Ken Burns on Losing His Mother and The American Buffalo

October 15, 2023

Documentary First, Episode 208. Christian Taylor and co-host Jason Rugg talk with Ken Burns about The American Buffalo, in the first of two parts. 34 minutes. Released October 15, 2023.

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Who is Ken Burns really trying to wake up?

Ken Burns's mother, Lyla, got cancer when he was two or three, and she died when he was 11. His father never cried while she was sick or at her funeral. A few months later Ken watched him cry at a movie, and Ken knew what he wanted to do with his life. Decades later his father-in-law, a psychologist, told him, "You wake the dead," and asked, "Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?" As Ken says now, "I would not be sitting with you had not my mother died."

In Episode 208 of Documentary First, Christian Taylor and co-host Jason Rugg talk with Ken Burns a few days before The American Buffalo premiered on PBS in October 2023. It's an emotional one for Christian, who says she wouldn't have finished her own film, The Girl Who Wore Freedom, without what she learned from him. Ken talks about seeing problems as the job, not the obstacle, and about the faded New Yorker cartoon that keeps him humble. He calls his work "emotional archaeology," and he explains the neon sign in his main editing room that reads "it's complicated."

Then the conversation turns to the buffalo. Ken says there were at least 15 million bison at the end of the Civil War, and within 20 years fewer than a thousand were left. He calls it the largest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world, and it devastated the Native peoples whose lives were built around the animal. He tells why the film waited 30 years, why it centers Native American voices, and why some of the people who saved the buffalo did it for the wrong reasons. And he repeats the question George Horse Capture Jr. asks in the film: "Do you need to destroy what you love?"

In this episode, you'll learn

How losing his mother at 11 led Ken Burns to filmmaking
What his father-in-law saw in the work that Ken hadn't
What Ken means by "emotional archaeology"
Why Ken sees problems as the "required friction" of making anything
How Werner Herzog described the difference between his truth and Ken's
Why the "it's complicated" sign hangs in his editing room
Why a four-hour film about the buffalo waited 30 years
How the buffalo went from millions to fewer than a thousand in 20 years
Why The American Buffalo centers Native American voices
What the 1913 Buffalo nickel says about romanticizing what we nearly destroyed

Questions and answers

How did losing his mother shape Ken Burns's films?

Ken Burns's mother, Lyla, died of cancer when he was 11. He says he decided to become a filmmaker months later, after watching his father, who hadn't cried at her funeral, cry at a movie. Years later his father-in-law, a psychologist, told him he wakes the dead for a living and asked who he was really trying to wake up. Ken says, "I would not be sitting with you had not my mother died."

What does Ken Burns mean by "emotional archaeology"?

Ken says his work isn't just excavating dry dates and facts. It's about the higher emotions we sometimes bury, and he's careful to say that isn't nostalgia or sentimentality, which he calls "the enemy of good anything." He says we have to drop the arrogance of the present and see people in the past with dimension, people who can grow or shrink, and the first-person voices, music and sound help do that.

What is Ken Burns's The American Buffalo about?

The American Buffalo is a two-part, four-hour film directed by Ken Burns, written by Dayton Duncan and produced by Julie Dunfey and Burns. It first aired on PBS on October 16 and 17, 2023. Ken describes it as a biography of an animal across 10,000 to 12,000 years of Native life, its near extinction in the 1800s and the many different people who brought it back.

Why did the American buffalo almost go extinct?

Ken says there were at least 15 million bison at the end of the Civil War, and within 20 years fewer than a thousand were left. Hunters killed them by the millions for their hides, which became leather belts to run the machines of the Industrial Revolution, and left the meat to rot. He calls it the largest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world, and says it devastated the Native peoples who depended on the buffalo.

Why does The American Buffalo center Native American voices?

Ken says waiting 30 years to make the film let the scholarship improve and let his team truly center Native American experience, not just pay it lip service. Native people lived with the buffalo sustainably for 10,000 to 12,000 years, so, as he puts it, the film asks them to tell us what they know. He names voices like George Horse Capture Jr., N. Scott Momaday and Rosalyn LaPier.

Where can I watch The American Buffalo?

The American Buffalo streams on PBS. The film's page on kenburns.com also lists Amazon, Apple TV (iTunes) and Shop PBS.

Chapters

Times match the YouTube video.

