Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns focuses on ‘The American Buffalo’ in PBS show, which airs tonight and tomorrow
Native Americans and the buffalo are forever connected, says acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
“I think it’s intertwined with the people who have existed on this continent for 10,000 or 12,000 years, 600 generations,” Burns told me. “Native people have been engaged and involved with every sense of the word buffalo, using every single one of their parts, from its tail to its snout, working it into their lifeways and folkways and even into, in many tribes, creation stories and things like that.
“And then of course, the extermination of the buffalo, the concerted effort to exterminate the buffalo in the 19th century, is incredibly reflective of the newcomers who came, who have perhaps six or seven generations experience on the continent,” he said. “And that seemed like a really good way to access a story that is at the heart a tragic one — but also farther along in its story is an uplifting and inspiring one. Because this is also a parable of de-extermination. We woke up in time and were able to save the buffalo.”
His latest film, “The American Buffalo,” airs on PBS today (Monday, Oct. 16) and Tuesday. It explores how the rise of the United States was almost exactly matched by the devastation and near-destruction of the buffalo.
But Burns also tells how an unlikely combination of people — including Native Americans (like those depicted in the above painting, "Buffalo Chase with Bows and Lances" by George Catlin, 1832-1833, provided here courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum) white ranchers and early conservationists — rescued the buffalo. It will never approach the millions who dominated the Great Plains, but today, there are an estimated 350,000 buffalo alive on the continent and their numbers are growing.
“The American Buffalo” also will be available to stream for free on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and on the PBS App, which is available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO. PBS station members can view the documentary via PBS Passport as part of a full collection of Burns’ films.
The series is accompanied by educational materials for middle and high school classrooms, highlighting recent research and perspectives. The materials, which were prepared by PBS Learning Media, will be available at the Ken Burns in the Classroom site.
Burns spoke about his film in a one-on-one phone interview with me on Sept. 29. He talked about the majestic animal, the devastation of its herd, his affection for American history and his remarkable five-decade career.
“One of the things that stands out to me is a comment by one of the experts in the field, who says, ‘It’s the largest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world.’ It’s not just the buffalo, it’s also the elk and the grizzly and the wolf and the coyote, but it’s principally that,” Burns said. “I don’t like having that on our watch. You know, I don’t like those mountains of bones. I don’t like the skinned buffalo and 800 pounds of meat left to rot on the plains. That just doesn’t seem right. And so I think telling the story is to own it and then admit it and then understand the ways we’ve taken to repair the story.”
He said more than 80 tribes are involved in the restoration of buffalo and return them to their people, which is important since the buffalo is at the center of so many tribes’ history, culture and spirituality.
Burns said buffalo have been a passion for most of his life.
“As a little boy, when I saw pictures of them, I just was drawn. When I saw them in a zoo I was drawn,” he said. “I’ve had the great privilege over the last 30-plus years as a filmmaker to film them in the Dakotas and Wyoming and in Montana and in Texas. It’s just a great thrill.
“There’s something magisterial about the animal. They are the largest land mammal in North America. They are now our national mammal,” Burns said. “But there’s something else. You look into their eyes, you see the history of the whole story, which is tragic and whatever. But they have some resilience.”
He said it’s noteworthy that buffalo turn to face brutal storms, which inspired the title of the second episode, “The End of the Storm.”
“They face it. They deal with it. And that to me is a wonderful kind of analogy to what we need to do,” Burns said. “Particularly when we talk about sanitizing our history and making it all sort of cheery and without any dark spots. You don’t get better, you’re certainly not exceptional as a country if you’re going to edit out all the things you don’t like.”
He said “The American Buffalo” also is “a quintessentially American story, filled with unforgettable stories and people. But it is also a morality tale encompassing two historically significant lessons that resonate today: how humans can damage the natural world and also how we can work together to make choices to preserve the environment around us.
“The story of the American buffalo is also the story of Native nations who lived with and relied on the buffalo to survive, developing a sacred relationship that evolved over more than 10,000 years but which was almost completely severed in fewer than 100,” Burns said.
“The story of American bison,” indigenous writer and historian Rosalyn LaPier says in the film, “really is two different stories. It’s a story of Indigenous people and their relationship with the bison for thousands of years. And then, enter not just the Europeans, but the Americans … that’s a completely different story. That really is a story of utter destruction.”
There were an estimated 35 million buffalo — technically the species bison bison — in North America in the 1830s as the United States began to expand to the west. The buffalo roamed in huge herds — explorers Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Second Lt. William Clark and the men on their 1803-05 expedition saw massive numbers of the animal.
They first killed one on Aug. 23, 1804, near present-day Vermillion. Clark recorded it in his journal: “J: Fields Sent out to hunt Came to the Boat and informed me that he had Killed a Buffalow in the plain a head.”
