Ken Burns turns lens towards “The American Buffalo”

Famed filmmaker Ken Burns, his crew and several members of the press were advised to “be mindful of rattlesnakes” as they walked to a bench near the Bison Range Visitors Center last Thursday.

Conveniently, a solitary bison loomed on the crest of a hill to the west while meadowlark song punctuated the conversation about Burns’ latest documentary, “The American Buffalo,” which will air Oct. 16-17 on PBS.

Burns and his longtime collaborators, writer Dayton Duncan and producer Julie Dunfey, joined Montana-based contributors Germaine White and Rosalyn LaPier, to discuss the film. Whisper Camel-Means, manager of the CSKT Division of Fish, Wildlife, Recreation and Conservation, which oversees the Bison Range, was also on hand. Footage for the film was shot at the Bison Range in 2021, and filmmakers sojourned along Red Sleep Drive prior to the press conference. A film preview and panel conversation were on tap that evening at The Wilma in Missoula.

Burns, known for acclaimed documentaries that chronicle American history and culture, says he first considered creating a film based on the American bison and its near extinction in the 1990s. “I’m glad we waited because I think it enabled us to be smarter as filmmakers and smarter as people, knowing, in this case how to listen to people who have been engaged with the buffalo for 600 generations,” he said.

The film, five years in the making, tells a tragic, yet ultimately hopeful story of America’s national mammal – an almost prehistoric looking beast that less than 200 years ago dominated the Great Plains and provided food, sustenance and spiritual succor to the indigenous people who lived there.

Burns, whose most recent film is titled “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” calls the slaughter of bison an “ecological holocaust.”

“By the beginning of the 19th century there were at least 30 million bison. By the end of the 1880s, nobody could find one. As one of our consultants, Dan Flores, who used to teach down the road, told us, this is the largest slaughter of animal life in the history of the world.”

Compounding the carnage was the political strategy behind it, said Burns.

The slaughter was “conscious and intentional and sometimes done not just to get what at that moment was valuable – the tongue, the hide, the head, or the bones – but also because they knew it was the surest way to tame, to marginalize and to exterminate native peoples, and that’s the definition of tragedy.”

Listening to native voices

Because of that interconnectedness between buffalo and native people, the filmmakers turned to tribal historians and cultural advisors to help tell the story. Among them are Germaine White, former information and education specialist for CSKT, who tells of Atatice, who had a vision to save the buffalo, and his son, Latati (Little Falcon Robe), who actually brought a handful of calves from the eastern plains, across the mountains to the Mission Valley. Those orphans became the foundation of the herd owned by Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, which once roamed freely across the reservation.

The decimation of the bison “is one of most heart-wrenching stories in all of America,” White said last Thursday. “The lives of indigenous people here and around the rest of this country and the bison are inextricably linked. The near extermination of bison had a profound impact on us, our culture, our way of life.”

The stories of bison and the people who depended upon them are inseparable, says Duncan, who describes the film “as a history, a biography of the most magnificent animal of the continent which is now officially our national animal.”

“You can’t understand it unless you understand its importance – the connection of the buffalo with the people who coevolved with it for 10,000 years.”

Rosalyn LaPier, a Blackfeet and Metis from Montana who teaches history at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, spoke to the ways in which “The American Buffalo” differs from other documentaries about bison. The film, she says, is more far-reaching and doesn’t glorify those members of the conservation movement who helped save the bison from extinction.

Instead, it “brings a larger lens” to the story and doesn’t “sugarcoat it.” The film also incorporates “a wide swath” of indigenous voices, including writers, artists, historians and conservationists from all regions of the Great Plains “so you’ll hear lots of stories that have not been shared in previous stories, in previous documentaries.”

In addition to White and LaPier, native voices in the film include those of Marcia Pablo, a descendent of Michel Pablo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday and George Horse Capture Jr., an Aaniiih of Fort Belknap.

“I asked Ken Burns earlier if he believed this was a time when people were ready to hear a more honest and balanced telling of history that included native voices,” said White. “He unflinchingly said yes.”

The film, said Burns, isn’t apt to appeal to those seeking “the kind of frothy dime-store novels of the wild west” because that version “just isn’t true.”

Third act still to come

Both Burns and Duncan said they view the history of the bison as akin to a three-act play, and their film focuses on the first two acts: “The great tragedy of their near extinction and the strange and bizarre and interesting story of their coming back from the brink of extinction.” “Now what are we going to do?” asks Burns. “Are we going to be able to have the courage to establish the kinds of ecosystems necessary to permit the buffalo to be wild and free and to invite all the other aspects of a complex ecosystem to flourish?”

Camel-Means said the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes is part of that process, and supports “bison restoration across the landscape … and for other tribes.”

“I would love to see across the state of Montana, different tribes showing their individual unique connections to bison using their unique words for bison,” she said. “We were all connected to a species – and we all have a different relationship with it.”

The third act – the story of what happens next – is yet to be written, say the filmmakers.

Sitting on a bench at the Bison Range, which was returned to the Tribes a year ago after being taken from them by the federal government more than a century ago, Burns noted that his film, at the very end, “talks about the ceding of control of this very place to the people who know most about this place and most about the buffalo.”

“We’re in the appropriate spot to talk about what the third act is.” It’s a story, he added, that might best be told by our great, great grandchildren – seven generations from now.