As you drive across North Dakota, there are many opportunities to see bison, most famously in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. But for many years, the animal was nearly extinct. This on the heels of large-scale hunting practices that brought the population of the American bison down from an estimated 30 million to a few thousand in just a couple of decades.
Multi Emmy Award winning producer and filmmaker Ken Burns is out with a new documentary, The American Buffalo. It premieres next week on PBS stations and features Bismarck's Clay Jenkinson and longtime Theodore Roosevelt park ranger Gerard Baker. In this interview with Main Street's Ashley Thornberg, Burns talks about why this animal finally gets to take center stage in one of his documentaries.
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TRANSCRIPT
Ashley Thornberg: There is so much discussion online about the terms buffalo and bison, which are often used interchangeably. And notably, we should mention bison are Native to North America and to Europe and buffalo are Native to Asia and Africa.
Why did you want to call it The American Buffalo?
Ken Burns: Well, you're absolutely right, and we do throughout the film use the terms bison and buffalo interchangeably. Scientists call this particular species bison bison, but they are popularly known as buffalo, which they are not. But I promise you that nobody is going to change the second largest city in New York State to Bison, New York, and William F. Cody's nickname will not become Bison Bill. And I have further news for you as well, that might come as a shock. And I hope everyone is sitting down. Prairie dogs are not dogs. What we, what we went with. What we went with is the usage that everyone has and, and, and therefore it is interchangeable with bison, because that's the popular thing.
It was what Europeans who came there presumed it was and wasn't quite, and that's what we have. So we, it helps us as film writers and narrators to not have to use buffalo and them all the time, but to be able to put in bison here and there. Okay. And our last thing is that the National Bison Range, north of Missoula, Montana, has just changed its name to the National Buffalo Range.
Ashley Thornberg: So our listeners will understand then if we use those terms interchangeably, and I'll even add that here in North Dakota with the NDSU Bison, we tend to pronounce that as a Z instead of an S.
Ken Burns: That's right. And the Cheyenne had 37 names or 27 names for What we call bison or buffalo and depending on the age and sex and condition, and amount of fur and things like that.
Ashley Thornberg: Well, even just this discussion of language brings up such an interesting point of being a filmmaker and somebody who has a very academic bent and airing these on PBS stations and meant to increase knowledge, but also this idea that, okay, let's meet people where they're at. And we're using the terms of Buffalo and not having to put this overly academic, was that also factoring into it?
Ken Burns: We're storytellers and we want to tell stories in the most direct way.You kind of say that. I mean, we are not going to refer to prairie dogs by their Latin genus. We're going to call them prairie dogs and I will happily answer all the letters.
Ashley Thornberg: So you have made documentaries about Lewis and Clark and about national parks and in those, I'll say buffalo, buffalo were characters, this time of course they are the lead. Why did you want them to take the role of lead in this documentary?
Ken Burns: I think they're the most significant mammal on the continent. They are the largest land mammal. They are our national mammal now. Their story, we wanted to do a biography of the bison, because their story we knew would sort of reconfigure kind of traditional and maybe tired and superficial and conventional views of history and would be forced us to engage with the Native American story not as some sort of paying lip service, not some paternalistic thing, but as the center story that this would be about the 10,000 to 12,000 years of relationship Native peoples, a diverse group of Native peoples from sea to shining sea had with this most magnificent of animals. And it is magnificent, and then it would also, of course, necessarily entail the story of their destruction and those white Americans who came in who were implementing that destruction, for market reasons, but also, because they knew that by killing the buffalo, you'd be controlling Native Americans, as well, who would make them more docile.
So imagine if all of our churches, and our synagogues, and our temples suddenly disappeared along with all of this of our commissaries, our grocery stores, and our supermarkets. That's what happened. It's not a direct analogy, but we not only separated this animal from its material purpose, with Native Americans, the subsistence aspect of it, but we separated them from their spiritual life with this animal, and that trauma that is anthropological, it's sociological, it's historical, it's ethnographic, it's biological, are all meeting in the story of a buffalo. So we felt that we could help kind of disrupt the normal kind of ways of exposition if we started out saying we're going to do a biography of an animal, unlike the perhaps two dozen biographies we've done, and biography is always a central component of our larger series.
