Ep. 472: The American Buffalo with Ken Burns

Episode Transcript
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(00:41):
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You'll find it. Thank you, everybody. Now back to regular programming.
All right, everybody, we're here with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan.

(04:21):
When I say ken Burns, I mean that Ken Burns.
His first feature film came out in nineteen eighty one,
about the Brooklyn Bridge. Since then he has made over
three dozen films. Now, in a recent conversation you mentioned
to me thirty films, but you said about now was
surprised that someone would say about Well, I.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
Never count them in that weird sort of way. I
know how many kids I have, but I I didn't.
PBS says forty now, and it's gonna pass that in.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
But the funny French Schnyder says, three dozen. Listen, the.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Most important thing is that one could be a one
hour film and one could be a ten part eighteen
nineteen hour film. This still counts as one. So whatever
it is, it's a lot of hours.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, and since but you agree, you have certitude that
your first film was Brooklyn Bridge in nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Actually, PBS and an app that we have called unim
which is sort of curating the evergreen themes that are
in our film. Actually not an app, it's a website
Unham as an e plurbus. Unham has released the film
I made in college as my senior thesis at Hampshire
College about Old Sturbridge village kind of the colonial Williamsburg

(05:37):
of New England, which is called Working in World, New England.
And it's seventeen ninety to eighteen forty kind of got
five to it and it's all live stuff. But the
last shot is a pan across a painting. Oops.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Oh, the birth is the genesis moments of the effect.
So there's forty one films major works on the Civil
War called the Civil War or and and I want
to tell you I hadn't told you this before. You've
heard this hundreds of times from thousands of people. That

(06:09):
overtook like that consumed our family life. That film even
even to where my parents bought the CD, would play
the music in.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
The house, my children, like you, all four of them.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
It was just like it consumed people in a way,
and it was it created at that time. You know,
now things are so diffuse and dispersed, but it was
like one of those recognized is one of those elements
of sort of like a shared It was unifying, like

(06:43):
a shared national experience.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
You know, it's pretty interesting that something that tore us
in two became something that unified us in a in
a way, I think we thought we knew about the
Civil War and had kind of super views about it,
or ideas or even mythologies that were incorrect, and this

(07:05):
was sort of trying to tell a really deep, complicated story,
and I think people wanted to know. It's the most
important event in American history, in American history, and so
everything that we were led up to it and everything
that we've become has issued from it. So I think
there was a curiosity, no matter what idiot was making

(07:26):
the film, that people would be drawn to where we
came from. And the simplest thing I can say is
that before the Civil War, when speaking about our country,
we said the United States are plural, which is grammatically correct.
After the war, we said the United States is and
we still to this day, which is wrong. These group

(07:47):
of people is nice, is ungrammatical. So what it did
is take people when Lee was offered the head of
the Union Army and turned it down. He said I
cannot raise my sword into my country, by which he
meant Virginia. After that, when you said your country, you
met the United States of America. And so that's just

(08:08):
one hell of a good story. And basically the whole
eleven and a half twelve hours is how an r
became it is. Didn't solve a lot of things about race,
didn't solve a lot of other things, but it sure
at least for a while, made us.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
It is so also World War Two, A major work
on World War two called The War, the Vietnam War,
also the dust Bowl, Country Music, the National Parks, the
West Jazz, and then projects centered around pivotal American figures,
including Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Jackie Robinson, and currently working

(08:47):
on and this is what it's a little bit of
surprise in here, working working on a film about LBJ.
Working on a film about the American Revolution, which I
want to ask you about. But Leonardo da Vinci, Yeah,
so that's not America.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
So in dating, so when I was thinking about doing
Benjamin Franklin, I had dinner one night with one of
his biographers, Walter Isaacson, who's a dear friend maybe no
longer heard my hesitation. And Walter and I were having

(09:21):
dinner in Washington, d C. And all of a sudden
he started to try to sell me a twofer. He said,
you know, you know, he's this great scientist and artist,
a political artist and writer. You know he's gonna argue
he's I think, undeniably the greatest American writer of the
eighteenth century. And he's funny and all of this. But
you know, and Walter had done another biography on Leonardo

(09:43):
and he said, same thing. You've got this guy who's
this great scientist but also this great artist, and you
know you should do I said, look, I don't do
a non American topics. I only do American topics. But
I walked out and was talking to one of one
of the producing teams that produced the Central Mark five
and that Jackie Robinson biography that you mentioned and the
Muhammad Ali thing, and I said, Leonardo.

Speaker 4 (10:06):
They said, yes, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
So I thought, why the hell not? You know, why
be stuck. We'll tell you why not my mid sixties.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Because it's it's you're you're an America.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
Wait till you see, wait you see we're we're but
we're halfway through editing and it's just so exciting and riveting.
And Sarah, my oldest daughter, who's that partner, and her husband,
David McMahon, who is the other partner. I've just returned
from a year with two of my four grandchildren in Florence,
and what we've got is just an amazing stuff. And

(10:37):
let's remember it's Florentine Films. So we were ment no,
I see that eventually to get to somebody in in Florence, right,
So well.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
I think there's gonna be there's gonna be a lot
of uh, you're gonna have to explain that, probably a
whole bunch.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
The biggest thing is the is the American Revolution. That's
just consuming almost all of my bandwidth.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, you mentioned to me just in passing, and of
course we need to get to what we're here to
talk about, which is your your new film, The American Buffalo.
But you mentioned to me something I wish I wish
I could remember more precisely. You said, you're working on
the American Revolution and you mentioned I think concord and

(11:21):
he said, and it's not what people think, or you know,
what is the because I guess it's not helpless. I
can't remember what exactly said, but you you intimated that
there's a that there's an element that has become misunderstood
about the American Revolution.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Perhaps well like the Civil War, it's less misunderstood, it's
just not understood. And that's the work that we try
to do is a pretty deep dive that helps to
sort of dissolve the you know, the the arteries that
are clogged with the false stories that it wasn't the
Civil War wasn't about slavery. It was about slavery. There's
no mention of states rights or and all of the

(12:00):
cation or interposition. In the South Carolina Declaration of Secession,
it mentioned slavery an awful lot. That's what it's about.
The Ku Kluk clan are not the heroes of the
post Civil War era. That's what birth of a nation
and gone with the winds suggests. So we begin to
inherit a lot of stuff, and we think that the
people who fought against the British were sturdy New England

(12:22):
of farmers and Virginia, you know, farmers, and they left
their work and their job the Minuteman idea, and we
only know Lexington and conquered. We kind of know Washington
crossing the Delaware for Trenton at Christmas Day. People think
it's Christmas Eve and then that's it, and they don't
know that the biggest battle of the entire thing is
the Battle of Long Island or Brooklyn, where Washington makes

(12:46):
classic mistakes. Another big mistake is Brandywine, the same mistake Germantown.
All of these stuff Sarah Toogain, which Washington's not involved
as a great victory. So we want to go through
the military history and get you to know. You to
know what Guilford Courthouse was about in South Carolina, or
cow Pens or Camden all in South Carolina. We want
you to know about King's Mountain and Yorktown and the

(13:09):
places where it's fault. It's like a three part opera,
you know, in New England, Central States, and then South Amerka.
But it's also a much more complicated picture. It isn't
just fifty five white guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, right.
A lot of these guys are slave owners. A lot
of them are trying to get Indian land. A lot
of this is about getting Indian land, and so you're

(13:30):
now dealing with slavery, freed slaves, runaway slaves. British are
offering freedom. If you belong to a rebel, if you
belong to somebody who's loyalists, forget it. You're still a slave, right.
So there's unbelievably complicated dynamics. Women aren't involved from the
very beginning, and any army is traveling, the American army particularly,
but also the British and Hashian have wives and children

(13:53):
and people that are there involved in it. And you've
got French, and you've got German, and you've got British people.
Some of the British people are pro American, some are
obviously vociferously not. There's a Canadian dimension. There's loyalists among us.
At any given table, you might have twenty thirty percent
our favoring staying with the ground. A lot of people

(14:14):
just remain neutral. So it is our civil war is
not a civil war. There's not huge civilian deaths except
in Missouri and Kansas related to the issues of the
civil War. You know, two people die in Gettysburg. That's
not what happens in a civil war. It's a sectional war.
It is North against South. The revolution is a bloody,

(14:37):
violent civil war that engages all Americans Native Americans.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Well, when you said about civil war, you mean that
there were not a lot of non combatant dot.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
Right people who didn't he carry a rifle at that moment,
are tird and feathered because they're a loyalist. I mean,
we just made a film on Franklin, and Franklin's own son,
William was the royal governor of New Jersey, deposed, imprisoned,
eventually released, presumed to go to England and get out

(15:07):
of the thing. Instead, he starts a terrorist organization dedicated
to murdering patriots. Because, by the way, there are lots
of patriot organizations dedicated to murdering loyalists. And that means
it's right within your own community, and it's from New
Hampshire down to Georgia. Georgia's more more loyalists, at least

(15:28):
you know in the beginning than say New Hampshire and
the New England states are, particularly in Massachusetts. But this changes.
They start a southern strategy, beginning with Savannah and then
moving to Charleston because they presume that this loyalist population
will help them pacify. As a word from Vietnam, pacify

(15:48):
the countryside never happens, and so they kind of shrugged
their shoulders and said, well, maybe we should just go
up to Virginia, which is the death knell of the
British attempt to keep these rebellious calmnists, none of whom
really know much about the other. The Carolinas do, but
everybody else is pretty much an independent vassal state. Plus

(16:09):
to the west there's forty or fifty other nations.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, yeah, I think we learned in doing Franklin. At
least it was driven home to me, not just because
Franklin and his son, but in the Revolutionary Wars the
Civil War. Also because there is no state, there's probably
no town in the thirteen Colonies that itself wasn't didn't

(16:36):
have people on different sides.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Oh I see, yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
And I remember when we were working on the West
and writing about bleeding Kansas and Missouri, and at that
time the wars in Bosnian you know what used to
be hungry. We're going on with the bloody just murders
of your neighbors, and I thought, well, that is a

(17:02):
civil war. Yeah, you know, in the classic sense that
people who are neighbors and collected together or you know,
in a location are fighting each other.

