Buffalo Boy: Then and Now

Prancing through the crowd at Corralling Art: Curatorial Practice in the Prairies and Beyond in Saskatoon (2007), brandishing his whip and shaking his tailfeather, Adrian Stimson's anti-colonial, gender-bending persona, Buffalo Boy, a parody of Buffalo Bill, resurrects the turn-of-the-century staged frontier spectacles well known from Wild West traveling shows. Stimson notes that Buffalo Boy is a trickster character. Remixing and re-signifying the Master Narrative of colonial history, Stimson's Buffalo Boy confronts contemporary structures of power through a neo-trickster approach, reawakening the indigenous figure of play associated with strategies of humor and subversion. Crossing the boundaries of colonialism, racism, hybridity, sexuality, nationality, politics and religion, Buffalo Boy's stature resembled that of local statues on the parade route, positioning him as an equal amid a legacy of colonial history while also challenging a mainstream conservative and mainly white gay community with questions of visibility, cultural differences and paradigms of absence and presence.