So this was just a way for us to find a new grammar to tell a complicated and riveting and tragic and also uplifting story.
Ashley Thornberg: And you are a white man. Walk us through your process of getting the right people on board so that you could be telling this story in a way that is culturally appropriate.
Ken Burns: Well, we've done this our entire lives. We've always realized that whatever subject we needed to not just present some received wisdom as passing on down the line. We've always engaged scholars with many different diverse points of view and were themselves diverse. And in this case, it's no different. In fact, we had thought about this for decades and decades.
And I'm really happy that we waited because it allowed new scholarship to, without any kind of paternalism, center Native American experience, in this story to privilege that point of view, those 12,000 years, those 600 generations, as opposed to anything else.
Ashley Thornberg: Describe for our listeners the relationship between the Indigenous peoples of this land and the bison?
Ken Burns:
Well, for many, it was a central aspect of their subsistence. It was their everything. They used everything from the tail to the snout, even the noises that the buffalo went into rituals. So everything is used not just for subsistence. It is a healthy meat. It is used for the clothing for the tipi, for their shoes, for their tools, for their weapons.
Everything is used and it, more importantly, it seems to me, is the fact that the buffalo figured prominently in their view of the cosmos, in their creation myths, in their spiritual lives. It was a sacred animal and a kin. And that was the whole thing. It's different for different tribes. The Kiowa believe that creation started when a buffalo came out of what is now Mount Scott in the Wichita Mountains, which is the highest promontory.
And their folkways suggest the centrality of the buffalo to everything. And that's not uncommon among Plains tribes and other tribes as well, that it has a kind of spiritual, there's a sacredness to the buffalo.
Ashley Thornberg: And the hunting practices during colonization and when white people came along really took a dramatic impact on both the buffalo and the peoples. 30 million in number for the buffalo to about a thousand within a few decades. Describe for us a little bit the hunting practices of the white people and why that was purposeful to a genocidal attempt for the Indigenous peoples of this land.
Ken Burns: So there is a person named William T Hornaday, who is the tax taxidermist, principal taxidermist at the Smithsonian, who is into killing animals and stuffing them. He thought that was the ultimate art form and that the animal could be best displayed that way. He then changes his mind. He migrates a little bit.
He never loses his animus towards Native people and what we would call a kind of white supremacy. But begins to save animals, to preserve them. He starts the national zoo and rather than killing and stuffing, he's saving animals and he also starts the Bronx Zoo.
So he's an important figure in that character, and he also, I think, even more importantly said that whenever an animal gets commodified, it's in big danger. You know, we nearly lost the beaver because we wanted their pelts for the fashion of hats. We lost the passenger pigeon that was there by the billions.
We nearly lost some of the birds, the ibises and egrets with their large plume birds in Florida for another fashion thing. The buffalo because it turned out that their hides were supple enough that they could drive the belts of the machines of the industrial revolution. And so we don't know how many buffalo were in North America from sea to shining sea when Columbus came, but they're probably around 60 or 70 million. We guess that around 1800, at the beginning of the 19th century, just before Lewis and Clark started, we estimate there could be 30 to 35 million. By the end of the Civil War, there are at least 12 to 15 million. We estimate again, and by the mid eighties, there's none.
We can't find any. There are fewer than a thousand in existence. Most of them are in zoos or in private collections. Those that are running wild and free, we have no idea. We think maybe a dozen or two in Yellowstone, also subject to poaching, and other places where the hide hunters never found them. So what happened was, when that industrial need happened to drive the belts of the Industrial Revolution, hide hunters, as they romantically like to call themselves, descended on the plains and decimated the buffalo, starving out Native populations.
It wasn't the initial intent, but as the Native American scholar in our film, Germaine White, says, ‘it was a twofer’. You knew that by killing the buffalo, you were also killing or at least making docile the Native Americans who depended on it, not just for the spiritual sustenance, but material sustenance.
Native peoples literally starved as a result. And the commodification brought the animal to the brink of extinction. And while American governmental policy did not explicitly publish that it was the policy to get rid of the Natives, or that there was a benefit; the twofer that Germaine White suggests.