0:00 The New Yorker Cartoon
2:10 What Ken Burns Taught Christian
7:02 Losing His Mother at 11
14:56 Emotional Truth
18:08 Four Hours on The American Buffalo
21:10 The Largest Wildlife Slaughter in History
27:16 Rescuers for the Wrong Reasons
29:54 Do You Need to Destroy What You Love?

Watch the film

The American Buffalo streams on PBS. Credits and other ways to watch are on kenburns.com.

DocuView Deja View picks: This conversation pauses before the segment. Ken's picks, and Christian's and Jason's, are in Part 2. See every guest pick on the DocuView Deja View page.

About the guest

Ken Burns has been making documentary films for nearly 50 years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, his first film for PBS, he has directed and produced The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Prohibition, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, The Vietnam War, Country Music and The U.S. and the Holocaust, among many others. His films have won seventeen Emmy Awards and two Grammy Awards and earned two Oscar nominations. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards in 2008 and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2022. He has lived and worked in New Hampshire for more than four decades. Ken's bio

Related conversations

The conversation continues in Ken Burns, Part 2, on music, sound and voices, and Ken's DocuView Deja View picks. Ken's longtime collaborators Sarah Burns and David McMahon talk about their PBS film in Sarah Burns and David McMahon on Leonardo da Vinci. And Erik and Chris Ewers, who directed the PBS film Henry David Thoreau with Ken as an executive producer, talk about it in Erik and Chris Ewers on Thoreau.

About Documentary First

Documentary First is a weekly podcast about the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them. Host Christian Taylor, director of the award-winning The Girl Who Wore Freedom, talks with filmmakers, distributors, entertainment lawyers, actors and more, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-timers, across nearly 300 conversations. Each week brings one of two formats: a long-form conversation with the people behind films for HBO, Netflix, PBS and independent film, or The Deep Dive, where Christian takes one insight from a recent conversation and follows it wherever it leads. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5% of all podcasts worldwide. New episodes every week.

Follow the show | Support on Patreon

Full transcript

Jason Rugg: Welcome back to Documentary First, an inside look at a documentary filmmaker's journey. I'm your host, Jason Rugg, joined as always by Christian Taylor.

Christian: Hey Jason, good to see you.

Jason Rugg: Good to see you. And we're just gonna jump right into it because we actually have a phenomenal guest with us today, Ken Burns. Welcome Ken.

Ken Burns: Thank you.

Jason Rugg: So here's a quick intro for Ken Burns in case you don't know him somehow if you've listened this podcast We've talked about his work a lot So Ken Burns has been making documentary films for almost 50 years since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981 Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made including the Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks, America's Best Idea, Prohibition, The Roosevelts, and Intimate History, The Vietnam War, Country Music the US and the Holocaust, and today's topic, the American Buffalo.

Christian: And that is just to name a few.

Ken Burns: Yeah, I have to tell you guys that I have in my in my house I live I've lived in New Hampshire for the last 44 years of making those films and I have an old and now faded New Yorker cartoon that shows three men standing in hell the flames licking up around them and One guy says to the other two apparently my over 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing and of course they don't Yeah

Christian: so wise in the big picture of life.

Ken Burns: And actually I made a copy of it and I brought it down here and when I'm in New York and just remind myself to.

Christian: That is such a humble way, I think, to look at all of our work, because I think it's really true. In the big picture of things, what we do does not necessarily last. I think it's who we are. And that's what matters as we live and work with our families and our teams. And it's just...

Ken Burns: That's exactly right. communities you know I live in a tiny town in New Hampshire where all the MEs and the nominations and the this and the that plus 50 cents get you a cup of coffee and they're more interested in who you are in terms of character than you know with the resume as

Christian: Exactly. One of the things that really changed my life. I mean, it is so incredibly humbling for me to have you here. We have talked about you from the beginning of this podcast. I'm so sorry for getting emotional. I told myself I would not do this, but it's true. I would not be sitting here doing this podcast. I would not have completed my film if it was not for you. And I am not alone as filmmakers that would say that. It's true for so many over the course of your career, how you've taught us and inspired us. One of those humble things that you said, when I first thought of the idea of making a documentary, I thought, how hard can it be? I went to so many producers and they said, well, yeah, you should tell that story. I was like, okay, well, ignorance is bliss, how hard can it be? I was sat down to try to figure it out and I thought, how do I do this? and I looked online and I went to master class and I took your master class. And all I needed to do was watch the introduction. That's it. Because it gave me such hope. I mean, at that time I was trying to raise money and I remember you saying, I had these two binders on my desk of rejections.

