Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns looks at the life and times of an American icon and its reemergence from near extinction.
The second part of The American Buffalo, filmmaker Ken Burns’ feature-length paean to the passing — and hesitant recovery — of an American giant, opens with a quotation from Wallace Stegner. “We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the Earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.
“But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.”
The American Buffalo bows Monday, Oct. 16 and continues the following night on American public broadcaster PBS, and will be available on the PBS app and online after that, for this is one program that, on the face of it, seems destined to stand the test of time.
“In the end, it comes back to us,” Burns said, on a Zoom conference call with writers and arts critics before The American Buffalo’s premiere. “What kind of beings do we wish to be? What kind of planning do we want to commit to, to ensure that we are not so separated and above the rest of the natural world that we can't participate in that kinship that Native Americans over time have taught us is possible? There are [those in the film] who talk about planning seven generations out. We don’t. We plan quarter to quarter, and that has delivered the world in peril we find ourselves in today.”
The story of The American Buffalo tends to be linear, and one-note. It’s a tragedy rooted in the past, about the near-extinction of a keynote species of uncommon dimension and power.
There is a hopeful side of the story, though, if only a glimmer, and it’s that aspect Burns chose to focus on, particularly toward the end, in the film’s second half, on Oct. 17th.
“The first section is, at times, incredibly difficult to watch … when you see a species that numbered perhaps as many as 50 or 60 million dwindle over the course of the 19th century to the mid-1880s to fewer than a thousand, and most of those are in zoos or in private herds, and not running wild and free. So the fact that we have brought the bison back from extinction is itself an accomplishment.
“But we began to see, as we were finishing the film, that the film we were making was really the first two acts of a three-act play. Because at the end of the day, to save a species as a zoo animal or as an exhibit in a corral is not the same as saving them in the wild. And it’s that aspect that's happening now. In some way, the final minutes of the film hint at what that third act will be, which is this wonderful union of private citizens, the federal government — who control upwards of 20,000 head of buffalo right now in national parks and various wildlife refuges — and native people, who have more than 20,000 buffalo distributed among more than 80 tribes all linked and interconnected by the Inter-tribal Buffalo Council. They are repatriating buffalo to tribes that had been disconnected for the last 150 years from this animal that was central to their existence for 10-, 12,000 years. It's very moving to witness.
“To look in the buffalo's eyes and look in the tribal members' eyes and see that recognition across the centuries, the millennium, is an amazing thing.
“There are also NGOs campaigning to set aside land large enough to be considered a complete ecosystem, substantial enough to take these large megafauna. There are many good heroes in this story, enough to make a significant difference. It's a story of what happens when we come together.
“It does not discount the fact that Native peoples who had 600 generations of relationship with this animal had that relationship severed by people who — us — have had fewer than six generations of experience. We cannot tell the positive story that the buffalo is safe from extinction without delineating what brought it to the brink of extinction in the first place, that the slaughter of wildlife on the Great Plains — not just the buffalo but elk and grizzly bears and coyotes and wolves — took place in this period.
“We're headed in the right direction now. We have not yet arrived where we should be, where we can take what is the relatively silent Great Plains, that used to be the American Serengeti, and repopulate it. But we’re getting there.”
