WHAT IT’S ABOUT This four-hour Ken Burns film begins on the Great Plains of the early 19th century, where the Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne (Southern Plains), Pawnee (Central), and Lakota, Aaniiih, Crow and Blackfeet (Northern), among many others, had long depended on the revered buffalo for food and shelter. Then, with westward expansion, the slaughter began, and by the end of 19th century, extinction loomed. Tuesday’s episode highlights efforts to save the buffalo by many, including Quanah Parker, a Comanche leader, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Theodore Roosevelt, and a Long Island robber baron, Austin Corbin, who built an “exotic game preserve” in New Hampshire filled with buffalo. The film includes extensive commentary by American Indian scholars and writers, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Ron Parker (Comanche), George Horse Capture, Jr. (Aaniiih), and Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet of Montana and Métis).
MY SAY Whether baseball or jazz, the Civil War or Vietnam, Ken Burns films are really about the American character. Sometimes the subject is the character, both interchangeable, one begetting the other. After a while we start to see something of ourselves in his films because that’s what we’re supposed to see.
But if the subject is the American buffalo, what are we to make of ourselves then?
The buffalo’s near-eradication also decimated the native peoples that had relied upon them for 10,000 years. The slaughter was so wanton that the plains were littered with enough bones to feed a vast industry that ground them up for fertilizer. By the 1880s, there were only a few hundred buffalo left from dozens of millions — casualties of greed, progress, Manifest Destiny, railroads, disease, broken treaties and a federal government that sought their extirpation as part of Indian “pacification” policies.
If you’ve already guessed that “The American Buffalo” is a cautionary story filtered through a searing national character study, then…
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