Buffalo Seed

Buffalo Seed is an unrepentantly luscious and beautiful work. The painted surface is combined with sunflower petals, meticulously arranged, floating on top, revelling in their saturated background. Two Elders, long since gone from this world, stand stoic and dignified. The buffalo themselves are inspired by a drawing of buffalo made by an Arapaho orphan who was known as Frank Henderson. These images made by a young Native child who never knew his real heritage draws some parallels with the experience of Poitras herself. While it is an undercurrent, and obviously a biographical perspective to which she could relate, there is a wide-ranging cultural moral as well. The buffalo taught the Natives about the importance of sunflowers. The virtual slaughter of those animals that had knowledge that white settlers didn’t is a metaphor for the slaughter of the Aboriginal people and the dissolution of their knowledge and culture. The two are parallel. (Exhibit Text by Virginia Eichhorn)