Speaker 4 (17:17):
And this applies to everybody.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
So the oldest functioning democracy on the continent is the
Hodna Shone, often referred to as the Iroquois Confederation, made
up of six first five and then six nations. And
what the revolution does is it splits them. Some are thinking,
maybe we'll get a better deal with the Americans, but

(17:39):
most of them know that they should. They know the
British from history, and they're super worried, correctly that the
whole impulse of the colonists is to move westward and
take their land. In fact, our whole series begins with
we know you know how valuable our lands are. We
know you want to take that. Oh well, because that's
what this is about.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
You refer to the reward system. Well, there were like participants.
Well in the participates on the American side were often
rewarded land.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
That often, if you if you signed up for the duration,
you got twenty bucks. If you got signed up for
three years, you got ten bucks. But the twenty buck
folks were also palm promised Indian But the revolution happens
for really interesting reasons. One is when the British win
the French and Indian War, which the rest of the
world calls the Seven Years War. They got a huge

(18:31):
empire and they can't pay for it. They're bankrupt from
the war. And so they see the settlers streaming people, English, Irish,
German settlers streaming over the Appalachians in the Indian territory,
and the Indians are fighting back and saying, no, you
can't take our land. So they do a demarcation line
and say you can't go over the Appalachians. Like, go, what,
I have an opportunity to own land for the first

(18:52):
time in one thousand and fifteen hundred years in my
family's history. What are you going to do that? And oh,
by the way, we're so broke, we're going to begin
to acts. The least tax people on earth, the American colonists,
And so this is what it is. But there's always
that pressure to move across the Appalachian and a great
deal of the killing of the American Revolution takes place

(19:15):
not just from Lexington conquered in Boston, down you know,
to here, or up to Quebec or Taykwon de Rog.
It's all there, and we detail it to Yorktown down
to Charleston and Savannah and even into a mobile. But
it's in upstate New York with Native people being killed
and having their villages. These are not plains Indians nomadic people.

(19:37):
These are people with cities and towns and farms and orchards,
having scorched earth policy. You know. Washington was called by
many of the Iroquois Confederation tribes the town destroyer, and
they refer to the revolution as the Whirlwind. It also

(19:57):
happened in the Southeast, and it all so happened in
the Midwest, particularly with George Rogers Clark, who's just he's
out to he's the Attila, the hunt of the story.
He's out to just kill as many Indians as he can,
to destroy as many villages to make that area which
will later become the Northwest Territories, you know, suitable for settling.

(20:19):
So it's a super complicated story, and yet it engages
some of the most noble aspirations of humankind periods. So
that when someone came up to me and said, our
last film that was broadcast was called The US and
the Holocaust, I said, do you think after the birth
of Christ, the most important event in world history is
the Holocaust? I said, no, it's the birth of the

(20:41):
United States.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
That's great. I can't wait to see that one. How
long will that one be?

Speaker 3 (20:47):
That'll be twelve hours without a single photograph, right, that's
the big challenge that we practiced in Franklin. I don't
mean to suggest that it was easy. And Lewis and Clark,
which is how you tell a story in which it's
pre photographic, no photographs, no newsreel, no combat footage, no
combat footed Whenever I travel and I give a species
and if anybody's got a photograph from their relations, please

(21:08):
there giving my address, please send it in. But what
happens is that necessity is a mother of invention, And
so we begin to find new strategies like going out
and filming yourself graveyard gravestones and and and trees and
atmospherics what Emily Dickinson called the far theatricals of day sunrises,

(21:29):
sunrit sets, and and try to find new ways to
do it. And it's beginning to work. We're knock on wood,
you know, we've been editing now for several months, and
and have you know, we're beginning to feel like we
can exhale a little bit.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, uh, I also want to do a better job
of introducing Dayton Duncan after our preamble about the forthcoming
revolutionary film American Revolution. Dayton Duncan has written and produced
many films with Ken Burns country Music. You can help
me fill in the list Country Music, Lewis and Clark,
Mark Twain, The West, Dustball, dust Bowl, National Parks, National Parks.

Speaker 2 (22:07):
Ratios, Drive, Ratio's Drive about the first car trip across
the United States in nineteen oh three.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
The West, The West, but also worked on Civil War,
you know, lots of different projects.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Yeah, I would, because we're friends. As I was writing books,
Ken would read the books that I was working on
in progress, and he'd asked me to sit in and
look at films in progress, not as an expert on
the topic, but it's just somebody who shares his passion
for narrative storytelling. And I'd say, well, this is really working.

(22:41):
And I was confused, here, this is dragging here. I was,
you know that do more of this and a little
less of this and that kind of thing. So I
fiddled around on the ones I didn't produce and write,
but was dedicated and lucky to work with him on
ones that were particul clear passion or interest to me.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
How'd you guys meet that's good story. Did you meet
through Dayton's books or yep?

Speaker 3 (23:07):
I I you know, when I decided to become a
documentary filmmaker. Strike one on PBS, Strike two in American History,
Strike three, Ye're out. I moved from New York City
to Walpole, New Hampshire, to the house i'm living in now,
to the bedroom I still sleep in forty four years ago.

(23:27):
But before that, in order to survive, we would take
day jobs from the BBC, who didn't want to send
a union crew from New York City all the way
up and incur all these expenses. And we just said
we won't charge per deems. We'll just get where you
need to be in New England, which was, you know,
waking up at one am to go be ready to
shoot at six am, to finish at midnight, to drive

(23:49):
another six hours ago on what kind of project like
one day shoot. So one day the BBC was interviewing
the Governor of New Hampshire, who was active in sort
of the adapt active reuse of some of the old
abandoned mills, the Amiskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. That
governor was named Hugh Gallen and his chief of staff

(24:10):
was Dayton Duncan. So the first time I met Golrok
is when.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
We wanted to talk to Hugh Gallan. They had to
go through Mate, yes.

Speaker 3 (24:16):
And he had a reputation already is kind of this tough.
So we did a shoot and we sort of noticed
each other, and I think he thought, oh, this child
is making a film, what is he doing? But it
turned out all right, And then later we'd bump into
each other at sort of political events in the state.
It's a small state and intimate. And then when I

(24:37):
was getting married, I had crossed every t and dotted
every eye except the very important marriage license, and I
needed to cut through red tape in about a day
and a half. So I called my buddy. Eventually our
wives and then my children and his children became the

(24:59):
dayon moved here, and so.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
He gave me.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
One of the books he did give me was Out West,
which is this magnificent story of Lewis and Clark, but
it's also the story of his story engaging the Lewis
and Clark trail. And I went to date and I
said man, this is a really great film. We're not
going to tell your story, but let's tell Lewis and Clark.
And so we had some stuff in the way, like
the Civil War and baseball in the West. But you know,

(25:24):
one of the most satisfying parts of my professional experience
has been working with Dayton, particularly on Lewis and Clark,
particularly out on the road in Montana, driving from one
town to another and looking and making jokes about, well, well,
it looks like Winnifred is way up there, and what
you know. Dayton would say, what are you going to

(25:46):
get when do we get into town? I said, well,
I think I'll start with a cold vs. Swas and
then I'm going to move to a salad of odive
with a vinaigrette dressing, and then I will have probably
either the Chateau Brion or the Dover Soul, and then
I hope to follow it off with a beautiful crem breulat.

