Story of perseverance: Ken Burns at the helm of 'American Buffalo,' taking a look at the importance of species

Oct. 15—The American buffalo.

It's a symbol of strength and perseverance.

The animal has found itself at the center of many of the country's most mythic and heartbreaking tales.

Award-winning director Ken Burns has worked for four years on the two-part, four-hour series, "The American Buffalo." The series will air over two nights beginning at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 16, and Tuesday, Oct. 17, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also stream on the PBS app.

The series takes viewers on a journey through more than 10,000 years of North American history and across some of the continent's most iconic landscapes, tracing the mammal's evolution, its significance to the Great Plains and, most importantly, its relationship to the Indigenous People of North America.

"It is a quintessentially American story," Burns says. "(It's) 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 says in the case of "American Buffalo," he wanted to do the film for 30 years and is grateful that he waited it out.

"I don't think we had the chops back then to do the story the justice it needs," he says. "We can't help but impose our cultural gaze. So we made sure to include the Indigenous point of view and that was really exciting."

The series was written by Dayton Duncan, who is also the author of the companion book, "Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo."

It is produced by Burns' longtime colleague Julie Dunfey.

Julianna Brannum, a member of the Quahada band of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, served as consulting producer.

W. Richard West, Jr., a Cheyenne and founding director and director emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, was the senior advisor.

Burns and his team focused on the buffalo, who for thousands of generations, evolved alongside Indigenous people who relied on them for food and shelter, and, in exchange for killing them, revered the animal.

The stories of Native people anchor the series, including the Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne of the Southern Plains; the Pawnee of the Central Plains; the Salish, Kootenai, Lakota, Mandan-Hidatasa, Aaniiih, Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Blackfeet from the Northern Plains; and others.

Burns says it was important to include interviews with leading Native American scholars, land experts and Tribal Nation members.

Among those interviewed were Gerard Baker (Mandan-Hidatsa), George Horse Capture, Jr. (Aaniiih), Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet of Montana and Métis), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Marcia Pablo (Pend d'Oreille and Kootenai), Ron Parker (Comanche), Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche) and Germaine White (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes).

"The story of American bison," says historian Rosalyn LaPier, 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."

The series documents the startling swiftness of the species' near extinction in the late 19th century.

Numbering an estimated 30 million in the early 1800s, the herds began declining for a variety of reasons, including the lucrative buffalo robe trade, the steady westward settlement of an expanding United States, diseases introduced by domestic cattle and drought.

But the arrival of the railroads in the early 1870s and a new demand for buffalo hides to be used in the belts driving industrial machines back East brought thousands of hide hunters to the Great Plains.

In just over a decade, the number of bison collapsed from 12-15 million to fewer than a thousand, representing one of the most dramatic examples of our ability to destroy the natural world.

By 1900, the American buffalo teetered on the brink of disappearing forever, and the Native people of the Plains entered one of the most traumatic moments of their existence.

Burns says the film's second episode focuses on the people who set out to save the species from extermination and how they did it.

Their actions provide compelling proof that we are equally capable of pulling back from the brink of environmental catastrophe if we set our minds to it.

"This was the largest slaughter of humankind," Burns says. "It's a very complex ecosystem. As the buffalo population began to come back, there was more and more land dedicated to make that happen. We're never going to get all of it back, but each step in making progress is important."

The buffalo were brought back from the brink of extinction by a diverse and unlikely collection of Americans, such as Native American families on reservations in South Dakota and Montana, the legendary cattleman Charles Goodnight and his wife Molly in the Texas Panhandle, and Austin Corbin, the Long Island railroad magnate who owned an exotic game preserve in New Hampshire.

There was also Ernest Harold Baynes, an eccentric nature writer, who trained a pair of young bison bulls to pull a wagon and took them on tour to help launch a national movement to save the species.

Other, more famous champions of the movement included the Bronx Zoo's William T. Hornaday; William "Buffalo Bill" Cody; and Theodore Roosevelt, who hurried west as an impulsive young man to shoot a bison before they were all gone, and then, as president of the United States, created the first federal bison reserves in the West.

The film also introduces Quanah Parker, the Comanche leader who went from waging war against the U.S. Army and the hide hunters to a man of peace, who lived to see the buffalo return to his homeland.

Today, there are approximately 350,000 buffalo in the U.S., most of them descendants of 77 animals from five founding herds at the start of the 20th century, and their numbers are increasing.

"We've come a long way from the motto of 'kill the Indians, save the man,' " Burns says. "There are more Native people now in the United States than there were when Columbus arrived. When the Gold Rush in California took place and people began to move across the Great Plains, the tribes were moved to reservations and the buffalo declined. Commerce was big in Santa Fe and remains that way to this date. It's been an amazing experience to yield to the story and the facts."

Burns says he's a storyteller and presents each story in an authentic way.

"For some people it will have a profound change," he says. "For others, they will become constituents for this species and protect Native people."