We nonetheless said that. T. R. before he was president said, and I'm paraphrasing him, you know, it's, it's kind of sad, I guess, but inevitable that the buffalo will go extinct, but it will go a long way to solving our Indian problem and permit the advance of white civilization.
So, there, from Theodore Roosevelt himself, who will become a conservation president, who will change his mind about a lot of things probably never lose his white supremacist views, but, he does make a big journey and is rightfully one of the most significant, if not the most significant, president for conservation and the setting aside of national parks and national monuments and wildlife refuges., the first that accepted buffalo. Nonetheless, you have that prevailing view and so that is just the end, the death now. I mean, some tribes were so traumatized by this that they would say that it was the end of
Ashley Thornberg: history. Yeah, Theodore Roosevelt factors fairly heavily into part two and oversimplifying here, part one is more about heartbreak, part two is more about hope.
As you are starting to write a documentary, how much do you know about how you're going to tell the story before you start filming and how much room do you leave for Okay, we're gonna go that
Ken Burns: direction. It's more the latter. I mean, I have a lot of colleagues whose work I respect that, you know, spend a finite period of time researching, followed by a finite period writing, out of which you have a shooting script which you adhere to, and then you edit from that script.
We never stop researching, and we never stop writing. Our film is more, we're open and encourage that scholarship. When we go in, in the case of this film, the writer, Dayton Duncan, will research for a long, long time. We're out doing interviews, filming buffalo, collecting, archives, still photographic paintings, drawings, maps, all of those sorts of things, you know, kind of hunter gathering period in which we might have a shooting ratio of 40 to 1.
Whatever script that Dayton did, comes out being two to three to four times longer than necessary or than we're planned. And then we begin to whittle it back, trying to isolate what's important. And it's only then that you can, as you say, very simplistically talk about part one as being the destruction and part two about hope.
Because, of course, there's lots of destruction in part two, and there's lots of positive stories for a long time before the arrival of white Europeans in the film, in which, Native peoples are saying, could anyone ever be as lucky as us to live as we do with this abundance of, of buffalo, now with horses to travel a great distance, the original horse of North America had died out and gone extinct years before, and it was the Spanish in a Pueblo uprising of 1680,where the Spanish were sort of pushed away that many of their horses were released and went out into, this was prophesied by Native tribes and wise men.
And, and changed within a generation or two, the whole configuration. Some tribes that had been modestly nomadic, because you can't cover huge distances if a dog is pulling your tribe away, could suddenly go hundreds of miles in a year. A whole community would spend every waking moment on subsistence.
And now a couple of hunters could gather enough buffalo for a month in a day. And so the many agricultural communities on the edges of the plains abandoned that agricultural way and adopted the nomadic way at the center of which was the horse that permitted them to get the substance that they needed.
Ashley Thornberg: Do you think that most people know just how genocidal this hunting and therefore the impacts on the Indigenous people really was?
Ken Burns: Um, no. This is why we're storytellers. I think we have superficial knowledge. We even find to our delight that some of our scholars didn't know some of the things that other scholars did or the things that we discovered that's been incredibly helpful to us. And so we're trying to be really good students delving into a subject, not trying to tell you what we already know, but to share with you our process of discovery.
That's a much better thing. The former is homework, in which there may be a quiz next Tuesday. The latter is... Just what storytelling is. Hey, let me tell you what I've just learned and that's how human beings communicate. And so it's really important. At least we've felt to do deep, deep dives that sort of, not deliberately shatter, but end up often shattering conventional wisdom about a subject because things are always more complicated.
In fact, in our editing room, I have a neon sign that I've had for years in lowercase cursive that says, Hey, It's complicated. Most filmmakers when a scene is working, you don't want to change it at all. And we, that's all we do is we open up something when we find new or contradictory information.
And sometimes, you want to avoid hyperbole. Sometimes we're just taking out the superlative. Sometimes we're saying perhaps or maybe as much as because you don't want to oversell something people know when they're being oversold. And so what you want to do is tell these complex stories.
