This course explores buffalo in American folklore from its earliest appearances in American travel narratives and colonial records. We will look at how British and French colonists related to the American continent through its inhabitants, buffalo being primary occupants. We will read texts that consider how Native Americans related to bison as kindred relations, and we will also analyze writings that reflect how colonists twinned indigenous peoples and buffalo in the American imaginary and its policies. We will read texts by Charles Eastman, James Welch, Leslie Silko, Linda Hogan, Ella Deloria, Gertrude Bonnin, and Susan Power, amongst others.