Ken Burns: hundreds of them for one short hour film the first one Brooklyn Bridge, you know, and it just was there just say You think you know, you think you're this it's so hard to make a film And then even if you get the money that it's even harder to make a film

Christian: Once you've got it, you're like, oh my goodness, now I have to do this.

Ken Burns: I've caught the tiger now what am I gonna do with it?

Christian: Exactly. And then from there, you said, these things really shaped me. Two things. One was, as a producer, your job is to solve a million problems and then solve a million more. You are in the business of solving those problems, whether it's in story or whether it's in production.

Ken Burns: And the important thing is not to see problems in a pejorative sense, as we in our daily life speak of problems as something pejorative, but actually the necessary and I would say required friction in order to create something or to order to express something or to do something, whatever it might be. So the important thing is not just the perseverance to overcome the problems, but to see problems to welcome them. to see them as the inevitable part and process of trying to do what we try to do.

Christian: Well, and as you say, problems make the people if we see them that way. I think they refine us as humans. They, when we can overcome them, they make us realize, okay, I have a little more fortitude than I thought, but it pushes us further, I think. And that is what I learned from you, that you just, you said at some point, just keep going. No film school will teach you how to make a film. You have to just do it and don't quit, right?

Ken Burns: Yeah, there are techniques and there's lessons that can be learned, but actually it just comes down to putting one foot in front of the other and going forward because the inevitable problems, the inevitable vicissitudes, the big serious things are gonna come up and you just have to figure out what I used to say is bite off more than I could chew and then learn how to chew. That was the mantra for years and years and years. And now I just foolishly add more and more films to work on at the same time, like the guy on Ed Sullivan adding more plates to spin. And then at some point you kinda go, what am I doing? But I'll give you a hint, I am so greedy for the creative process. There's nothing, well, there are a few personal things, but there's nothing like making a film better. And even if you wake up the next day and go, boy, that sucks. you know, and change it. Even having the courage to say that sucked after you were certain, you know, and working with people, it's such a gloriously collaborative process as much as it at times makes you feel really lonely. You know, you're as good as the people you work with. It's a wonderful thing.

Christian: Yeah, we're going to get into that because you have some amazing people. I remember, I don't know if you've seen it, this diagram of the creative process where it goes like, this is great. And then, oh my gosh, this is horrible. And well, maybe I can do this. You know, and it kind of just goes like that over and over again. And till finally, like, maybe I did it, you know, and it's just like this ride, you know.

Ken Burns: Right. Yeah, it's a glorious one too.

Christian: Yeah, so I want to jump into a question that Jason, Jason came to our conversation a little bit before you came here saying, this is really what I want to know. And I did too, because you tell these vast stories, very expansive, but yet you make them feel incredibly personal. And as I was reading your own personal history, I do think it might go back to your origin story. and maybe what your father-in-law said to you at one point. And I really would love for you to unpack that for our listeners.