I've always said that I've had this great privileged professional life because I've made films about the U S but I've also made films about us. That is to say, the lowercase, [00:19:00] two letter, plural pronoun, all of the intimacy of us, and we, and our, which suggests bottom up storytelling. And then the U. S., all the majesty, the complexity, the contradiction, even the controversy, which suggests in some cases, a top town view.
It's not rigid and fast, but it allows you to see things from different perspectives. So you get to know lots of individuals in the story, and at the same time, you get the larger kind of geopolitical, ethnopolitical, cultural, spiritual, biological, environmental story at the same time.
Ashley Thornberg: Do you run into criticism during your documentaries which are presenting things as they happen, warts and all, where, and maybe I'm being too specific here, but I wonder, is the reaction ever that we don't need to talk about what happened in the past and that that doesn't matter anymore and that this is a great country and let's not worry about the bad things that happened in the past, because they don't matter anymore.
Ken Burns: I don't get that, but you're speaking about something that is happening all across the country, which is incredibly dangerous to our survival as a country, and is impossible to be a great and exceptional country, as most Americans think we are. If you aren't into rigorous self examination, you don't stand a chance of maintaining that exceptionalism. Tom Brady, who is considered the greatest quarterback of all time, did not say I'm the greatest quarterback. I don't need to study anymore. He studies even more and is constantly self critical. If we are not engaged in a path, nobody's hurt. There's a wonderful woman named Katerina Metro who teaches history in Maryland and she was born in Germany and she just finally posted on YouTube several months ago a very short video in which she said look I've been taught the history of my country and my goodness could a country have a worse history? I've been taught from an early age and I'm not traumatized.
And the people who liberated us, the people who insisted that we have a democracy, also insisted that we have an educational system that taught us everything that had happened without regard to upsetting. And that people is you. You. You did this. You made us do that. If you've ever been to Berlin, you can't walk around without literally stumbling on the evidence of the Holocaust.
Literally embedded in the pavement are stones that describe someone's life or some event. Or something that happens and they have actually done a much better job of dealing with the difficult aspects of their past than we have because we have coasted on the exceptionalism and now thinks, even though young kids, school age kids are subjected to unbelievable stresses all of their lives with school shootings, with what religion often teaches about the soul's fate, about what they see in their media and video games and all in sports. But somehow you can tell the story of Rosa Parks without mentioning race.
I don't know how you do that without buying yourself a one way ticket to mediocrity. But this is not what I worry about. I've spent my entire professional life making films within the PBS system. And I have delved deep in my first film, and I continue to delve deep, and I am unafraid of the consequences.
Because of the controversial nature of the subject of our Vietnam war series that came out in 2017, we created a war room of Democratic and Republican political operatives who would know how to defend this. Nothing happened. Cobwebs grew on them.It was because the story was important.
The novelist Richard Powers said, the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do today, is argue. The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. I'm in the good story business. I just want to learn how to tell good stories.
And if you tell a good story, you sometimes can permit people to set aside the binary, right? Everything's red state or blue state. Everything's young or old. Gay or straight. Rich or poor. Male or female, whatever it is, those kind of binary systems don't exist, except in computers with ones and zeros, except in a superficial media culture that has to point out them.
The thing I learned about the U. S. and us is that there's only us, and there's no them, and whenever anyone tells you there's a them, just walk away.
Ashley Thornberg:
This idea that the story matters. Period. End of discussion. What the story demands to be told has to be met with that word that you used to describe yourself earlier. Unafraid. Have you always been unafraid?
Ken Burns: I think so. I feel so privileged. I think I've got the best job in the country, but you're absolutely right.
The most important thing about this...and an admission I make proudly is I've made the same film over and over again. I don't mean it's formulaic, but I'm asking a simple question, or a seemingly simple question. Who are we? Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?
What does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we've been, the subject, but where we are and where we may be going? You never answer this question. You deepen it with each successive project. It's about practice. That's all it is. It's the same as what you've described. We are drawn to a subject matter, and we are not trying to proselytize.
We don't want you to buy into this political set of beliefs or whatever. We want to tell you a complex story. We don't want to turn people into simplistic villains or heroes. In fact, the Greeks have told us For millennia, the heroes are not perfect. They're there as object lessons for us mere mortals to understand the wars going on inside us between our strengths and our weaknesses.
