Ken Burns on ‘The American Buffalo’ and the Tragedy of Mass Eradication

For several decades in the 1800s, the American Great Plains were the scene of the most destructive wildlife annihilation in world history. Driven by greed, bloodlust, and manifest destiny, this animal carnage has driven one species, the buffalo, to the brink of extinction. Once numbered in the tens of millions, there were only a few hundred mammals left alive at the end of the century.

Ken Burns’ two-part, four-hour “The American Buffalo” (PBS) combines the animal’s biography with the Native American experience, tracing two parallel and overlapping historical traces of grief and mass eradication.

The horrific rationale for slaughtering the bison – depriving the indigenous people who cohabited with the animal for more than 10,000 years of its hide, meat and religious significance – is depicted in a story that also features a multi-generational theme of resilience and hope. .

TheWrap: The subject of the buffalo has come up in other projects you’ve worked on, but are you glad you waited longer to make it?
Yes I am. I’m glad we waited because the stock market had matured. And it was more possible for us to get out of the way and center Native American perspectives in a very direct and essential way.

In developing this, we structured it as the first two acts of a three-act play. The first act resembles “Dante’s Inferno,” the slaughter of the buffalo almost to extinction. The second act is similar to “Paradiso,” in which we try to save the species. And the third act is a big question mark: Can we use our power to actually restore the buffalo population? This number will never exceed 70 million again, but for our country to recover from this history, it is important that buffalo live free and free.

In the document, an Indigenous historian named Rosalyn La Pier points out that progress is not just about what happens ten years from now, but seven generations from now.
You don’t like that? As a country, we can get so mired in the tyranny of quarterly shareholder judgments. So I really like this Native American vision of thinking seven generations. Because when they plan things this way, there is a kind of peace that can be enjoyed through the perfection of nature. There is perfection in nature and we realize that there is much to learn from this point of view.

There is a spiritual dimension in this project, because you highlight the mythical and majestic character of this animal. Have you ever looked a buffalo in the eyes?
Oh, my God, yes. Several times. There is a herd about three towns from me (in New Hampshire). You look into their eyes and think, “Oh, you know everything, don’t you?” I mean, they’ve basically accompanied the indigenous peoples of this continent over the last ten or twelve thousand years, including through several disappearances and extinctions. They saw everything.

What’s amazing is how the story of the buffalo incorporates so many different threads. I never knew how the Bronx Zoo played a role in their rescue?
I’ve said it before in my career: “You can’t make this up, you can’t make this up!” I mean, to understand this: the idea that in 1907, buffalo were sent to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in the Osage Nation – from the Bronx Zoo in New York! And they were sent on the train, the same instruments that had transported the people out West to be murdered in the first place. How could anyone make this up?

And we meet some very unsavory historical figures – thieves, racists, eugenicists, murderers – who nevertheless had an influence on the conservation movement.
Let me mention that having made “The United States and the Holocaust” (2022) just before this, I did not expect to deal with eugenics in two films in a row. But yes, for example, William Hornaday, first director of the Bronx Zoo, was a eugenicist and a horrible, arrogant SOB. We respond fully. He also played a very important role in saving buffalo from the brink of extinction. The amazing writer IF Stone once said: “The story is a tragedy, not a melodrama.” » In melodrama, the bad guys are perfectly bad and the good guys are perfectly good.

It is our superficial media culture that insists on this binary logic. But the fact is that the conservation movement, for all its wonderful, extraordinary, laudable momentum, was also taken up by people who embodied that noblesse oblige of the white man’s burden. They wanted, on the one hand, to save the redwoods and save the buffalo, while at the same time defending the most objectionable racial, ethnic and religious views.

Speaking of which, I heard that you have a neon sign in your editing room.
I do. It’s written in cursive, lowercase letters and says “it’s complicated.” Story and storytelling are all about touching on these imperfect stories. As filmmakers, we always find new and contradictory information that could destabilize our narrative and even make our films far less great than they could have been. Still, it’s always better to search and find this stuff.

You have worked several times with actor Peter Coyote as narrator (“Vietnam,” “The Dust Bowl,” Emmy Award-winning narration for “The Roosevelts”). What is special about this collaboration?
Peter is so good. We generally do only one take out of two for each block of narration. Maybe three, after which he’ll ask me something like, “What’s your music here?” It means: “How do you hear it?” » I do a lot of the temporary narration for each documentary, but when Peter is narrating, I often realize, “I’ve never said that word that way, like him.” »

It’s interesting because when he recounted “The United States and the Holocaust,” I felt a seething indignation in his voice. And she, when he talks about the buffalo, I felt a reverence in his speech.
Oh, I’m so intrigued to hear that. Because Peter reads the entire narration cold, without repetition. He wants to read it cold and I want him to read it cold so that he discovers the essence of it for you, the viewer. Not for me, I know what there is to discover in the film. So when he takes a certain tone, like a solemnity that settles into things, I would say 95 percent of that is like an auditory Rorschach test, where you’re projecting your own feelings onto Peter’s voice.

The last words we hear in the document are spoken by a man named George Horse Capture Jr. of the Aaniiih tribe. He said, “What I want for my people, I want for your people.” » It’s an amazing moment and its message of hope is so clear that my eyes welled up with tears.
Let me tell you, I watched this George Junior moment a lot while I was working on this film and my eyes filled with tears every time I watched it. Every time he’s in the movie, he rearranges our molecules when we listen to him. It makes us think about things like forgiveness and redemption in a way we never have before. And George, in a sense, frees us and then challenges us. It’s true that you’ve done that in the past, he said in substance. But what are you going to do now?

This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of awards magazine TheWrap. Learn more about the Race Begins issue here.