexander, and David Thompson. New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry and of David Thompson, 1799-1814: Exploration and Adventure Among the Indians on The Red, Saskatchewan, Missouri, and Columbia Rivers. Vol. II. Edited by Elliott Coues. New York: F. P. Harper, 1897.

King, Ian, Anthony Blair Dreaver Johnston, and John Kindrachuk. “Astam, Pī-pīkiskwātotān: ‘Come, Let’s Talk Together.’” (The Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s Idealab, 2019): 1–13.

Lucier, Ed. Interview by Sara Pilon and Elizabeth Martens. July 9, 2025. Unpublished Transcript. Documenting Indigenous and Settler Land Use in the Redberry Lake Biosphere Region.

McAdam, Sylvia. “manitow wiyinikêwina.” In Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems. (Purich Publishing Limited, 2015): 37–63.

McLeod, Neal. Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Purich Publishing Limited, 2007.

McLeod, Neal. “Exploring Cree Narrative Memory.” PhD Dissertation, University of Regina, 2005. https://primo-pmtna02.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/fbi72i/TN_cdi_proquest_journals_305435045/.

Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online Collection. “Buffalo as Telegraph Operators.” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford). September 9, 1878. PAS_Q_NP-133_1878_002. 1–4. http://sabnewspapers.usask.ca/islandora/object/PAS%3A28020/.

Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online Collection. “Duck Lake.” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford). January 27, 1879. PAS_Q_NP-133_1879_002. 1–4. http://sabnewspapers.usask.ca/islandora/object/PAS%3A28030.

Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online Collection. “Progress of Settlements.” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford). April 7, 1879. PAS_Q_NP-133_1879_007. 1–4. http://sabnewspapers.usask.ca/islandora/object/PAS%3A28035.

Ray, J. Arthur, Frank Tough, and J.R. Miller. “Saskatchewan on the Eve of Treaties.” In Bounty and Benevolence: A History of Saskatchewan Treaties. (McGill-Queens University Press, 2000): 87–104.

Ritvo, Harriet. “Combinations and Conjunction.” In Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History. Edited by Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (University of Calgary Press, 2022): 389–401.

Saas, Jessy Lee. “The Myth of the Homesteader: Challenging Saskatchewan Settler Narratives, 1880–1910.” MA Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2022. https://primo-pmtna02.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/3k8mfj/USaskIII.b57081438.

Waiser, Bill. “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse: The 1877 North-West Territories Bison Protection Ordinance.” In Bison and People on the North American Great Plains: A Deep Environmental History. Edited by Geoff Cunfer and Bill Waiser (Texas A&M University Press, 2016): 245–246.

Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 20–34.

Notes

1. Alexander Henry and David Thompson, New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry and of David Thompson, 1799-1814: Exploration and Adventure Among the Indians on The Red, Saskatchewan, Missouri, and Columbia Rivers, vol. II, Ed. Elliott Coues (New York: F. P. Harper, 1897): 491. ↩︎
2. Neal McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times, (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Purich Publishing Limited, 2007): 19. ↩︎
3. Ian King, Anthony Blair Dreaver Johnston, and John Kindrachuk, “Astam, Pī-pīkiskwātotān: ‘Come, Let’s Talk Together,’” The Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s Idealab, (March 2019): 9. ↩︎
4. Ed Lucier, Interview by Sara Pilon and Elizabeth Martens, July 9, 2025, Unpublished Transcript, Documenting Indigenous and Settler Land Use in the Redberry Lake Biosphere Region, 7. ↩︎
5. Deanna Christensen, Ahtahkakoop: The Epic Account of a Plains Cree Head Chief, His People, and Their Vision for Survival, 1816-1896, (Shell Lake, Saskatchewan: Ahtahkakoop Publishing, 2000), 3. ↩︎
6. Christensen, Ahtahkakoop, 4. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Harriet Ritvo, “Combinations and Conjunction,” In Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History, Eds. Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj (University of Calgary Press, 2022): 398. ↩︎
9. Neal McLeod, “Exploring Cree Narrative Memory,” PhD Thesis (University of Regina, 2005): 139. ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Jessy Lee Saas, “The Myth of the Homesteader: Challenging Saskatchewan Settler Narratives, 1880–1910,” MA Thesis (University of Saskatchewan, 2022): 6. ↩︎
12. McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory, 57. ↩︎
13. Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!)” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 21. ↩︎
14. Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online Collection, “Buffalo as Telegraph Operators,” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford), September 9, 1878, PAS_Q_NP-133_1878_002, 4. ↩︎
15. Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, “Buffalo as Telegraph Operators,” 4. ↩︎
16. Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019): 6. ↩︎
17. Demuth, Floating Coast, 8-9; Demuth uses “foreign” to describe non-Beringians, who were not all racially White nor ethnically European. ↩︎
18. Lucier, Interview by Sara Pilon and Elizabeth Martens, 7. ↩︎
19. Ibid. ↩︎
20. Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online Collection, “Progress of Settlements,” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford), April 7, 1879, PAS_Q_NP-133_1879_007, 2. ↩︎
21. Ibid. ↩︎
22. Bill Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse: The 1877 North-West Territories Bison Protection Ordinance,” In Bison and People on the North American Great Plains: A Deep Environmental History, Eds. Geoff Cunfer and Bill Waiser (Texas A&M University Press, 2016): 245–246. ↩︎
23. Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse,” 246. ↩︎
24. Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse,” 253. ↩︎
25. Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse,” 251. ↩︎
26. Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse,” 253. ↩︎
27. Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse,” 258. ↩︎
28. Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online Collection, “Duck Lake,” Saskatchewan Herald (Battleford), January 27, 1879, PAS_Q_NP-133_1879_002, 1. ↩︎
29. Arthur J. Ray, Frank Tough, and J.R. Miller, “Saskatchewan on the Eve of Treaties,” In Bounty and Benevolence: A History of Saskatchewan Treaties (McGill-Queens University Press, 2000): 90. ↩︎
30. Waiser, “A Legislator’s View of Bison Collapse,” 255. ↩︎
31. Lucier, Interview by Sara Pilon and Elizabeth Martens, 7. ↩︎
32. Henry and Thompson, New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest, vol. II, 491. ↩︎
33. Sylvia McAdam, “manitow wiyinikêwina,” In Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems (Purich Publishing Limited, 2015): 41. ↩︎
34. McAdam, “manitow wiyinikêwina,” 44. ↩︎
35. McAdam, “manitow wiyinikêwina,” 38. ↩︎
36. McAdam, “manitow wiyinikêwina,” 44. ↩︎
37. McAdam, “manitow wiyinikêwina,” 49. ↩︎
38. Jeff Baker, email correspondence to author, August 25, 2026. ↩︎

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Sara Pilon

Sara Pilon (she/her) is an MA student in the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of History. Her SSHRC-funded research explores the wide ranging environmental and sociocultural transformations of Saskatchewan’s UNESCO Redberry Lake Biosphere Region. Sara has been an undergraduate research assistant on several projects with the University of Saskatchewan’s Co-Lab: Centre for Community Engaged and Collaborative Historical Research. Starting in September 2026, she will be serving as the Co-Lab’s Research Coordinator. Her approach to history is grounded in her Women’s and Gender Studies background, with a focus on ethical community engaged research, collaboration, and social justice.

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• askiy wahkohtowin: The Buffalo’s Home - August 28, 2026