And heroism is not a perfection. It is in fact the result of those negotiations internally and those wars internally. Achilles had his Hubris and his heel to go along with his great strengths. And so now, we're in a media culture where it's only binary. So, we're lacking, where are the heroes we used to have?
We now want a simpler time where they were here. No, we've got heroes, we've just forgotten how to see them. They're right in front of us, all the time. And, and they're not perfect. In fact, we are all experiments. We are all practicing. But we're all animated by my questions. Who am I? What is my purpose here on earth? How do I help other people? What do I wish to leave?
Ashley Thornberg:
I'm really fascinated by you using words like villains or heroes and, and maybe some of each, and particularly where we are at as a nation right now, as monuments are being torn down, as place names are changing, and specific to North Dakota, there is The Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt that was a long time in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City recently torn down, based on a lot of protest of it sort of being understood now as a white man's burden] kind of statue.
Ken Burns: It has slave children at his adoring feet and Native people at his adoring feet and it is very much paternalistic. It is very much about white supremacy and noblesse oblige and white man's burden. And so while he had to think long and hard about it, and the museum interprets him in very important ways and hasn't erased him from that.
Most of the monuments taken down are monuments to confederates who were in open rebellion against the United States. responsible for more loyal American deaths than Hitler or Tojo. I got no problem with those. And they didn't go up at the time of the Civil War or before. They went up after Reconstruction collapsed and white rule was brutally reimposed in the South.
All those statues went up in the late, in the 1880s and 1890s. And just like the flag, which they call the confederate flag, which it isn't, the flag of the confederacy was a different thing. What we call the confederate flag was one battle flag of the army of northern Virginia, which had many battle flags.
And it was used by the Ku Klux Klan in their night raids to ensure that Reconstruction collapsed. And that flag, not the Confederate flag, but that flag, which we call the Confederate flag, worked its way into many state flags of the Confederacy, but only after 1954. Brown versus Board of Education. The Supreme Court ruled that segregating school children based on race was unconstitutional.
And then that flag went in. It's fortunately now out of I think all of the flags, but you've got to do the deep dive into history to understand if somebody tries to take down the Washington Monument because he owned slaves. Or the Jefferson Memorial because he owned slaves, or the Lincoln Memorial because he thought of colonizing black Americans as late as 18, out of the country to South America or back to Africa as late as 1861, it will be over my dead body, right?
But, I have no problem in renaming a fort. For somebody who was an enemy of the United States or to take down a statue in New Orleans. Lee Circle had a big obelisk and on the top of it was a statue of Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee never visited Louisiana, not once. He certainly never set foot in New Orleans.
But that was one of the central things in downtown. And it was taken down because it only went up at that moment when White rule was brutally reimposed. Those elected black officials disappeared overnight from the South. And Reconstruction, which comes down to us from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, is an upside down, backwards history in which our own homegrown Al Qaeda or ISIS, that is to say the Ku Klux Klan, are the heroes of these films.
And I am very happy to set the record straight about it. At the same time, I will not go far to take other people who are complicated out of our stuff. Complication is what makes for good stories, and complication is the human experience. Bo Whitman said it, do I contradict myself? I contradict myself.
Ashley Thornberg: Well, the reason I even brought up, Theodore Roosevelt's statue is because as it was being torn down, it was given to the and I'm not gonna get the exact wording correct here, but the long term storage and concern of a group in Medora, North Dakota, and there has been a lot of discussion in the states on should it be recontextualized or should it continue to remain not in public.
Ken Burns: One thing is that it wasn't torn down.Torn down is what you do with dictator statues and you topple it and you melt it down. What it was, was removed. And just as I was talking about William T. Hornaday, the taxidermist, who went out to Montana, couldn't find any bison, freaked out, came back a few months later, spent two or three months, shot several, brought them back and created one of the most amazing dioramas, the largest glass display in the Smithsonian to date. And it was visited for years and then finally retired, not for any political reasons, but is now in Fort Benton, Montana, where you can still see this thing that drew millions of people who had never probably seen a buffalo in their lives.