Ken Burns: Well, I think it's very important, no matter how big the topic, you can't just do it from 30,000 feet. There has to be a kind of bottom-up component in which you personalize it. The English romantic poet William Blake said, "'You could find the world in a grain of sand.'" And we do notice that the architecture of the atom is similar to the architecture of the solar system. And so I think there are ways in which you can approach story and the structuring of story in which you don't abandon a connection that makes... anybody know how no matter how vast the subject is feel connected because it has an individual life tethered to it in an intimate and an important way. So I grew up in a sad situation. My mom got cancer when I was two or three. I never had a moment of consciousness where I did not know that something bad was about to happen and she died when I was 11 a few. month short of my 12th birthday. And afterwards, my father, who was a big movie fan and had a strict curfew, would let me stay up on nights to watch movies. And I watched him cry. And he'd never cried when she was sick or when she died or at her sad funeral. Friends had remarked on this and I knew that it was a criticism. I felt defensive of my dad, but I had noticed that. And when I watched him cry at a movie, I just thought, that's what I want to do. I want to be. filmmaker. So 12, a few months after my mom died, I kind of had that calling in the best sense of the word. But you know, I did the same as my dad. I sort of buried stuff. And many years later, I noticed that the anniversary of her death was approaching and then receding. I could never be present. And I was now like close to 40. And I remember telling my late father-in-law, who was an eminent psychologist, that I couldn't do that. And then he said, oh, I bet you blew out the candles on your birthday cake wishing she'd come back. And I go, how you know? And then he'd say three or four other things that I did too as a boy and as a teenager. And I said, what's going on? He said, well, look what you do for a living. I said, what do you mean? He said, you wake the dead. Make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake? And we can say it's not dime sore psychology because it's coming from an eminent psychologist. But I do think that this tragic event was defining for me. I would not be sitting with you had not my mother died. Her gift in a bizarre way is having died and having transformed me. I mean, I was anxious and worried and everything leading up to the time. And and kind of buried a lot of that for a while until it was unbearable, but I dealt with it and a lot of my work, and I said it before I'd ever done work on myself, that it was emotional archeology. It wasn't just excavating dry dates and facts of the past. It was something that's not nostalgia, not sentimentality. That's the enemy of good anything, but it had to do with an emotional, higher emotions that we. sometimes Barry, we'd sometimes rather everything be really neat and one and one always equal two, but that actually the things that we value in our lives is when one and one equals three. So I've been interested in whatever that the emotional analogy is to that about finding that and then it all goes back and my mother's name was Lila, L-Y-L-A. Her mother was born in the 19th century also named Lila and for years since 1965, April 28th. We, you know, that name was draped in black crepe. And then my oldest daughter, who of course never met, her grandmother named her first child, who was born in 2011, nearly 13 years ago, Lila. And now we say it every day. And so there's been a kind of a lot of healing, but I don't think we've lost this curiosity of how you resurrect the past, how you treat the people who are gone, not with the arrogance that we in the present always impose on them. That is to say, we're here, you're not, we know more than you. We don't. There were conversations going on 5,000 years ago that were much more deep and profound than any we will get in today because those people were more deep and profound. And so we have to sort of remove that arrogance and extend to people in the past, not a one-dimensional, oh, that's a good guy, oh, that's a bad guy, she's, you know, this, that, it's. to see people that have dimension and that they can actually grow and move or shrink and contract. And that, the essence of willing the past alive, either in a photograph or sound effects or music or narration complimented by first-person voices so that you have a sense of how people spoke that's maybe anachronistically different than how we speak today, but about emotions that are exactly the same. So if all of that kind of goes into a big stew. that allows you to kind of tell stories, I think without that arrogance of, you know, I'm just gonna use this to make a score of political point. Politics is so binary and so superficial. It's everything, you know, it's red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, whatever it is, and none of that really exists in nature. It's always something in motion, and if you can capture that motion, you can capture the complexity, the undertow, then you're there. I mean, we have a scientist been up there for years and years. neon sign and lowercase cursive that says it's complicated in the editing room, the main editing room, because you want people, you know, you're filmmakers, you know, if you've got a scene that's working, you really don't want to touch it. But in my job, I find contradictory information all the time, and you have to touch it. And I've spent nearly 50 years sort of going, okay, let's make it more, you know, going in and adding that thing that, you know, either takes away from somebody or gives to somebody and that somebody might be Abraham Lincoln. You know, you're finding out that he wanted to recolonize all Black people to South America or Africa as late as April of 61. That's when the Civil War started. Ouch, yep, got to put it in. Or or gives, you know, that you begin to find out that this kind of ambitious and kind of playboy, you know, guy is stricken with infantile paralysis, which usually happens when you're a kid, but at 39 years old, and he never walks again unaided, and he is able to lift us out of the depression and the Second World War. I'm speaking, of course, of FDR, but I mean, those are famous boldface names, but I can tell you, you know, people who landed at Normandy, who did not have a real... staking it other than ideas. Like they weren't getting territory, there was no financial reward, they were doing it because of ideas. You know, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who's a housewife, you know, married with kids, who articulates in America the most essential principles of feminist equality that have ever been expressed.

Christian: I'm so glad you unpacked that because I think that what you said reveals that deep well that I have always seen in you because I think your heart is laid bare in all of your films that way. And I think as filmmakers, what I hear you saying is it is incredibly important to bring our own history and be very vulnerable when we tell our stories. And I, you know, as I look back at my own work with The Girl Who Wore Freedom, At some point in the beginning, it dawned on me that my son Hunter, who was the reason the whole story began, I would not have had that story without him. And yet there was a time where I was married, I wasn't married and I was pregnant, and I was looking to have an abortion. And it was the most painful moment that I ever had. And yet I looked in the mirror and I said, I wanna live what I say I believe. And I want to give this child life. And I want to take responsibility for that, no matter how hard it is. And in that painful choice, gave me life and changed my life, not only at that moment, but here, 35 years later. And I do think what I hear you saying is we must bring all of those joys and pains to our work, and be vulnerable. and relate with our subjects.

