Native studies recently welcomed new faculty member Tasha Hubbard, a Saskatchewan Cree filmmaker whose 2005 Gemini-award-winning documentary Two Worlds Colliding brought to light the Saskatoon police’s notorious starlight rides.

She was a sessional lecturer at First Nations University of Canada from 1995-1997 and then turned to casting and documentary filmmaking. Her film projects have been screened at festivals across North America and broadcast on CBC and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.

Her film and academic work focuses on Indigeneity, including themes of social justice, transformation through art, representations of the Buffalo, and the importance of “belief” in approaching Indigenous literatures.

Oral tradition says the buffalo chose to leave the Prairies because of the destruction brought by colonization, but will someday return. Just as the number of buffalo has increased in recent years, so has Indigenous peoples' creative expression grown across North America. Hubbard's University of Calgary dissertation explores themes of abundance, appropriation, loss, confinement, renewal and return.