And the closest they would get was to a stuffed one that William T. Hornaday himself has shot. The statues that were taken down in New Orleans --- the Lee statue is one of four --- were moved to museums and to different places where they can be re as you said, contextualized and that I am totally for.
Ashley Thornberg: Keeping on this discussion of Roosevelt, but also bringing Hornaday and some other people in here, let's start to progress into episode two of The American Buffalo and this idea that understanding that extinction is a bad idea. How do you describe the conservation ethic of Roosevelt and how does that compare with the other people of his day?
Ken Burns: What we have to understand, those people who are identified with a modern environmental movement, that conservation was really born among hunters.
People who wanted to continue killing the animals that looked like they were going to disappear. I think that we just have to be realists. And what they were looking for is a word that we use all the time, which was sustainability. You want to be able to have a population of ducks or bison or whatever it might be, that's not going to disappear.
And you're going to do this in a conscientious way. So a lot of the early conservation movement is, comes about because people like George Bird Grinnell, who's much more attuned and who's one of the great heroes, I think --- if I can use that word after making it complicated --- brings Teddy Roosevelt along.
And I think the journey that he begins to take is helped and sponsored in part by George Bird Grinnell. They formed the Boone and Crockett Club. They do everything to promote the manly art of hunting. It is Theodore Roosevelt who will become the person who sets aside so much national parkland, so much.
He declares, using the Antiquities Act, he declares the Grand Canyon a national monument. It was passed in a moment Congress has regretted ever since, that gives the president to set aside 5,000 acres to preserve Devil's Tower in Wyoming, which was the first of them, or Muir Woods, across the Golden Gate, from San Francisco.
He did 880,000 acres, and the furor in Arizona was great. But there were real threats, for mining, uranium mining, specifically, and a good deal of corrupt politics going on that he just interceded with the stroke of a pen. That meant he traveled a long distance. So, at some point or another, we decide, a bunch of people decide, that we need to save the buffalo. And a lot of those people are a very interesting, diverse group. Native Americans and white Americans. Some for the wrong reasons, as I've suggested, in terms of white supremacy. Others for more pure reasons. Or others because they've evolved as human beings begin to set aside. To me, the apotheosis of this comes in 1913 when we have an Indian head and the sculptor Fraser says, I wanted to design a coin that would be unmistakable for anybody else's. You could only be one country, the United States. What does he pick? He picks the head of a Native American, and the back is a buffalo.
We know exactly who both of them are. And the buffalo is Black Lightning. And he's sent down to the meatpacking district and cut up into steaks and parted out after this is over. And it seems to me there's a kind of... Evidence of a pang of conscience, a prick of conscience, you know, what have we done?
There's anxiety on the part of Americans since the 1890s when Frederick Jackson Turner writes his celebrated essay saying the frontier is done. What's our identity? Who are we now? What kind of people are we? And then all of a sudden we're beginning to fixate on two symbols of our own developing mythology, and that's the Native American and the buffalo.
And we're beginning to romanticize and fetishize two things that we've spent the last century trying to get rid of. And George Horse Capture Jr. from a tribe in north central Montana called the A'aninin on the Fort Belknap Reservation said, I just have a question. Do you need to destroy that which you love?
It's a wonderful moment because he has in several instances in the film sort of challenged the momentum of our assumptions. Sometimes these assumptions about property and ownership are hundreds of years old, but he challenges them with the simplest of comments. And it does help to kind of rearrange your molecules and understand the beginnings of this effort of saving the buffalo may be born in something as simple as guilt.
Ashley Thornberg: Hmm. It is quite a motivator. We've talked so much about the bison and their worth as a commodity and their worth as factoring into creation stories and then being an important part of a spiritual practice and being an important food source.
Next, let's talk about bison as part of an ecosystem. What do they do for the land?
Ken Burns: It was huge. I mean, first of all, they're a huge animal. They're very spectacularly looking, but they're very powerful. They can get up to 35 miles an hour.
Ashley Thornberg: I was charged by one recently.
Ken Burns: Yeah. Well, just be careful. That is very scary.
It should be scary. It's life threatening. I'd be only concerned worse with a mama grizzly bear. Because if you see one... You're dead. What they did is they would often scratch and have these dirt baths that would create what are called buffalo wallows, literally millions, tens of millions of these little kind of things that collected rainwater.
