by Lauren Carter
On the second landing of the stairwell at University LRT Station there is a buffalo. It’s part of a mural that extends up and down all seven landings of the stairs. The mural is called “The River” and it was installed in 2017 by four artists: Carla Rae Taylor, Aja Louden, Dana Belcourt and Matthew Cardinal. Cree syllabics on the painting give (one of) the Cree name(s) for ‘buffalo’ ᐸᐢᑳᐧᐃᐧ ᒧᐢᑐᐢ which you can write as ‘paskwâwi mostos’ in the (directionless)1 Roman alphabet.
ᐸᐢᑳᐧᐃᐧ ᒧᐢᑐᐢ has a dark brown pelage and neck shag down to their wrists. Their eyes are gentle and watchful, which adds some calm to the damp stairs, convex security mirrors and the surveillance of flood lights. Between their curved horns there’s what looks to be a rock effigy of a medicine wheel. The river behind them runs along a flat plain—like the North Saskatchewan River upstream of our city—and downstream passes through steep valleys. Like the ones in our city.
Then came the graffiti artists. Someone took a thick silver marker and wrote “BISON” above the buffalo’s rump. The letters popped against the blue river background. Next, hidden in the dark brown of the buffalo’s winter coat appeared small letters in a black marker. I assume this was the work of a different someone. They wrote “TATONKA.” Tatonka is a name for buffalo in Siouan languages like Dakota and Lakota. The three layers of art—a cattle call. A discussion. A disagreement? A conflict between languages and cultures.
Why did someone write “BISON”? I looked at the other animals in the murals. ᒪᐢᑲᐧ didn’t have “BEAR” written on it. ᐊᒥᐢᐠ didn’t have a “BEAVER” tag. It was only ᐸᐢᑳᐧᐃᐧ ᒧᐢᑐᐢ, the buffalo, that was marked. Is it an addition or is it a correction?
I have a theory. There’s a real prescriptivism about the term bison being the only correct name. Usually it comes up when someone says buffalo instead. Some folks insist bison and buffalo are different species and their names cannot be shared. The idea is that bison is the scientifically correct name for the animals in North America, sometimes called American bison and sometimes called ᐸᐢᑳᐧᐃᐧ ᒧᐢᑐᐢ. Buffalo is only for the animals of Africa, Asia and Europe, like cape buffalo and water buffalo.
This argument has been going on for almost 150 years now. The 1877 United States Geological Survey Report reads, “In the United States this animal has generally borne the name of buffalo, though discriminating writers persist that the name is erroneous, and that it should be called the American bison. The latter is undoubtedly its correct English cognomen, but probably among the people generally the name buffalo will never be supplanted.” Discriminating writers, indeed!
From a sociolinguistics perspective, words take their meaning from how they are used. Not as much from how someone says the word should be used. No one can be wrong for how they use language as long as they’re getting their point across.
It’s annoying when someone tells you you’re breaking some imagined rule—don’t end a sentence with a preposition, they is a plural pronoun, don’t say buffalo. And you can argue it’s not just annoying, it’s part of the way that voices are silenced. Deciding what language use is correct is about power. Language prescriptivism is intertwined with class, race and gender.
The reason bison and buffalo cannot both be right comes from the Western science tradition of Linnaean taxonomy. Linnaean taxonomy is a classification system where each creature gets a unique name so that there’s no confusion. One creature can’t have two names or share its name with a different creature. That would be chaos! Disarray! How would someone know what you’re talking about? Context is not allowed in Linnaean taxonomy.
And yet, it isn’t the scientists proclaiming that bison is right and buffalo is wrong. Folks who spend any amount of time with buffalo are clear to tell you that both names are good.
Take an interview played on CBC AM in November 2022. The hosts interviewed the authors of The Ecological Buffalo, Wes Olson and Johane Janelle (photographer). It’s a book based on Olson’s thirty-five years of working with buffalo. And a scholarly publication from the University of Regina no less.
Johane Janelle: Well The Ecological Buffalo is basically about… how bison and/or buffalo—because they are the same—are connected to their landscape…
The same! Here’s another example. Interviewer Alie Ward asks Dr. Ken Cannon, an archeologist and expert on bison about bison versus buffalo.
Alie Ward: “What is a buffalo? What is a bison? What is the difference? What is this animal?”
Dr. Ken Cannon: “the bison and buffalo, they’re interchangeable terms.”
It’s a prescriptive rule done in the name of science that is not supported by scientists. The ones who spend time with the animals are not the ones telling people what to call them.
The way the “BISON” graffiti was placed above the Cree syllabics fits the image I already had in my mind. It’s the voice offstage, the discriminating writer, calling out “the correct word is bison!”
“TATONKA” did not pose this question for me. It is an addition you have to be looking for in order to see it. It’s been absorbed into the mural. “TATONKA” reminds me of Chelsea Vowel’s words in her book Buffalo is the New Buffalo. In her short story, the narrator looks out at the IKEA mural of a buffalo (another great mural in our city):
Huh? Bison? Yeah, I know that’s the right word, but you understand me when I say buffalo, don’t you? I mean, it’s a little rich to tell neechies how to call an animal your folks only met a hundred years ago or something. And that you genocided so you could build McMansions on all our lakes. Do you speak Michif? Cree? Nakota? How about Saulteaux? Know how to say buffalo in any of those languages? No? Okay, then. I get to say bison or buffalo all I want, how’s that?
There’s nothing wrong with using bison. I suppose having the choice to use the name you want is what’s important. There is room for all the many ways to say buffalo: paskwâwi mostos, tatonka, lii bufloo, iiníí, nįnteliįjeré, bison. The more names you know, the more knowledge you can draw on.
“BISON” has since been painted over. It never became part of the mural like “TATONKA” did. “BISON” was always physically separate on the outskirts of the mural. I suppose that made it easier to cover up. If someone wanted to slap some English on Cree artwork, it didn’t work out that way.
Who gets to name something? That is a type of power. Here in our city we know how colonial names are systematically overlaid over Indigenous names. It’s not the words like bison or buffalo that do the work of colonialism, it’s the greed to name and claim the world. Policing language use works to shrink that world and censure knowledge.
The “BISON” graffiti pissed me off, but I wish it was still there. I don’t welcome prescriptivism but I do welcome the choice to use whatever name you want, just like Cheslea Vowel writes. It was part of the art-graffiti mix that made me imagine a wall full of graffitied words from all languages. There is room for every name. Just no room for arbitrary prescriptivism that works to silence voices. Or, at least, that’s what I’m thinking as I walk down the stairs to catch the train, past the new graffiti tags that pop up and are soon painted over, the eyes of the bison watching me as I go.
Footnotes
1. Cree syllabics are oriented along the four directions whereas direction is not part of Roman orthography.
Sources
CBC AM. 2022. “A book about buffalo,” interview by Mark Connolly. CBC AM. November 2022, radio, featuring Wes Olson and Johanne Janelle. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2125129283880
Hayden, F.V. 1877. Ninth Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Embracing Colorado and Parts of Adjacent Territories Being a Report of Progress of the Exploration for the Year 1875. Washington: Government Printing Office. Gale Primary Sources. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/BEMCAL843946454/NCCO?u=edmo69826&sid=bookmark-NCCO&xid=032948ea&pg=1
Ward, Alie. 2020. “Bisonology.” Ologies with Alie Ward. Jan 16 2020, podcast. https://www.alieward.com/ologies/bisonology
Vowel, Chelsea. 2022. “Maggie Sue.” Buffalo is the New Buffalo. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Lauren Carter lives in Edmonton with her sister and her dog. She writes for fun. This is her first published piece.
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