Ken Burns: Well, you know, I think that's right. I think at least in the kind of emotional archeology that I'm involved in, it sounds like that you're involved in that that's true. You know, my friend, Werner Herzog, who makes unbelievable documentaries once turned to me on a panel and said, you know, I am interested in an ecstatic truth. and my friend Ken is interested in an emotional truth. I He looked to Michael Moore and he said, you're interested in a physical truth, you know? And so you begin to realize there's lots of ways. Tolstoy said that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another. I fully believe that you cannot. communicate unless you're willing to also bear some of that emotional stuff. And then I think we've spent too much of our lives, whatever our job is, including documentary filmmakers, trying to make things be okay. You know, kind of the simplest, the path of least resistance, comfortable, the equivalent of a gated community. We want things to run well and smoothly. But it's in fact the times when they don't, when our world is upended, that we actually have the possibility for some kind of growth and then perhaps the possibility to share the sort of mechanics and pain as well as the understandings that issue from that in our own work. Humility is an important part. Being honorable is an old 19th century word that doesn't really get applied much today. But all of these principles are hugely important, I think, to the... to whatever alchemy it is.

Christian: Yeah, and I love what you said previously about it being complicated and how that's assigned in your editing room because that brings us to the story that we're here to talk about today. And that's your work that's premiering on PBS on October 16 and 17, The American Buffalo. It is a four hour remarkable. series that I recommend everybody watch. It was transformative to me. And I want to say how important it is that you watch both. I mean, they are long and you are well known for doing these long stories. I believe it's almost two hours each episode. But the second episode is vitally important as well as the first. And throughout that entire thing, I'm going to be honest with you. and reveal my ignorance and stupidity and sadness is that when I first saw that you were doing the American Buffalo, I thought, how in the world can anybody do a four hour series on the American Buffalo? And it'd be interesting. I mean, we know that they were here in droves and then they disappeared and it was largely our responsibility and now we're trying to bring them back. And I'm like, how complicated can that be? And then I began to watch and my mind was blown by what I didn't know. I was just, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe how complicated it was. And I just was blown away by the fact that you don't judge us and you don't erase history. Now you do tell the truth. And so sometimes that may come across to some people as judging, but not in a harsh way. It is saying this is who we are. our good, our bad, our neutral. And I think we need to embrace that and accept it. And I think what I love with the second episode is that you call us to be our best selves. You show us how people are starting to do that. So it sets an example for how we can do that. And so I'd love for you just to talk more about that.

