Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns, who have teamed up for a worthy series of documentary films that examine is memorable detail some of the most iconic stories of American history, combined once more on The American Buffalo, which debuted on PBS this week. If you missed it, you can find it on its own website or stream it from PBS.
The American Buffalo is beautiful, of course--we've come to expect that from the two of them--and outspoken with its spirituality. What the two of them must have decided somewhere along the line is that any discussion of North America's biggest mammal cannot be begun without acknowledging the place those millions of marvels lived in the minds and hearts, the stomachs and the souls of America's Indigenous.
Foremost to any understanding bison is witnessing the spiritual connection Native tribes, especially from the Great Plains, had--and still have--for the buffalo. Duncan and Burns talk about it, and we eventually come to understand that they own it themselves. They get it. At one moment in the film Duncan tears up just talking about the tragedy of the Native American experience. Once, experts say, between 30 and 60 million of them--maybe more--wandered over the continent. In the early years of the 19th century, Lewis and Clark were overwhelmed when they'd come onto tens of thousands of bison in a single herd.
The decision the filmmakers made to spend significant time with Native American history was not only right, but good, and even moral; for what happened to the buffalo happened concurrently to America's Native people.
Christianity doesn't fare well in The American Buffalo. Good Christian people squatted on Native lands, mobbed west under the banner of Manifest Destiny, and commodified the buffalo, shot them by the dozen from turned-down windows of passenger cars they took west for sole purpose to hunting buffalo, killing them by the thousands, cutting out only their tongues, and leaving the rest to rot. White folks originated the wisdom that created the policy: if we'll get rid of the buffalo, we'll get rid of Indians.
The abundant spirituality of The American Buffalo rests in the filmmakers' desire to infuse the viewer with the reverence Native tribes had for their four-legged neighbors out here on the plains. The Lakota and the Omaha, the Kiowa and Pawnee, the Arikara and the Mandan--they were all buffalo hunters too, but they didn't kill for sport or money. They lived by contrary values.
In the spirit of Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, let me introduce you to my herd I tend on my harddrive, some shots I've taken throughout the years.
2 comments:
East of Rehoboth, NM lies a community named Iyanbitoo (Buffalo Springs). One hundred miles north of Rehoboth there is a pass that crosses over into Arizona just west of Red Valley and southwest of Shiprock, NM. That's referred to as Buffalo Pass. Both places are located on the Navajo Reservation. The buffalo were of the Southern herd but, of the two, the Northern herd was the largest. Both herds were reduced in favor of the building of the Rail Roads in those areas. Work among the Navajos was begun in around 1895 after the CRC left Pine Ridge because of Wounded Knee under the CRC Board of Heathen Missions.
Somewhere I read that traces of the American Bison were found in every state of the Union. Thanks for the info, "Anonymous." :)
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