(26:07):
And then there would be a beat and he'd say,
what do you want on your cheeseburger? And so we
would go into town and we go to the cafe
and we get a delicious cheeseburger, and then I'd repeat
it the other way I would. I would say to Dayton, well,
you know, we're coming up on it. Where do you
what do you think we should get? And he would
elaborate thing and then I would go, what do you

(26:27):
want on your cheeseburger? So that's it was. It was
our routine. But in that time we got we've you know,
Dayton had already known the West, but I fell in
love with it, and and he was the guide and
we'd be drinking fresca.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Yeah, I think one of the joys of my life.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I
was with you the first time that you were ever
in South Dakota. In North Dakota, yes, and maybe Montana.
And the first time you ever saw any buffalo for
some that wasn't.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah, I saw a buffalo when I was a little boy.
And it's either Philadelphia or Baltimore. I don't remember what zoo.
And I'd already's been animated as an anthropologist, sons by
native people and buffaloes and stuff like that. But I
saw a buffalo.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
At the ranch where years later The Dances with Wolves
was shot. Oh, the ranch north of Pier that was
the Halk Ranch at that time, I've had a triple
U I think was the name of the ranch. They
had one of the largest herds in America at the time,
and I had met the guy that the rancher when

(27:35):
I was doing my book out West and interviewed him.
But then so we filmed there. But that was what
I was going to say. One of the joys of
my life was on those moments with Ken, even though
you know we're doing ridiculous hours to get up and
shoot at dawn and then drive and find the place

(27:55):
we're going to shoot next and go tell sunset in
the northern plains and the middle of the summer, so
you're talking about sunrise at four o'clock and sunset at ten.
But of just seeing his was important to me when
we were making that film, of seeing his eyes so

(28:16):
wide at the landscape, encountering the landscape of the Great Plains,
and it reminded me that we needed to make sure
in our film that we somehow because we can't show
the faces of Lewis and Clark and the members of
the Core of Discovery. We were standing with them looking

(28:38):
at it and using their quotes from their journals, but
to make sure we got across the sense of wonder
that they had because they know they came from this
part of the country up in New England and the
East where basically you have vertical views through gaps and
trees and stuff. And now you're in this horizontal world

(29:01):
and you're encountering animals that, as they would write in
their journals, not known back in the United States. I
mean they're writing that when they're in Nebraska and South Dakota.
They're talking about back in the States, you don't have
these things that barking dogs and piet sheens and prairie
dogs as John Ordway called them, and that's what they became.

(29:24):
And antelope and you know, jack rabbits and the and
bison they knew about, but because they used to be
in the East Coast, but not in those numbers and
the astonishing numbers grizzly bears living on the plains elk

(29:46):
elk one was a plain's animal at one time, and
just this wonderland of landscape and wildlife that they encountered
as the first US citizens to ever go that far west,
and as the first US citizens, white citizens to see.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
In that.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
You know, paradise of wonderland of wildlife and landscape, and
for me that's the marker, you know, that was what
the West was after the United States had claimed it
through the Louisiana Purchase but didn't control it. But it
was a view of a land and a people and

(30:31):
animals that in the next eighty years would be irrevocably changed.
And so they were the first in one respect, and
they were the last in another respect to encounter that
place that had been evolving for me ten thousand years
before the United States as officially was entering into it.

(30:55):
And my book Out West was about the difference between
what they saw and what I saw, and to tell
the history of the West in between those they saw.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
They saw Buffalo everywhere.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
It'd be like going to Kenya, right and not seeing
all the things you can see in Kenya anymore. Right,
that there's a kind of silence and a kind of
mono culture now to the prairies when it was, as
they say, are serengetti. And that's I think I think

(31:28):
we tried. I think we accomplished in Lewis and Clark,
and I think again in the Buffalo film, to get
a sense of just how filled the planes were with
species of both both flora as well as fauna, and
how what it would be like to imagine or now
reimagine the possibilities that there were elk, there were grizzlies,

(31:52):
there were wolves and so now and in a variety
of plant life that is just a spectacular eden as
as as day and says Is as people talked about it,
you know, this was this was our new the new
territory we were acquiring, and it was just full. And
then very shortly afterwards it's not full. The rounds have disappeared.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yeah, Lewis and Clark, I say, we just saw them.
And just talking about buffalo. They saw them everywhere. Once
they reached what's now South Dakota and the plains that
I crossed in the early eighties, retracing their route, it
was a wildlife desert now, uh. And to find to
see buffalo out on a range took a lot of work.

(32:37):
I mean I had as a reporter, had to you know,
dig down to find out work. And I go see
some you know, and talk and learn a little bit
about them. And so South Dakota and then my friend
became my friend through that Gerard Baker who's in our
in our Lewis and Clark film, and also in our

(32:59):
National Parks film, and also in the West Colman, and
also in this Buffalo of Them Who's a Mandanadatsa the
tribes that sheltered Lewis and Clark in the winter of
eighteen o four eighteen o five. I got to know
him very well. But at one point he became the
district ranger of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the North Unit,

(33:20):
and one of his jobs was sort of managing.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Their buffalo herd.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
So through him I got not only introduced, you know,
personally to buffalo, but more importantly, and we hope that
our film gets this across, the importance that they had

(33:45):
both for sustenance physical sustenance, but also for spiritual sustenance
for Native people who had been living with them for
ten thousand years. And he really got that across to me.
And that's what another thing we hope in this film
that we make perfectly clear. You know, you can say it, well,

(34:08):
they've been living them for ten thousand years and everything,
and then they were gone and that was really devastating.
That just doesn't touch it, you know, about how how intricate, intricate,
it intocreate in whatever how closely thank you they were.
Their lives were intertwined and the meaning that they had

(34:31):
for people beyond you know, the food or the hides
or the bones that they would use for different different things.
It was part of existence and it was part of
a web of.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Being.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
That is, you can you can talk about it, but
having people like Gerard and other people that we interviewed
in our film describe it because they're talking about their people.
Bones are out there too, talking about how deep it
was and therefore how devastating it was, and therefore how

(35:10):
important it is now to try to restore some more
buffalo two reservations to the land, their own ancestral lands,
the buffaloes and the ancestral lands that are laughed at
least on reservations for tribes to revive that sacred connection

(35:31):
that they had and also to provide them with food
sovereignty as well.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
It's been broken for you know, five six generations. That's
a big break, because if you think about it, it's
six hundred generations of experience up to that point and
then all of a sudden, you know, we have in
filmmaking a phrase called POV, which means point of view,
and we tend to realize that we are susceptible to

(35:59):
one po and while it might be generous enough to
encompass other points of view, it does so in the
kind of sometimes patronizing kind of no bless obleiche. We well,
yes there are other views of this, but you really,
in the case of this question, have to yield to

(36:21):
those people who have six hundred generations of experience and
not just four or five or six generations of experience
with regard to this animal. I think for us the
ability later in our professional lives to be able to
seed to views not in just some sort of kind liberal,

(36:44):
bleeding heart way, but in a real full we just
give it over and challenge lots of things, presumptions about
ownership of land, presumptions about superiority as a species, presumptions
about how you act in concert with this. Because if
you're just killing a buffalo and taking the tongue, which

(37:05):
is the first thing, you can imagine what the effect
is on a culture that is using everything, as Dayton
is suggesting, from the tail to the snout and as
Girard says in our film, and also the snort, because
the buffalo sounds get worked into rituals, so it isn't
just using every last thing. And Dayton wrote a beautiful

(37:26):
thing of you know, from the moment you're born into
a warm buffalo blanket and the time you die in
a shroud of buffalo skin, all the ways in which
the buffalo is used from tail to snout, and then having,
as Dayton has said so well, this spiritual dimension. And
so we need to actually look at the story that

(37:49):
takes place from a variety of povs and actually seed
something even as filmmakers tightly in control of the narrative,
is that we not we may not always be right
or see it in a way. And how can we
in developing this narrative see things from what is in
many cases with regard to say, ownership of the land

(38:11):
or kinship with other species, entirely different point.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
Of the kinship question. I think is handled really well
in the film. And again the film releases in October. Yes, yeah,
called the American Buffalo.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
I think that we're sixteenth and seventeenth.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
October sixteen and seventeenes a thing that does very convincingly,
and I'd like red references of it and pondered it before.
But you guys, capturedly. Well, well, is this idea of
between the planes, tribes and the animals, that there's a

(39:00):
spiritual dimension in otherwise there's like this this real equal footing,
meaning it was even that at one in some belief systems,
it was even at once upon a time the buffalo
were dominant over humans, but through various circumstances, the humans
became dominant over buffalo. But if humans did sort of

(39:23):
moral infractions against the animals, the animals would deprive themselves
and you had to to in writing about the film
later I wrote a thing for Outside magazine about the film,
and writing about it would be that bad hunting could
be more than bad luck, like bad hunting could could

(39:44):
be a sign of some moral transgression, meaning you needed
to make things right.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
Religious karma idea right that that that there was you
had a kind of responsibility. There's a reciprocity and in
quality between all of creation, and you needed to be
in balance with that. And this is not just every tribe.
It's specific tribes have specific myths about the creation and
when man became dominant, But that dominance required a kind

(40:13):
of humility in the face of what the buffalo then
provided and pre horse. This is going to be a
very big deal. This is the survival of your band,
your tribe might be on the success of one hunt
that would provide you with enough meat for a month
if you got to buffalo and if you didn't, what
were you doing if they were not there? Had had

(40:36):
you done something wrong? And it's really a wonderful ones
And it's different from the steamroller effect.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, yeah, it's about respect. I mean, the cosmology is
so different a world view of human beings in their
relationship to the natural world than what was brought to
the Americas in fourteen ninety two and following, which was
we're all part of this web and we're all in

(41:06):
essence on an equal basis everything and it all comes
from the Sun and that great unknown that uh that
the Lakotas are called the walk on Tonka, the you know,
the great incomprehensibility. They understood that the sun was the

(41:26):
source of all life and the represent the biggest representation
of the Sun.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
Was the buffalo.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
The buffalo ate the grass that the Sun made possible
and then turned that into meat that they then relied
upon for their you know, for their food, but also
everybody part for for something else, and that the that
relationship was one in which a number of the people

(41:57):
we interviewed say in our film, the buffalo give themselves
to us. That's part of how this works. And yeah,
and if if we don't uh, through our ceremonies and
our practices respect that, then they might withhold that and
they would go back to where they came from a

(42:17):
lot of times in sacred places to them, the Wichita
Mountains in Oklahoma to the Black Hills in the Northern
Plains for the Lakota and Cheyenne, they might go go
back there, and then special ceremonies and maybe the intervention
of a culture hero were required to convince them, Okay,

(42:38):
we've learned our lesson where you know, we will start
a fish are we'll reset, and we'll we promise you
know that we won't. We'll try our best not to
do whatever that violation was that caused you to disappear,
and to a certain extent in our film. Remarkably, when

(43:01):
the first national preserve for bison back on the Plains
is created in the early nineteen hundreds through Theodore Roosevelt,
it was in the Wichita Mountains where, according to the
Kai was they would go they had first emerged, and
it's where they would go when they hadn't been respected.