And then because it was a disturbed area, it tracted flora that also was interested in this third area. So the buffalo are the charismatic mammals that are at the heart of what people referred to as the American Serengeti, the Great Plains. Now it's a relatively silent place of monoculture, a single crop or not as loud and as filled with is not as diverse of species around.
And so I think we've begun to see our film is two acts of a three act play, if you will. So the bison is saved. They're not going to go extinct. They're not 70 million. There's not 30 million. There's not 12 million. There's not even a million. There's 375, 380, 000. 20 are in federal hands in various national parks and wildlife reserves.
20, 000 plus are in Native hands. Over 80 tribes have buffalo, and they're repatriating buffalo to other things. There are NGOs who are trying to set aside some land for this idea that we've saved it. But do we want the buffalo to be wild and free again? Can we create a habitat, a wildlife corridor, an ecosystem large enough to support the roaming patterns of a mammal this big?
Could we invite back into parts of the depopulated and underpopulated Plains the possibility of an ecosystem that would take us back to the glorious Eden that gave us the idea of manifest destiny that gave us the idea of our destiny to overspread that completely ignoring the Native people that are there?
So I think that's a challenge that other people will have to ask themselves whether they're going to be part of that collective will to create that. But right now, you know, it is possible you want to see a buffalo, you can see them. You want to see them out in the wild? Yes, they're still confined by fences.
But how great would it be, many people are saying, if you could see them in a natural habitat and where you could begin to grow hundreds of thousands of buffalo that are literally wild and free. And your own North Dakotan Clay Jenkinson, the great scholar and friend of mine, has said, 'I actually think I may see this in my lifetime.'
And his hope is so resonant. This is a story of resilience of a species, but also the Native people, and I think it's one that ought to give us hope and some pride. We are responsible, it's on our watch, that we participated in the greatest slaughter of wildlife in the history of our world. The buffalo were not the only ones, but we've now also been part of this attempt to resurrect the species, and we've done it. It is not going to go extinct.
Ashley Thornberg: We are broadcasting in North Dakota. Clay Jenkinson is one of ours. He's been in a number of your documentaries. How do you describe what he means to the kinds of stories that you are telling?
What is his legacy and significance?
Ken Burns: First of all, he is a scholar of the first rate, but he brings with his scholarship, a passion and enthusiasm that literally wills the story alive. He inhabits human beings and has you understand them from all their complexity. He is a steel trap with regard to the tick tock of history, which is hugely important.
He is up to date on the scholarship, but he brings to it this ability to see a big picture. I can think of him talking about the Roosevelts and about theater Roosevelt who I think you'd agree with most of my inherent criticism of Theodore, just as we celebrate him as well for all the good things he's done, but he was very fond of saying bully or bully.
By golly, and you know, Clay is the historical equivalent of that. He's just a magnificent human being in his own right. I'm so privileged to count him as a friend as well as a colleague.
Ashley Thornberg: Ken, you work with 60 plus filmmakers on your team. Beyond them knowing how to employ the Ken Burns effect, what do you look for?
Ken Burns: Nobody uses that. It's actually on iMovie. Okay. And nobody, we use, it's sort of a subtle version of that.
Ashley Thornberg: Beyond the actual technical skill set, what do you look for when you choose
Ken Burns: colleagues? Hard work and curiosity. That's easy. That's easy. We're all prepared to do whatever job is needed to get it done.You don't last long. Nobody gets fired. People just don't last long because it's rigorous and it's hard work and there's nothing glamorous about it, but you do get to see bison, nestling in the snow next to the Yellowstone River covered with the confectioner's sugar of the last night's snowfall.
That's a pretty great reward. But, it's curiosity. It's wanting. It's basically understanding that it’s complicated, as the neon sign in our editing room says and willing to sacrifice something that may seem to work on the surface for something deeper and more resonant. That is more indicative of the history that I think we need to know in order to go forward.
Ashley Thornberg: Ken Burns. What an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time today.
Ken Burns: It's my pleasure. Thank you.
Additional resources: The American Buffalo Museum in Jamestown, ND