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Record W7155536778 · doi:10.59236/emro.v27i8a227

Singing Back the Buffalo

2025· article· W7155536778 on OpenAlex
Abbey Lewis

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueEducational Media Reviews Online · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEcocriticism and Environmental Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIndigenousSingingFrench hornNational parkAllianceWork (physics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Distributed by Good DocsProduced by Bonnie Thompson, Tasha Hubbard, Jason Ryle, and George HupkaDirected by Tasha Hubbard2023, Streaming, 99 mins Early in Singing Back the Buffalo, viewers are introduced to “Buffalo Consciousness,” an idea central to the film that’s used to describe the bond between buffalo and indigenous people. The term recognizes spiritual and ecological elements that today serve as a uniting force for tribes throughout North America working together to restore buffalo populations. The film’s director, Tasha Hubbard, who based her doctoral dissertation on Buffalo Consciousness, follows native activists making profound impacts on their communities and the lands to which buffalo have returned. Their work reveals deep, systemic divides in the ways that native and non-native people have practiced conservation and restoration. The Buffalo Treaty, an intertribal alliance representing almost 50 nations, guides indigenous-led projects to restore buffalo to 6.3 million acres of land in Canada and the United States. Through the work of the treaty, buffalo populations have been reintroduced to areas including Banff National Park in Alberta and the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Left free in these places, their populations continue to grow and provide ecological benefits for other species. Throughout the film, native activists reject the idea of ownership of the buffalo, insisting on their freedom to roam across park, state, and even national boundaries. Although the focus of the film rests on these present-day actions to reestablish buffalo populations, Singing Back the Buffalo also does an excellent job of detailing the magnitude of destruction that nearly caused the extinction of buffalo in North America. White settlers and their governments reduced a population that once numbered in the millions down to several hundred, turning their grazing grounds into farmland and the buffalo themselves into leather, fertilizer, and other industrial goods. The film is particularly attentive to the way this destruction extended beyond the animals themselves to the spiritual and religious practices of native peoples. The Buffalo Child Stone (Mostos Awasis Asiniy to the Cree people), a stone sacred to several plains’ First Nations, was blown up by the Canadian government in order to build a dam. A photograph from the time shows a government worker standing atop the fragments, a crass contrast to another photograph from the film that depicts solemn Cree people holding what they know will be the last ceremony there. The film provides an opportunity for classes covering conservation and restoration to explore native-led projects. Singing Back the Buffalo is also recommended for ethnic studies and anthropology classes that explore ties between people, land, and ecology. The Buffalo Treaty seeks to restore populations in areas throughout the Canadian and U.S. plains. Public libraries in those areas should also consider adding the film to their holdings to encourage allyship and cooperative efforts. Awards:Y for Youth, Special Mention, DOXA Documentary Film Festival; Honorable Mention, Documentary Feature, Calgary International Film Festival

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.545
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0250.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.290
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it