(43:23):
And according to a legend told by a woman named
Old Lady Horse, whose words we use in the film.
She describes a girl watching the last buffalo heard after
the buffalo had been slaughtered by the hide hunters disappearing
that into what's called now Mount Scott and the Wichita

(43:43):
Mountains and said it opened up and inside was a
world of fresh beauty, and the rivers ran clear, and
the grass was green. And that's where they went. And
when they came back for the Kias and Comanches, was
at the Wichita Mountains where the preserve was founded. That

(44:04):
you know, Theodore Roosevelt believed me wasn't doing it because
he knew the legend of that Old Lady Horse had told.
It was just a good place. The federal government had
taken some of the land from the Comanche Reservation during allotment,
and it made sense.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
To do it.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
But there were people there, Guana Parker and others who
understood that deeper thing and were and who had interacted
with the animals as young as young. There were still
some people alive that remember them the time when they
covered the plains, and they were also their children who
hadn't seen a buffalo. I mean, that's how dramatic that.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
And the irony is that the buffalo that are going
to seed the Wichita Mountains refuge from the Bronx, come
from the Bronx zoo and they're loaded on this you know,
in the busiest city, the biggest city in the Western Hemisphere.
They're going to be loaded on these box cards and
make the reverse trip out to their you know, as

(45:09):
we said, new old home. And that I think is
part of trying to understand the undertow of this story.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Look, we have a very good interview in that in
our film described Steve somebody.

Speaker 4 (45:28):
Helps us, helps us get that from the beginning.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Rather promising middle aged man.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
So so the thing to remember is that human nature
never changes. It's the same for all, right, villains and
heroes and all that stuff that we superficially apply. So
there are lots of ways of thinking and lots of
ways of behaving and whatever. But you know, native peoples
are warring with one another and committing atrocities. But I

(45:56):
think for us to be able to look and see
that many of our own ancestors participated in a kind
of thoughtless which is maybe the most charitable thing, you
could say, thoughtless slaughter that reached a kind of industrial
pitch in the last half of the nineteenth century. That

(46:16):
took an animal that numbered in perhaps thirty million at
the beginning of the eighteenth century down to basically nobody.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Could find the beginning of the eighteen hundreds, eighteenth century.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
The beginning of the nineteenth century, there are at least
thirty million. There By the end of the eighteen eighties,
you can't find one outside of a zoo or private collections.
There's some in Yellowstone there under tremendous threats from poachers
and things like that. So how did this happen? And
then why are we sitting here today not so worried

(46:49):
about the buffalo?

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah? You know, well I want to touch on that,
and I want to touch on the slaughter, But I
want to back up a little bit to ask to
ask an earlier question. Guys, in your work, you touch on, uh,
you touch on the buffalo and the dust bowl early
on and establishing you know, the the come up and

(47:14):
for tilling the great planes, and and you have this
thin you know, layer of grass that has a root
structure that goes buffalo grass, yeah, five feet subsurface, right,
and has this tiny reflection on the surface and that ecosystem,
and you touch on the animal there, you touch on

(47:35):
the animal Lewis and Clark in the West of course,
the National Parks. But at what point, in the back
of your heads, in the front of your head or whatever,
at what point did you think we let's just go
at some point, let's just tackle the animal in its
own free standing project.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
We've been talking about that for more than three decades.
We found a proposal from the nineties that was like
really fully developed and we really you know, we're about
to do it, and we.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Generated the proposal Dane probly were all.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
But we talked about it from the early nineties, you know,
about this would be a great film in and of itself.
And what's so good is that this?

Speaker 1 (48:16):
You know, and this.

Speaker 3 (48:17):
Happened some projects. You know, you say this country music boom,
you're suddenly in it. Other stuff same same way, and
others you know, sit.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
There, I mean, I mean the process from from from
from conception.

Speaker 3 (48:28):
So the first articulation of it, you know, front of mine,
back of mine. So you say something and all of
a sudden you're racing towards it and you're working. Country
music was like yeah, Cut was like that, and national park,
national parks like that. Many of the projects of Vietnam
like that. You know, when you we're going to do it.
You know. It took us a long time to do
the war because after the Civil War we said no

(48:50):
more wars, and then we had to decide that we
are going to jump into that. But what was so
great is that a lot of things have over the
years kept kind of on the back burner or have
just been there. Of course, the buffalo, it falls off lists,
it comes back onto lists. You make a ten year
plan and it's not there, but then maybe there's a

(49:11):
hole and it comes. And I'm so happy that we
waited these decades to do this, because I don't think
we had that ability to do what I was trying
to describe earlier about respecting without patronizing, without some sort
of inherent paternalism other points of view, just to literally

(49:32):
permit them to obtain doesn't fit with your belief system, okay,
but that's the way the whole world works well, across
thousands of cultures and eons of time, and so to
be able to have this little moment of daylight that
we could say, okay, so after Franklin, we should be

(49:54):
doing this, and this particular team with Dayton and with
Julie and and and and said well, we'll fit the
Buffalo in here. It was just the right time. And
it feels so fortuitous in the same way that we
celebrate country music for the impulse of just saying I mean,
a friend suggested it to me in Dallas. I was
kind of nervous because Dayton and I were thinking about

(50:14):
something else. I went back to Dayton, we don't have
to forget that idea but country, and he's like, we
forgot that idea, Like we still we don't remember what
it is anymore.

Speaker 4 (50:22):
And so and suddenly.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
We were just pressing forward on that and that's okay.
You know, some things, some things are developed over time,
and this one, like a fine wine, just needed that age.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
And I think by by dealing with it in bits
and pieces on those other films. You know, even before
we did some of those other films, we talked about
one just on on the Buffalo, but we just kept saying,
this is such a it's such a portal to telling

(50:56):
a story that's not this is a by It's like
in our biography series. Yeah, this is a biography of
the American buffalo in one respect, but it's not just
about the buffalo, because it never was just about the buffalo.
And what my friend Gerard and other people made clear
to us is that if you tell the story of

(51:19):
the American buffalo, you're also telling the story of Native people,
particularly on the planes. You're also telling the story that's
even larger than that, which is a collision of two
worldviews of how we interact with the the natural world,
which reached its most dramatic crescendo on the Great Plains

(51:39):
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. And you're
also just talking about lots of different things, you know,
the importance of you know, what does the railroad mean?
What is manifest doest destiny mean? You know, what does
conservation mean?

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Who are the people that.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Step forward in there for their own individual private reasons,
sort of do it yourself? Buffalo salvation projects? You know,
you know twenty head here and twenty over here in
New England of all places, and and someone were doing
it because and on two reservations where they're being preserved

(52:24):
and ingrown for the more traditional reasons. But ranchers. Charlie Goodnight,
the legendary cattleman in the Pandema, Texas, you know, hated
buffalo and he really didn't like Indians much. And by
the end of the film you find out that he's
been raising he starts raising buffalo. He becomes very attached him,

(52:45):
and he becomes very attached to providing buffalo to Indian
tribes near him for their ceremonial reasons. And you know,
George bird Grenella, who was a character in our film
on the National Park, plays a critical role in their salvation.
And some very you know, a couple people who aren't

(53:07):
particularly likable in modern times. Rightfully, so William T. Hornaday,
who becomes just you know, a crusader for saving them
from the commercial destruction and who hates Indians and thinks

(53:28):
that they're and and a lot of other non white
people and believes in the pseudoscience of eugenics. But he
still is a person who played a crucial, crucial role.
You can't overlook it, Yeah, yeah, you can. You can't
overlook either of them. I mean, you know, if we're
talking about buffal We can't just sort of say, well,

(53:49):
but we're not going to talk about this other part.
You know, as Ken mentioned, our films deal with human
beings who are their own amalgam of different impulses.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
And you have to be honest, uh, with your portrayal
of it and with you know, without saying, well, we
can't talk about him.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
Because he had this.