Ken Burns: Yeah, well that's an interesting point. We sort of saw this two-part series as the first two acts as we were finishing up of a three act play. And that third act play is what are you gonna do now? You've saved the buffalo, it's no longer going extinct. That's not a problem. It's a great parable of de-extinction after descending pretty low into the dynamics which we'll get into of our slaughter. But do you just want a zoo animal? Do you just want a corral animal? Or do you want to bison back where they were wild and free? And what kind of commitments could you make to helping create the ecosystems and the habitats that would make that possible? So there's a kind of sense that there's something to be written by all of us if we choose to read it. You don't have to, the film's not polemical. It's just saying this is what it was. But let's go back and say what it was. There were at least... at the beginning of the 19th century, 35 million buffalo. There probably had been 70 before Columbus, but pressures and contact with the outside world put market pressures initially on the buffalo, which was used by native people for 10,000 years as all of their subsistence, everything. They used everything from the tail to the snout. They even used the snort, which was worked into their rituals. They used the waste for fires, everything. When you were born, you were swaddled in a buffalo blanket. When you died, you were shrouded in a buffalo blanket. And every part of the animal was used for tools or weapons or whatever it might be. And they were revered in return for killing them, as we say. they revered them and the buffalo became part of many native tribes, sort of central creation myth. And for some tribes on the plains, the central story of their myth, the Kiowas, for example, believe creation starts when the buffaloes walk out of a mountain in the Wichita Mountains in what is now Oklahoma. Into this came white European, white Americans who exerted the greatest market pressure so that by the end of the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century, there's at least 15 million bison. That's a lot of bison. And within 20 years, they're gone. Turns out their leather would make supple belts to run the machines of the Industrial Revolution. Leather was the fifth largest industry. And so we sent hide hunters by the thousands. out to just kill the buffalo for their hides by the millions. And they just stripped the hides off and took them back leaving 800 pounds of meat to rot the bones, the head, the horns, the hoofs. Just the place was a stinking wrench, wretched smell and odor that people described. And the native peoples there were saying, killing the buffalo is the end of history for us. So imagine... is the way TV dramas sometimes do some supernatural thing in which all of our commissaries, all of our grocery stores, and all of our churches and mosques and synagogues disappeared. You know, where would we be left? And that's essentially what we did to the Native people. And it was, as one of the Native American scholars said in the film, a twofer, you know? You killed for the market stuff, for your leather to run the Industrial Revolution, but you killed the Native American. Killed the buffalo, killed the Indians. and that Americans wasn't written policy, but it was articulated policy from the highest levels to the army, to businessmen, to whatever, that you would make the Native Americans at least docile if not kill them. And it's the largest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world. It's other animals like elk and grizzly that are happening in the 19th century too. But the largest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world is on us. And it had this concurrent devastating effect on native people. So back up 30 years, we wanted to do a biography of the buffalo. And it wasn't a joke because we do lots of biographies, maybe a couple dozen of them. And our big series are also the constituent building blocks are more often than not biography. So we just knew that if you did the buffalo, you'd be doing 10 to 12,000 years, 600 generations of experience that native people. in a sustainable fashion with this animal. It's a much better meat, much healthier meat, than cattle, than cows. And then the story of the people who have maybe six generations, who then severed this. There are now, you know, if you take away your commissary and your church, the trauma is beyond belief, and it's only now separated after 150 years, or 200, or 250 years, in the case of some tribes, the farther off you get from the Great Plains. because the Buffalo were sea to shining sea. The second largest city in New York is not named Buffalo for nothing. The Jamestown settlers went up the Potomac exploring and found a huge herd in what is now Washington, DC. It's just, they've been there, and they got confined by the beginning of the 19th century, and they're still in the tens and tens of millions. And we still manage to bring them this close, fewer than 1,000, most of them in zoos and in private collections, and some. maybe fewer than 200 roaming wild and free. We just don't know a few dozen in Yellowstone and other places where hunters hadn't gotten to them and there were already poachers there. And so it's this horrible tragedy. And then suddenly a variety of people, some of them for the wrong reasons of racism and white supremacy and nationalism, decide we have to save the Buffalo. And the conservation movement is born for a lot of competing reasons, including the desire to continue to hunt. in a sustainable fashion. And it's such a complicated and such a fascinating story. And for, I'm glad we waited 30 years. We've done stuff on the Buffalo and the National Parks film. We've done Lewis and Clark. We've done it in the West in the mid-90s. But waiting this long permitted us to, I hope, be better filmmakers for the scholarship to improve, but also for us to have the ability to just center Native American experience. It is not just. paying lip service. It is not just saying, oh, and there are other points of view. It is not just a kind of paternalistic, even patronizing view. It's saying, these people have experience for 10, 12,000 years. We do not. Tell us what you know about this animal, about the story, about what's going on. And so it privileges to use the modern term, Native American viewpoints. But it just allows, you know, even characters that don't go far enough. TR is still... probably a racist and a white supremacist, even though he moves from like, okay, the buffalo's gonna go extinct, that's not too bad, Theodore Roosevelt, to let's save the buffalo, right? Others like William T. Hornaday, who's the chief taxidermist for the Smithsonian is out killing them, then says, maybe that's not a good idea, starts the National Zoo and the Bronx Zoo, that's all good, but probably never loses, we know never loses his animus towards native peoples. And then there are people like Charlie Goodnight, who's in... Texas Ranger, Indian fighter, Indian killer, buffalo killer, whose wife asks him to save some buffalo. They have a herd. He repairs his relationships with native people, and he goes a long distance. Buffalo Bill goes a long distance. Michelle Pablo, who's got the largest private herd in the country up near the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, Northwest. Montana is a great story. So you begin to realize it's gonna take everybody to do it, and not everybody's gonna do it for the right reason. You know, and you don't excuse them. Being a eugenicist, which is that pseudo-science that says, I never thought the last film we did was the US and the Holocaust, and eugenics played a big part because it convinces people to be anti-Semitic and racist and anti-immigrant and whatever. It basically postulates that you could create a hierarchy of races, of ethnicities, and even nationalities, which is incredible bunk. There's only one race. That's the human race. Everybody's the same. everybody's equal and you know all of our problems come out of not having communication between equals. So this was an attempt to just sort of look at all of this stuff and obviously have to unbelievably so go back into eugenics. The key maybe is that in 1913 we come out with an Indian head nickel and on the back side is a buffalo. We know the Native American it's modeled after. We know the Buffalo is modeled, you know, Black Lightning, who was then sent down to the meat packing district in Manhattan and killed, slaughtered, and parted out for steaks and parts. And you begin to realize that here we are suddenly, they're now the symbols of the United States. Like the sculptor, Frazier, said, I wanted to design a coin in which you would not be mistaken for the... the coin of any other country. So what does he pick? He picks a Native American head and a buffalo. And this now means us. So we're now romanticizing, even fetishizing, two entities that we've spent the last century trying to eliminate. And it prompts George Horsecaptured Jr., who's one of the more potent Native American speakers in the film, to comment. He says, I just have to ask you a question. Do you need to destroy what you love? So at the heart... of that question and many others, he and others ask in the film, makes this story not just, oh yeah, they're Buffalo. I didn't really realize how they nearly were extinct and isn't it good that they're back, which is, you know, a 32nd film, how difficult it was to cut it down to four hours. And as people tell us, and I've seen it, they've wept throughout it and particularly at the end where there is so much redemptive reconciliation spirit on the part of Native Americans, even to us. who perpetrated this tragedy, not just on their animal, but on them and their livelihoods and their religion. How, and how much active work is going on today? It's just a great, great story. And I'm just glad we waited.