On Sept. 9, 1804, west of today’s Fort Randall Dam in South Dakota, York, Clark’s servant, killed a buffalo near their boat. The explorers saw “at least 500 Buffalow, those animals have been in view all day feeding in the Plains,” Clark wrote.
On Sept. 17, 1804, west of modern-day Oacoma, Lewis recorded his thoughts on seeing a massive number of the beasts.
“This senery already rich pleasing and beautiful was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe deer elk and Antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3,000.”
The vast number of buffalo seemed limitless, and Americans slaughtered them for many reasons. Buffalo skins were used for robes and hats, their magnificent heads were placed on the walls of homes, offices and saloons, and their tough hides were discovered to be perfect for the belts needed to power the growing industries of the east. Their bones were used to create chemicals and fertilizer.
Drought and completion with cattle brought to the West also reduced their numbers, as did the diseases the cattle carried with them. But “The American Buffalo” also makes it clear that the American government viewed reducing the number of buffalo as a way to marginalize and kill the Native Americans who had depended on their meat, hides and horns for so long.
Burns and his team also tell the story on how the buffalo were saved. Almost all buffalo in North America are descended from 77 animals taken from the five surviving herds in the early days of the 20th century.
Even as they were being slaughtered by the thousands, there was a backlash. Some of the very people who had led efforts to reduce their numbers, as well as writers and conservationists in the East, rallied support to save them. There was a surprising element of white supremacy mixed in with this effort, the film reveals.
Others who worked to restore the buffalo included Old Lady Horse, a Kiowa woman who describes her tribe’s spiritual and practical relationship with the bison, and Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones, a mercenary hunter who took part in the elimination of 3 million buffalo, then turned to rescuing motherless calves and starting a small herd that would eventually provide seed stock for others.
Pretty-Shield, a Crow medicine woman, described the utter devastation felt by all the tribes at the destruction of the great herds, while crusading conservationist George Bird Grinnell’s editorials explore how central Yellowstone National Park’s small herd was to the survival of the species.
Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, spurred on by his wife Molly, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who had shot the animals in massive numbers, and an ambitious New York politician named Theodore Roosevelt, who had shot Buffalo in Dakota Territory and said reducing the number of Buffalo would help the United States lessen its problems with “savages,” were among the leading voices calling for efforts to save the last of the species.
Other historic figures make appearances in the series, including Comanche leader Quanah Parker, who battled the U.S. Army and the buffalo hunters as a young man, but lived to see the buffalo returned to his homeland.
Many people chose to stop killing each other and the buffalo, and instead adapted and changed, Burns said.
“As much as you have to accept the tragedy, just as you have to deal with slavery if you’re going to talk about American history, you gotta deal with this slaughter and you have to deal with the treatment of the Native Americans, but you can also see this is a story of hope and inspiration and resilience,” he said.
Burns said he has been in South Dakota many times, from the Black Hills to Sioux Falls.
“I’ve retraced the Lewis and Clark Trail in both directions,” he said.
Burns greatly admires Custer State Park.
“It is gorgeous,” he said. “I’ve been there many times.”
But he would like to see it renamed.
“I think it would behoove the citizens of South Dakota to do the same thing, to honor either a Native American, probably a Lakota, maybe Sitting Bull, you know, someone, or to call it by a particular geographical figure,” Burns said.
Custer is a divisive figure who broke a promise that the Black Hills would be set aside to the Native people who consider it a sacred place, he said. His defeat and death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 led to a crushing attack on Native people that ended the last vestiges of the freedom they had enjoyed for eons.
American history has always called to him, and that lifelong fascination has sparked his work.
“I just feel like in some ways, we’ve made the same film over and over again,” he said. “Asking this deceptively simple question: ‘Who are we?’ And while you never answer that question, you deepen it. These strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans, and what does an investigation of a particular story tell us about where we’ve been but where we are and where we may be going.”
He said this “complicated history of us” — both the U.S. as a nation and us as a people — is a form of “emotional archeology” that his audience finds compelling.
Burns, 70, said he has several other projects in the works. “The American Buffalo” took four years to make, but he had been thinking about it for three decades. The timing was right for it now, he said, and he is glad it didn’t come out earlier, since newly revealed research helped him tell a more complete and compelling story.
“I’m really glad we waited,” Burns said.
His widely known documentary films and series include “The Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Statue of Liberty,” both of which were nominated for Academy Awards,” as well as “The Civil War,” still the highest-rated series in PBS history, “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “The War,” “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” “Prohibition,” “The Roosevelts,” “The Vietnam War,” and “Country Music (2019). He also served as executive producer of both “The West” and “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.”
Tom Lawrence has written for several newspapers and websites in South Dakota and other states and contributed to The New York Times, NPR, The Telegraph, The Daily Beast and other media outlets.