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Deplorable belief that there was this hierarchy of genetically driven
purity of the human species. At the same time he was,
you know, doing everything he could to to keep this
magnificent beast from disappearing forever.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
It's you know, there's a good the the complexities of
the people involved. Uh. You explore a handful of them.
There was a story in there that I hadn't that
wasn't familiar with. So Palo Duro Canyon. If if listener,

(55:00):
if you're imagining the Texas Panhandle, there's a thing called
the landscape feature called the yano estacado, the staked planes
and coming off of this bench or these like deeply
incised canyons, and the Commanchi and others had long hunted
these canyons. I had never heard this story that after

(55:22):
the animals were mostly disappeared that I can't remember. You'll
have to help me fill this in. Yeah, the Quanta
Parker and the Comanche went to Palo Duro Canyon from
They're like, if there's one place we'll find them, it's there.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
And they get there and it's being ranched by Charlie Goodnight,
by Charlie Goodnight, and.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
He says, you're not going to find any but I
know you're not going to believe me. Go take a
look and anywhere. Detell them. Every two days.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
You're can have a couple of miccounts.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
You can kill every whatever days and kills some number
of my cows to feed on.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
This is the beginning.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
It's please satisfy your curiosity that they're gone.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
We really love the simplistic binary idea of villains, and
Horned Day fits a villain because he starts off doing
one thing and he and he and he does an
admirable thing, but he does it for all the wrong reasons.

Speaker 4 (56:20):
But then you have these other things.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
That are the Charlie Goodnight stories, in which you have
a human being who's an Indian hater and Indian fighter
and is a buffalo hater and a buffalo killer. He
wants to raise his cattle in Palladero Canyon. He's got
the first ranch there, and his evolution ends up embracing,
as Dayton said, not only the buffalo on an accident.

(56:42):
His wife's lonely and she wants to raise a few
buffalo calves, and so they end up with a herd
that's not insignificant in the story of all these isolated
herds that need to in some ways, if not coalesce,
contribute to a coalescing in various places that will protect
the buffalo from the measures of real extinction. But he

(57:03):
also then is shedding the animosity towards native people and
embracing them, and he and them he in a hugely
important way. And it's those stories that punctuate all of history,
regardless of subject matter, that you are drawn to as
easily as you do. We have in our editing room

(57:26):
neon signed that says it's complicated. There's not a filmmaker,
there's not a filmmaker on earth that when the scene
is working, you just want to just don't touch it,
don't touch it. But we always are finding out new
and contradictory information about something undertow that threatens to sort
of derail what was effective about that particular scene. But

(57:47):
we always will move towards that and lean into it,
because you end up realizing, as Dayton said, you know
that nobody I mean, we always lament they're no heroes now.
But heroism is not about the Greeks tell us about perfection.
It's about strength and weaknesses. And so you want to
calibrate and calculate what those strengths. Achilles Head is Hubris

(58:07):
and his heel to go along with all of his
great strengths. So it's really not perfection. It's the negotiation
between strengths and weaknesses and what happens in that. And
so Hornaday remains an important person to tell you don't
wash him out, you don't cut him out of this.
He's not disappeared or canceled. He's an important, really important person.

(58:29):
But he represents a kind of heroism that is not
you know, doesn't reach Charlie Goodnight. You know, you cancel
him for the early years and then all of a
sudden embrace. So the idea of even cancelation in good
history becomes kind of beside the point. You're going to
try to include as much as you can and treat

(58:50):
everybody with that kind of perspective that allows you to
understand even the motivation of the high hunters, even the
motivation of this. So you're you're you're not excusing. It
isn't some big, you know, Kumbaya moment. This this is tragedy.
This is violence, this is hatred, this is race animosity,

(59:11):
this is generosity and love and purpose. There are people
from all over the country who band together, and we
now have buffalo not skinned in some museum, as Hornaday
initially was doing, not on a damn nickel, But there's
hundreds of thousands of them that are alive, and we

(59:32):
can take our kids and our grandkids to see them.
And that's one hell of a great story.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
I was heartened by the bold choice to use the
word buffalo.

Speaker 4 (59:45):
And the title, and I'll let Dayton address.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
I had dinner with Date and last night and we
were talking. I was talking about a question I had
asked of Well, I'll point this out. So there's a
number of people. There's a couple of people that are
in this new Kemberton's documentary, the American Buffalo, who have
appeared on this podcast before. So we've had Dan Floory's

(01:00:10):
on a couple of times. Michael Punk's been on a
couple times. I recently interviewed Dan Floy's about his new book,
While New World, and one of the questions I asked
him was there we were talking about there are certain
things that historians and writers when they talk about them,
they feel like they have to explain the evolution of

(01:00:30):
the thought, the peopling of the Americas. No one ever
is comfortable saying here's what happened. They'll say, well, for
a while, we thought this, then for a while we
thought that, and currently we think this. And there's certain

(01:00:50):
subjects that every people have like they feel like I
can't just say what the current thinking is. I have
to say how we got to the current thinking. And
we're talking about like when you when you use the
word if you describe the animal's buffalo, it usually comes
with you feel this need to go hear me out

(01:01:14):
right and explain the whole thing. And just to end
the film, they spare all that it's not there to
say scientists whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:01:25):
And he said, scientists call it bison.

Speaker 1 (01:01:27):
Known to scientists to say bison bison, right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
And that allows us to use it interchangeably and not
entymology of our argument, because it is buffalo New York,
not bison New York. It's the buffalo nickel, not the
bison nickel. It's now been changed from.

Speaker 4 (01:01:46):
A bison reserves to go bufalo. It's buffalo bill.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
I mean, you've got all these examples, so what you're acknowledging,
And though Dayton.

Speaker 4 (01:01:55):
Can I can press a button, I'm going to steal
that from you.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
The bison nickel, I.

Speaker 3 (01:01:59):
Mean, will you can You can hear the whole dynamics
of the argument.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
But it's quite simple.

Speaker 3 (01:02:06):
If that's what you're calling it, this is what we'll
call it, and we will early on acknowledge that scientifically
it is. It is bison bison. And if you want
to get into the fact that they're buffalo in Africa
and buffalo in Asia and nothing's really and this is
not really a buffalo, it doesn't matter. We say, this

(01:02:27):
is what the earliest settlers called it, or a variety
of things. There's lots of Native American names for it,
dozens and sometimes you know, one tribe will have dozens
of names for it, depending on its age and its size,
and its sex, and its health and where it is
and how much skin and you know how much for
it has and what firs lost.

Speaker 4 (01:02:44):
So you know, this is what we call it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
And the rest becomes complicated semantics, which is designed to
put people to sleep if you have to in that
meta way sort of say, so, this is how we
all have to think about it. And I'm trying to
save Dayton from having to to do what he what
he does, which is it's it's you know, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
He said, someone took him to task at a recent UNA.

Speaker 3 (01:03:13):
And you had to do it, and we were to
talk for ten We're going to talk for twenty minutes.

Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
And nineteen was his explanation of what it was.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
I just picture the guy raised his hand being like,
but hold on a minute, yeah right, exactly right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
So oh you're maybe you didn't know this, but they're
actually bison. You see, there are these other and I
want I.

Speaker 4 (01:03:35):
Want to do is to do that. You know, it's
like it's like rabbit.

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):
Please don't give me a lengthy explamanation of of Please
don't ask for a lengthy explanation of the bison buffalo conovers.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
And then he brought up another instant where or instance
where he toyed with one of the one of the things,
which is that Lewis right Lewis's death, that Lewis killed
himself or was murdered. And he explained me the process
of do we get into it, how do we get

(01:04:07):
into it? And eventually it's just he killed himself.

Speaker 3 (01:04:10):
How much of dinner did that?

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
It was post dinner. But I really need to do this.
I suppose I should do it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
And I said, well, actually, the way we solved it
it was because I was one of the interviewees on
the Lewis and Clark film is that I tell the story.
And so I said, so we can have the narrator
later say well, there are some people who claim he
was murdered and all that, but I'm the one that's
saying it. The narrator's not. And just give him my

(01:04:41):
address and my phone number, and I'd be happy to
talk to and I'll be happy to anybody wants to
chide us for naming this the American buffalo and said
the American Bison and using it interchangeably with bison to
save time for the broad podcast and to avoid if

(01:05:01):
they can contact me as long as in.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
Just think in sentences that comprise paragraphs that comprise blocks
of narration that are pages of talk that you can't
just see buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, or bison, bison, bison,
So you're you're saying bison and then buffalo, and then
the animal and then bison. So it just helps relieve
the thing. But the point is they're buffalo, and that's

(01:05:29):
the name of our film, and we're sticking with it, right,
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
How did you guys?

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
This is this is a version of asking how do
you find your subjects for your films? But I want
to focus on one that I found just I could
watch all day and listen to all day because of
just the artic relation the passion is George Horse captured Junior.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
Yeah, so you know, I'll a date and tell the story.
But I think when I was trying to talk about
what it might be like to seed the momentum, the
impetus of your own world views to someone Else's not
just in some kind of gracious after you elponse no

(01:06:27):
after you guests now, but in a real way it
occurs naturally because George does not see Junior, does not
see things the way we expect people to see things, and.

