Blair Palmer Yoxall Remembers the Family History That Inspired His Debut Novel
Treat Them as Buffalo fertilized when I was five, riding in the backseat of my mom’s blue minivan along Cowboy Trail in the Alberta foothills.Article continues after advertisement
“Do Indians still exist?”
I’d seen Indians in Westerns and comics and TV. They frightened me. From the rearview mirror, my mom seemed embarrassed when she chuckled. I knew my mom and I were Indigenous because her dad was. But the Indians I’d seen in movies dressed nothing like the people in my mom’s family. The Indians in Westerns had war paint and whooped like savages. The Indians in my family were all cowboys and cowgirls.
Then when I was thirteen, my maternal grandfather passed away. My mom remembers my grandpa having an uncomfortable relationship with his mother. But I was close with my mom. Why couldn’t grandpa be close with his? By that point, I’d lived a pretty white life except the time I’d spent playing hockey on Stoney Nakoda and Tsuut’ina land, and watching the Calgary Stampede with Blackfoot and—I now recognize—other diasporic Métis people and people who are mixed. Other than being close with my enormous extended maternal family and some other unglamorous aspects of my mom’s family that distinguished us from my white dad’s family, I didn’t think much about being Indigenous as a preteen. I didn’t know what Métis was, but I knew I wasn’t ‘real Cree’ because I didn’t live on a reserve. Whatever kind of Indigenous my mom and I were, I thought it died with my grandpa.
