Spirit of the White Bison
Learn how Spirit of the White Bison was inpired by the fictional white bison from my childhood.
One of the first make-believe stories I told was that I had all the animals of the world at my first foster home. They had all followed me to the second foster home but didn’t stay with me because there was no room for them. My favorite was a white buffalo. I was around six years old.One Sunday, in 1984, after watching an animation about rabbits called, Watership Down, I thought I should write a story like that. What animal could it be about? Then I remembered my fictional white bison from my childhood. I sat at my typewriter and began to write a story about a white bison. To my surprise, a whole story poured out within a few days. Later that year, at the Women’s Music and Cultural Festival, I read from the manuscript. A lady came up to me afterward and invited me to come to their bison farm south of Winnipeg. There I took lots of pictures and forgetting that I was not using a zoom lens, I found myself in the middle of the herd with one mother stomping her hooves at me to warn me away from her calf. Reviews- Reliving an era in Canadian history through the eyes of White Buffalo is a unique experience. In eight easy-to-read chapters, the devastation of the buffalo is portrayed in a simple, straightforward manner.
The introduction and the story content suggest that the work can be interpreted on a higher plane involving the traditional native culture and challenging areas of twentieth-century life. Cyclical aspects of life are evident even in the black-and-white illustrations where a circle is incorporated into almost every delicately drawn depiction. The author has put as much sensitivity into this work as she did in her previous one, April Raintree. The reader enjoys the story while being forced to examine the future of planet earth and ramifications of present human activity. - Janet E. Goldack, CM XIV/1, January 1986 - Beatrice Culleton has once again given her readers a book to be enjoyed and pondered about. The novel, Spirit of the White Bison, is not an Indian legend, but rather recounts the tragic decimation of the plains bison herd.
The novel is set in that time of history when North America was home to countless bison. Indian people lived harmoniously within the laws of nature, hunting bison only for food, clothing and shelter. This was not to last. With the coming of the Europeans, these laws changed. They came in large numbers, and they had different values. Simultaneously with the extermination of the bison, came starvation and death for many Indian people. Although the story has many tragic overtones, they are offset by the special friendship developed between the White Bison and a young Indian man called Lone Wolf. Sprit of the White Bison, in its honesty, forces us to confront our past mistakes, and leaves us pondering our future. - Della Lougheed, Urban Indian & Metis News, May 1985
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