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Treat Them as Buffalo

A Novel

Treat Them as Buffalo Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Blair Palmer Yoxall

Formats and Prices

On Sale
May 19, 2026
Page Count
224 pages
Publisher
Algonquin Books
ISBN-13
9781643756820

Price

$12.99

Format

Format:

  1. ebook $12.99
  2. Trade Paperback $19.99

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An electrifying anti-Western from an exciting new Indigenous writer. As teenage boys begin to disappear from a great plains Métis community, a young man attempts to uncover the evil force lurking out of sight.

In 1885, Nikosis “Niko” Eriksen spends his days playing buffalo hunter, even though it’s been many years since a member of his tribe has actually seen one of the once-ubiquitous animals. But when beloved Cousin goes missing, things start to fall apart. With law enforcement failing—indeed refusing—to investigate the disappearance, the community members take matters into their own hands, rallying around the leadership of a sawn-off shotgun-slinging rancher named Kate McCannon.

The resultant women-led coalition of freedom fighters strikes back against the Mounted Police as they investigate the boys’ disappearance and take their futures into their own hands. But violence continues to haunt Niko, and boys continue to disappear. As he leaves his boyhood behind and draws closer to finding Cousin, Niko’s investigation points to a harrowing revelation about his own heritage, which heels closer to violence that any boy would wish to know.

Written with the pace and punch of Outlawed and the inventiveness of The Only Good Indians, Treat Them as Buffalo delivers a gripping portrait of a young man coming of age before his time. 

Blair Palmer Yoxall

About the Author

Blair Palmer Yoxall (he/him/his) is a writer and poet. His fiction won the 2015 Striking Prose Competition Sponsored by Terry Whitehead and the 2019 James Patrick Folinsbee Prize in English, and has been shortlisted for a 2017 Norma Epstein Foundation Award and a 2019 Indigenous Voices Award. His poetry and fiction have appeared in glass buffalo, The Fiddlehead, and Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology. Yoxall is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and of Métis and settler parentage. He holds an M.A. in English in Indigenous Literatures and Westerns, and enjoys fly-fishing in the Alberta Rockies. Treat Them As Buffalo is his debut novel. Follow him on Instagram @atayookee.

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