Speaker 1 (01:06:41):
So what it's disconcerted. It's disorienting almost.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
It is disorienting in the most for me emotion away.
I have watched this film dozens and dozens of times.
I have wept every time I get to his last remark,
which we will give away. And I have been watching
myself agitated, disconcerted, having being kind of elated that there

(01:07:09):
might be another way to see this grasshopper, you know,
I mean, it's like suddenly there's another way to figure
out how to square the circle, and that makes me
curious about it. So you know, he is You could

(01:07:32):
listen to him about anything, because he is going to
come out out of it a way that just upends
your own kind of whatever it might be. There's nothing
wrong with wherever we come from is wherever we come from,
and what we bring is okay. But it's going to
be nice to have him there as like what do

(01:07:53):
we call it a disruptor? Right? It just literally but
in a real sense, in a spiritual way. It's like
upending conception. Like Dayton used to have this wrap. We'd
been on the road with the National Parks and he'd say,
you know, people would look at a river and think, damn,

(01:08:14):
they would look at a stand of timber and think
board feet. They would look at a canyon and wonder
what minerals could be extracted. But couldn't you with a
national park idea let go of that and see things
in a different way. So the seeds of that impulse
are part of the six hundred generation's history of George

(01:08:35):
horse Capture Junior of a small, tiny tribe in north
central Montana, and out of his wisdom is not an argument,
not a fight, not a war, but the possibility that
if I sit where you're seeing, you know, is my

(01:08:58):
ancestor Robert Burn said, Oh, some power, the gift to
give us to see ourselves as others see us. George
just suddenly goes and there's just some new light. That's
that's that's possible. He's the beas needs to me.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
I met his father, George Horse Capture. He's George Horscaptor Junior,
who was a very renowned anthropologist when we were working
on the West and spent some time with him.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
Yeah. When I tried to find George Horse Captured Junior online,
I read a lot about his father.

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Yeah, and so I knew about him. And then I
learned from friends that we have at American Prairie, the
nonprofit that's trying to reintroduce buffalo and restore part of
the prairie in Montana, which is not too far from
the Fort bell Knapp reservation that George horsecaptured. Junior was

(01:10:00):
doing a program at the reservation dealing with buffalo and
would sometimes come and talk to them at American Prairie
to you know, their their neighbors and they work together
now with you know, American Prairie giving some of their
buffalo for the Fort Belknapp heard, but that you know

(01:10:24):
that he would come and talk to people that were
visiting there, you know, about what it meant, what the
buffalo meant and still mean.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
To his his people.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
And so I said, well, I had never met him,
but I you know, this is part of our process,
you know, you want to give things a chance, right,
And so we obviously went to people like yourself and
others Dan Flores and other people who were who had
written books about it, and also Dan O'Brien who is

(01:11:04):
a writer but also has a buffalo ranch in South Dakota,
and Rosslyn Lapierre who's a Blackfeet meti but who's an
ethno botanist and historian. You know, Michelle knew how Nighthouse,
who's a writer about extinctions and stuff. You know, you
go through all the reading you do and you say, well,

(01:11:26):
let's go talk to those people that might help us
tell our story. And some of those that turned out
to be really good and some of them don't. But
he also we wanted to talk to descendants of Quana Parker.
We wonted acousa character in our film we won. We
learned about Marcia Pablo, whose great grandfather was Michelle Pablo,

(01:11:50):
who had an important herd on the Flathead Reservation. And
then so I just said, well, let's, you know, spend
two hours with George and to see what he's got
to say, and interviewed him in Fort Benton, Montana. And
you know, right from the get go you knew this
guy was bringing something that was not necessarily narrative storytelling

(01:12:16):
of the historical story, but just a flat out point
of view.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
You know, he's got some.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
Incredible moments in the film, including the final but even
well before that, you know, when we're talking about the
technique of the buffalo jump.

Speaker 3 (01:12:35):
Before the horse debut in the film, and we.

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):
Have other people Rosin Lapierre and Sarah Dant, who's an
environmental history explaining how that worked, how a tribe you know,
would work communally to try to maneuver a herd and
then get it moving toward what you couldn't see from
the ground is that there's a cliff on the other side,
and the buffalo jumps, as the Blackfeet would call him,

(01:13:03):
and they tell that story and it's just comes alive.
And then George just comes.

Speaker 3 (01:13:08):
On in the in the in the moment is going
uh is pretty uh. You know, it's a stampeding music,
and it just sort of ends and resolves as they
go over the cliff in your imagination and in a painting.
And then you're looking up on a live shot, but
we see a live shot with quiet, and then you

(01:13:28):
hear this voice come on.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
And he says, you go to a buffalo jump, you
know these days, and if it quiet, if people ain't
you know, ain't talking like magpies.

Speaker 3 (01:13:38):
So you think you're going to hear about the sorrow
of the buffalo that you can hear in a Native
American way, the sadness, the sorrow, the screams of the buffalo.
But he takes you in exactly the oppertuity.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Yeah, and he says, but you you know, you get
the quiet and you think about that, and they're going
to eat now, they're going to be able to eat,
and that makes people happy.

Speaker 1 (01:14:02):
You know that My.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Family, my tribe, we're going to be we're going to
have enough meat to last us, you know, weeks a
month into the winter, and then it's a good thing.
And you know, it's just it's like holy smokes, you know,
it's just like of course, you know they would celebrate.
You know, you just got you know, we don't get

(01:14:26):
into it in the in the film, but in the
book I mentioned that there were certain among certain native
tribes if you didn't get all of them that went
over the cliff, because they wouldn't all necessarily die going up,
and they had people at the bottom to finish them off.
We say that, but part of the thought was you

(01:14:48):
needed to do that because otherwise the survivors would go
and tell and Warren and Warren.

Speaker 1 (01:14:54):
We still use that term day. It's called when they're educated. Yeah, right,
you don't want to educate the He has a line
that really stuck on me, and he uses it so fluidly,
and it's not rehearsed. But he's talking about his people,
his tribe or his collective people Native Americans, and he

(01:15:17):
says my people and their people. When he says their people,
he's talking about the buffalo. And when I and the
thing I wrote about your film and I touch on
being in the film, and I quote him, and I
wound up needing to when I quote him when I

(01:15:39):
say their people, it's so disorienting. Like I said, I
needed to put in parentheses so because the reader would
never understand when he says they're people, he means the animals.

Speaker 4 (01:15:50):
But there's no parentheses in his mind.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
No, And that's the great thing about it, I wrote.
And I'd look at it and be like, no, one's
gonna understand what he's talking about. You know, they're being
like but but George is.

Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
Asking you to take the parentheses off and see things
in an entirely new way in which that that word
then is part of a of a reciprocal relationship between
all of creation and not just the dominant species and

(01:16:23):
everybody else.

Speaker 1 (01:16:24):
I couldn't make it like you. You can't make it
work in writing. No, you can't without a prent. You're
clarifying what what he's talking about by saying there people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
That's the thing with on the film and film when
he's talking and he'll say some things that you know, grammatically,
you know, are confusing or something like that, but there
is no confusion confusion watching him say it. It's it's
it's totally communicated.

Speaker 3 (01:16:54):
My ownership, my cattle, my land, my this he's asking
you to say, you know, there's a who's this.

Speaker 1 (01:17:02):
This is a response to good night, Noah?

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
This is this is this is the you know, the
early nineteenth century philosopher Prudom I think you said property
is theft and that was part of the developing revolutionary
and all the stuff that leads to. But he has
that not as an intellectual idea in opposition to anything.

Speaker 2 (01:17:21):
It's just like, what kind of theory is this?

Speaker 1 (01:17:24):
What is my mean?

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
What does what does that mean to be? My? I mean,
where does this come from? This does not compute in
a way, And so he's by virtue of his clarity
and his certainty. You are then required to let go
for a second of your own sort of momentum, which
in this case is four or five generations, six generations old,

(01:17:48):
as opposed to his, which is six hundred generations old
on this continent and say, WHOA, Well, maybe he's got
a point here, right, And so I I love being uh,
you know, not calcifying. I love the fact that that
that that he kind of wakes you up.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
He also has a great moment speaking of the bison nickel,
the buffalo nickel, in interaction with your comments about that
about there this animal that gets put on a on
on a nickel on the other side of an Indian head.

(01:18:30):
By the way, but that, uh, the model for that
was from the black Black Diamond that you describe and that.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
But I went to the nast the last known location
of Black Diamond's head, which had become an Italian clothing boutique.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (01:18:49):
And I went in and told the woman working there,
you know what used to be in here.

Speaker 2 (01:18:56):
But but but as you as you point out that,
so here's this here in nineteen thirteen, here's this symbol
on one side as a.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
Portrait of a.

Speaker 2 (01:19:10):
Of a Native American individual's portraits. I think so, and
I can't I can't remember saying well, at least I
know that there are theories of who it is. It
may not be known, but definitely Fraser said this, this
one was black black diamond is as you say. And
so what we're left with this what is it a

(01:19:31):
symbol of It's a you know, it's a wonderful thing.
And that to us, it comes near the end of
the film, is what is the buffalo a symbol of
in American history? Is it a symbol of plenty? Is
it a symbol of destruction?

Speaker 3 (01:19:46):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:19:47):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
And then George comes on, you know, and just gives
it the final things in my confusion, he says, I
was looking at thinking like he's looking at that nickel
right at that moment. It just makes me why did
they put that buffalo on there?

Speaker 3 (01:20:04):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:20:04):
What is it?

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
Why is it that for some people that you want
to kill the thing you love?

Speaker 3 (01:20:13):
This is it? Because that's Look, look what we have done.
We are beginning now this is nineteen thirteen, to fetishize
and to romanticize the Native man and the buffalo, something
we have just spent the last century trying to exterminate,
and now all of a sudden it's the symbol of us.