Christian: Yeah, you know, I, that is a beautiful summary of, of your film, your film series. And I'm so glad you brought that quote up about George Horses capture. I wrote it right down. I was going to ask you to give it myself. So.

Ken Burns: He's from a small tribe called the Anani, A-A-N-I-I-I-H. And they're in North Central Montana. They're, his people are on, and he is on the Fort Belknap Reservation, and they're around Buffalo now. And now we can say that the Inner Tribal Buffalo Council, 80 different tribes have herds of buffalo, and they are actually then. helping other tribes, what's called rematriation, bringing Buffalo back to tribes that have been separate. And there's one of our producers, Julianna Branham, who is a Comanche and related to another character that I didn't bring up, Kwana Parker, just had made a small film called Homecoming that's so beautiful and moving. And it shows Jason Baldis, who's on the Shoshone reservation, the Wind River reservation of Wyoming. rematriating Buffalo all the way to Wisconsin to the Menominee. And it's like they look at each other in the eyes and it's like, where have you been? It's just, it's like Odysseus coming back from the Trojan Wars. It's like, you know, where have you been? Both people, Buffalo as well as the people, the humans that are seeing it.

Christian: Yeah, so beautiful. I mean, the people that you interviewed from the historians to the Native Americans to just, I mean, everyone in the film is so articulate and compelling and interesting. And we're gonna.

Ken Burns: And can I say also that some of those Native Americans are scholars too. So I mean, they're not mutually exclusive. There's Rosalind Lapierre, who is a Blackfeet Métis Indian, also from Montana, who teaches at the University of Illinois and Jermaine White is an educator and scholar. And so, and many other people have risen through the ranks of the park service system and Scott Mamadé is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and novelist.

Christian: Yeah, she's amazing.

Ken Burns: a Kiowa who can speak to the centrality of the buffalo and the Kiowa, he says, they're our brethren, it's our blood, they're in our blood memory. We recognize each other. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Christian: Yeah, yeah. No, that's okay, I was just gonna say, we wanna continue this conversation. There's just so much to say about this film and about your work. We're gonna pause here. We're not gonna do docu-view deja vu in this segment. We're gonna do it in next week's segment. Exciting news for you, Ken, we are going to release this before the American Buffalo premieres on the 16th because we really want people to watch it. And then we'll follow up with the second episode. So we're gonna close here. Thank you so much for your time. I thank you for coming back next week to unpack this more. It has been an incredible honor. So thank you so much. All right, Jacey, you wanna take us out?