(01:20:34):
What two symbols represent the newness of America, particularly the
West and the Native American and the buffalo, and so.

Speaker 4 (01:20:46):
We've done this to it.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
To me when he says that do you have to
kill the things you love? You just go, my God,
that may be the story of mankind. I mean, there's
a moment one of the episodes in the Vietnam film,
the eighth I think of out of ten is something
in a marine said to us that we're just talking
about warfare in general, and he goes, well, that's the

(01:21:08):
history of the world, meaning warfare. So we just called
it the history of the world because this is what
human beings do. This is what we do.

Speaker 4 (01:21:16):
This is not the aspect that we like to say.

Speaker 3 (01:21:19):
We want to say, Oh no, we're the Mona Lisa
and we're the Tower of Pisa, and we're the this,
and then that we're also this.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
That's what I've tried that. No, I've tried to find parallels.
I mean, there are many parallels for that in minor
forms that you can look at our most populous state
right their state symbols the Grizzly Bear, of which they
don't have any right. So there are things like that.
But it's so and one of the comments that one

(01:21:48):
of the comments that I have in the film is
how quickly. The nostalgia, yes, began because you guys do
a great job of Buffalo Bill Cody. Yeah, in the
Wild Wife show where they are it's it's like a

(01:22:09):
it's like he got on a train. I mean, it's
like he got on a train from participating in the
Final Slaughter to arrive on the East Coast to mythologize
the thing he'd tried to be passing. But this is
what it was like. It was like he he didn't
even look different.

Speaker 3 (01:22:27):
No, he's still advertising the same stick. He's just now
flipped the coin right.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
And it's different.

Speaker 3 (01:22:34):
But look at that. We romanticize the revolution. We took
the Civil War and made it not about race. It
was brother coming together. You know, all of this sort
of stuff. We call the Second World War the Good War.
It's the worst war ever, sixty million human lives were extinguished,
and it's the good war to us, right, So this
is always happening in our in our purview, and I

(01:22:58):
think what we've been dead cad to is to try
to take this the onus of a superficial treatment off
it and just say it is possible to tolerate complexity,
It is possible to give and take away. At the
same time, with an individual or a moment, it is
possible to sit in contradiction. It's complicated. As the sign

(01:23:22):
says in.

Speaker 1 (01:23:22):
The editing, you said to me one day on the phone. Uh,
you just said, nothing is binary.

Speaker 3 (01:23:30):
Yeah, nothing's binary.

Speaker 4 (01:23:31):
If nothing is bindy. And that's all we want to do.

Speaker 3 (01:23:33):
We want to make something red state or blue state,
black or white, young or old, Richard, poor, male or female,
gay or straight, whatever it may be. We want to
make sure that there's just an on off switch for it,
so that we know where we stand with everything, and
everything is will resist that kind of on off switch.

(01:23:54):
Because in Charlie Goodnight, you have all of this complication,
In William T. Hornday, all of this complication in Theodore Roosevelt,
the great conservation President, who in fact subscribes to many
of the abhorrent eugenics views of Hornaday, and those that

(01:24:14):
are spouting them, like Madison Grant, are also doing magnificent things.
And so you know, Lincoln as late as eighteen sixty
one was thinking of colonizing black people to Mexico or
South America or back to Africa. In sixty one, that's
when the guns open up at Fort Sumter, right, I mean,
and yet he's the great emanticipator, which he is. He's

(01:24:37):
the visionary who saw who wrote the Gettysburg Address, which
is our two point oh operating Manual Declaration one point
oh oops.

Speaker 4 (01:24:46):
The guy who says all.

Speaker 3 (01:24:47):
Men are created equal owns hundreds of human beings. We
will gloss that over. Don't pay no attention to that
man behind the plantation. So he says, no, we really
do mean it. But it's complicated. It's really really complicated.
And I think we need to as Americans, particularly today,
rejoice in complication. And I think what I was trying

(01:25:08):
to say before is that maybe as we got older,
our chops get a little bit better, and that we
find a way to integrate it more to rejoice in
that complication.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
Was can I say, in terms of these you know,
complications and other things. You do a great job helping
us in talking about how the people like Roosevelt avid hunters,
George Bird Grenell an avid hunter, you know, informing the
Boone and Crocket Club, you know, helped start a movement

(01:25:42):
in which hunters were at the forefront of conservation. So
you've got to you can't just have all this market hunting.
You can still have hunting there, but it needs to
be regulated and not just sort of wanting.

Speaker 3 (01:25:56):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
And that's an important part of it. And Grennell is
a personal hero of mine in that respect, who also
saw conservation differently than some of the others of his age,
because he also had a deep connection with native people,
was actually interested in them as human beings and everything.

(01:26:18):
But you take Roosevelt who rushed west in eighteen eighty
three because he'd heard that the bison were about to
be gone forever. And so he first thing, he gets
on a train and rushes out to what's now North Dakota.
He wants to shoot one while there's still a chance

(01:26:39):
to do it, so he can hang a trophans. While
in the book he writes after he buys a ranch
also in that place and keeps coming back for several
summers about hunting adventures of a rancher, a ranch man.
He talks about the buffalo and said, this is their
disappearance is a great tragedy. But on the other hand,

(01:27:01):
not only not only was it probably not only was
it necessary for the advance of what he called white civilization. Uh,
it was probably a blessing that it needed to be
done because of its impact on us, you know, controlling
Native people. So he just just said in a book
that he's written that the elimination of the bison was maybe.

Speaker 4 (01:27:26):
A little bit sets disappearance, but it was, but it was,
but it was.

Speaker 2 (01:27:29):
A blessing and necessary. Who then at the then, with Grennell,
forms the Boon and Cocker Club, Who then, with Grennell
helps save and enact regulations in Yellowstone to save that
last remnant wild herd from being poached out of existence.
Who then signs the the bill that creates with a

(01:27:53):
you know, executive order creating the first preserve for bison
in on the plains and also the one on the
Flathead Reservation in north west Montana. And as we say,
the greatest conservation president in our history, without question. But

(01:28:13):
he's all of those things. And there's nothing wrong with
saying it's all those things. You can't just say if
your tilt is, well, he said this about their extermination,
he's done or opposite if theseus said, he's just you know,
you know, there's only glory to be talked about with him.

Speaker 1 (01:28:35):
He was who he was.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
He was a complete thing. And we try to portray
him in that way. He also spent can you imagine this?
He went out to Oklahoma to the Comanche Reservation after
he'd met after Kwanta Parker had appeared with some other
Native leaders in his inaugural parade in nineteen o five,

(01:29:00):
he then went out to hunt coyotes and and Kwana
invited him to come to his fairly elaborate house called
the Star House on the reservation. And can you imagine
the President of the United States going to a Indian reservation,
spending the night on the porch of one of the

(01:29:26):
Indian leaders, but then told him, you know, from what
you've told me and everything, I think this is a
good place for us to have the first Buffalo preserve.
I mean, that's a journey. I mean, I don't think,
I don't want overstated. I don't think Theodore Roosevelt's views
of you know, the pecking order of the races as

(01:29:48):
he would call them, changed that much in terms of
his opinion of Native people. But you know, he loved
to hunt, and he loved you know, Uh, they're too old.
There were two warriors who were you know, Quanta Parker
had his own journey.

Speaker 1 (01:30:03):
Oh No.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
One hated Texans more than he did. They they abducted
his mother and his little baby sister, uh and and
took them away from the command. She's back to the
White civilization because that's where they had been.

Speaker 1 (01:30:18):
Listeners want to get a listeners get a good sense
of this from from the film. But also I would
recommend as well empire the summer move absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:30:28):
But anyway, Charlie Goodnight was one of the Texas Rangers
who abducted cynthiy Anne Parker from the commands she used
to bring her back to the Texas settlements. So Quanta
was uh a renowned warrior, you know, uh in fighting

(01:30:48):
particularly Texans but also the US military. But then when
he finally decided the buffalo are gone, there's we have
to you know, forge a new path, became, you know,
a leader of trying to help his people make that
adjustment without giving up his many of his traditional beliefs,

(01:31:12):
including multiple wives and long hair and in the use
of of peyote. But he became a good friend with
with Charlie Goodnight and gave him and good Night helped
Kuana get the remains of his mother and baby's sister
brought back from Texas and buried near the Wichita Mountains

(01:31:33):
where they, you know, which they had considered their home.
And in thanks for that, Quana gave good night the lance,
the commandchee lance that he used to kill hide hunters
at the Battle of Adobe Walls. Okay, so I mean,
so that lance is now in my mind, that not

(01:31:55):
just a you know, it's what is it a symbol
of well, it's a symbol of existence, right, It's a
symbol of friendship and and possibly some you know, some redemption,
some yes, some measure of redemption and reconciliation. It's it

(01:32:16):
is something, you know, it has its own blood memory.

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:32:23):
One thing you guys did and dating I recognize that
this isn't one of the ones you wrote or produced,
but one of the you mentioned celebrating these personal evolutions
and the complexities. I thought one of the most beautiful
things and and any of your films was at the
End of the Vietnam War Ah, which is a very

(01:32:47):
very good telling of just the deep complexity of the
war and what it did to America, what it did
to Vietnam. But it ends on among end on the
wall the memorial and narrows in on an individual who
speaking of personal change, and an individual who initially refused.

(01:33:12):
He was like, I was not going to go. Look.

Speaker 3 (01:33:14):
He hated the idea of the wall, and it was
in that school, and it was very contentious that it
was this black gash, that it was celebrating defeat, that
it was the list of the dead, it was in
no way responsible for honoring what had particularly gone on
and had resisted, and was adamant about not going amongst
a group of people that have already gone and had

(01:33:37):
everything happened. And when he began to answer the question
about this, he started off with the defiance. By the
end of his sentence of story, he has gone to
see a friend and he breaks down on camera because
he the power of it and the memory. And he
would probably still say to you mentally, intellectually, I don't

(01:34:02):
agree that it's this. But he was himself, more than
any of the other people, proof of the power of
that great work off to transcend. I mean, Tolstoy said,
art is the transfer of emotion from one person to
the other. We hope that our films do that. That
were emotional archaeologists, not just excavating dry dates and facts
and events, but something other what George Horse capture can

(01:34:25):
do it. But at that moment, you take someone who's
opposed and lead him in his own mind. He's just
narrating what he did in some living room, safely out
of the thing to the monument, and he loses it,
and it just tells you what the force of that
thing is and how spectacular, I mean, second only to
the Lincoln Memorial, which is the greatest thing ever in

(01:34:48):
our republic.

Speaker 1 (01:34:49):
I was, my family was gone. I was between houses.
I was on the second floor of the Lewis and
Clark Hotel and the Bows in Montanne, looking over the
parking lot, watching the end of that movie. And I said,
my I thought something was wrong with me. I sat
in that room and wet wept, well, we wept, we all,
like to the point where I was beginning to be
concerned about myself. At the end of the Vietnam War.

Speaker 2 (01:35:11):
We had, you know, we.

Speaker 3 (01:35:14):
Because we are addicted to this notion of binary everything's
good or bad. We we build up within us reservoirs
of attention based on that false premise that it's all
just black and white. So catharsis is the ability, wherever
it occurs, to let that release go I know what

(01:35:38):
it means. There's not a listener listening right now that
doesn't know what it's like to just break down and cry.
And there's really not an answer, and there is really
what's why is it this little thing? I mean, I
wasn't in Vietnam, you know, I didn't do that. I'm
here in the Lewis and claud you know, but something

(01:35:58):
opens up and it just you just it spills out.
It's so healthy in the best sense of the word
to permit that, And you know we're the rap in
Florentine films is that we kill people really well. You know,
I was so happy at the end of this film.
In the Bubbalo, we didn't kill anybody. We save somebody,
a person. I mean, we think The Buffalo is a biography,

(01:36:22):
but we also permitted somebody like George horse Capture to
do something that for many of us, exactly the same
thing happens. All of the tensions of trying to maintain
the fraudulence of this binary, yes known thing which does
not exist in the universe. You get full expression there

(01:36:43):
and George just lets me just let go of a
whole bunch of baggage that I just perpetually carry put down.
Think I want not going to pick up again and
find out I'm still carrying the same stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:36:55):
Do you feel that you have to do something on
the war in Afghanistan?

Speaker 3 (01:37:02):
I need twenty five years after an event to do it,
I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:37:06):
But I don't I think that I'd like to challenge that. Yeah,
I don't think you do.

Speaker 3 (01:37:10):
Well, we'll see what happens. We've got stuff through the
end of this decade, and after that. It may it
may in fact be and it would not. It might
be all the petroleum wars, you know, it might be Iraq,
first Iraq and second Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, and
try to understand them in that sort of postcolonial way

(01:37:33):
and in a global sense and also in the deeply
personal thing, particularly with Afghanistan relating to nine to eleven.
So it's a wonderful story and it's very very complicated.

Speaker 1 (01:37:47):
And deserve even the people that it's like, you know,
for me to look at. You know, I was born
the last year of active engagement in Vietnam, but I
was raised around my buddy's dad's Are Vietnam bats, Yes,
But I think that there are plenty of people who
have lived through that twenty year war, who have really

(01:38:09):
lost sight of the evolution of mission, the evolution of
the thinking there, what it was in the first place,
what it became the withdrawal. I mean, you, guys, it
needs to be someone, It needs to be someone like
your team to do it. And I just don't know

(01:38:29):
that you need to wait a ton of time.

Speaker 3 (01:38:30):
Yeah, well, we always like to, you know. Philip Graham,
who owned The Washington Post, said that journalism was the
first rough draft of history, which is a wonderful thing.
But you also realize that nobody turns in a rough draft, right,
So what we like is the passage of time and

(01:38:50):
the perspective that will I'll give you a good but
not so quick, but pretty quick thing. If we'd done
the Vietnam film ten years after the false I Gone
right nineteen eighty five, America's in a bit of a recession.
We're talking about the Pacific rim, but we don't mean us.
We meet Japan, which is ascended. Vietnam would represent the
symbol of our decline, the ball and chain that we

(01:39:11):
would forever carry around with us. If I'd waited twenty
years till nineteen ninety five, we are the sole superpower
in the middle of what was then the greatest peacetime
economic expansion in the history of our country. We had
won the First Gulf War with one arm tied behind
our back, with a coalition of dozens and dozens of

(01:39:32):
countries supporting us. The Beacon, the city on the Hill
Vietnam would have would be an important story to tell,
but it wouldn't be representative of any decline. You go
thirty years to twenty five and we're in both Iraq
and Afghanistan and were bogged down, and now people are
making Vietnam references. So once again you're going, well, maybe
Vietnam is more symbolic of that. So we know it

(01:39:54):
comes out in twenty seventeen, and so we are able
to look from you know, it's like the Bitterroot Mountains,
from a lot of different peaks and a lot of
different valleys to see.

Speaker 4 (01:40:07):
A better, to.

Speaker 3 (01:40:08):
Triangulate better what actually took place. And so I after Vietnam,
I was thrilled to realize when we were working, not
after it. I'm looking at a map of the Drang
Valley and play may this important? How more story? And
we're just doing this and We've got this kind of
three D map that we're threading through the Ya Drag

(01:40:29):
Valley on a graphic right, and I go, I can
do the Battle of Long Island right right. We're going
back to the revolution and people are like what what?
But now we're like years deep into it, so to me,
and we're still it's still contentious. The stuff we're arguing
about in the editing room among scholars about this thing

(01:40:53):
that happened it will be when this comes out. It
two hundred and fifty years ago is just magnificent.

Speaker 1 (01:40:59):
So I'm I'm not saying no Toice that like somewhere
between thirty and two fifty.

Speaker 3 (01:41:03):
Yes, well, yeah, as an American filmmaker, I mean we are,
you know, working on Leonardo, so we're two centuries before that.
I mean he's we say in two different places it
will have to be down to one in the Leonardo film.
It would be another four hundred and fifty years before
anybody would be able to duplicate what you've done, right,

(01:41:23):
or his theories of this had benefited from. I mean,
he he had some theories of gravity that Isaac Newton
is still a century away, and Einstein is you know,
four centuries away, and Newton and Einstein have calculus. He
does not, and he's got some stuff on gravity. He's
a painter, right, he's a painter. And it's at that

(01:41:47):
point you're going, you know, oh my god, So we're
the perspective is is pretty important to us just because
and I think it's one of the arguments and maybe
we've said it, of the Buffalo wait is to be
able to be in the age we're in now with
the kind of scholarship, including yours, that that helps us

(01:42:09):
understand and evolve the story that we were drawn to
and said, boy, we need to do a film on
just the Buffalo because it cut touches all the corners,
as Dayton says in the film, back in the early
nineties or even late eighties, Right, We've got to do that.
But the fact that we've waited as long as we
have nothing changed except the Inter Buffalo Tribal Council and

(01:42:31):
stuff like that, and you know, wolves released in Yellowstone,
and you know, whatever is back has happened in the
last But to be able to enjoy your and Dan
Floores and you know, so many other scholars that appear
in the film, Michael punk Michael punk For sure, you
begin to realize that we've got a richer, more dynamic,

(01:42:54):
less binary story to handle.

Speaker 1 (01:42:58):
Well. Whatever whatever you guys make now and in the future, Uh,
I will watch it and I will be moved by it.
I will think how I would have done parts different.
And I think our audience is really going to get
a lot out of out of the American Buffalo. I
think that you listeners when you watch it, parts are

(01:43:19):
gonna speak to you, parts are gonna challenge you. It's healthy,
it's good. You're gonna probably if you know the story, well,
you're gonna have parts you're like, well, yeah, what about right?
But that stuff's great, man, It's good for your brain,
so exactly. Yeah. I hope everyone watches it and really
want to thank you guys for coming on and giving
us the time you. Thank you, thank you, appreciate it all.

Speaker 4 (01:43:52):
Seeal Grey shine like silver in the sun. M h ride.

Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
Ride, ride on alone, sweetheart.

Speaker 3 (01:44:10):
We're done beat this damp horse to death, taking a
new one and ride away. We're done beat this damn
horse today, So take a new one and ride on.

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Steven Rinella

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 472: The American Buffalo with Ken Burns