The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 472: The American Buffalo with Ken Burns

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. Topics discussed: When you’ve made more than three dozen renowned documentaries; Ken Burns’ college film ending with the pan across a painting; how The Civil War film consumed Americans; The Tenth Inning; Lewis & Clark, Jazz, Muhammad Ali and so many more; what do you want on your cheeseburger?; questioning the superiority of a species; The American Buffalo film, featuring Steve and former podcast guests Dan Flores and Michael Punk, premiers in October; watching the last buffalo herd disappear; word choice and the feeling of needing to explain the rationale behind a thought; George Horsecapture Jr.; what is the buffalo a symbol of in American history?; how nothing is binary; Quanah the warrior; how you should go watch all of Ken and Dayton's films; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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auction house of oddities is up live and running right now probably the most impressive slate of auction items to ever be compiled in the history of Western civilization. You can go right now and bid on a hunt at the Dern family farm with bubbly Doug Dern himself. It's the winner's choice. You do a buck hunt for one or a deer hunt for one, opening day of rifle season. So opening weekend of rifle for one or three people do a turkey hunt on Doug's place, hanging out with Doug, cruising around with Doug. We have a custom log trapper's cabin from Naughty Log Homes. Okay. So this is a totally built trapper's cabin that you can have get shipped out and you get assembled where you want it. Okay. We have a art commission, an original art commission of your choosing. Go on Instagram and go to at Jamie, J-A-M-I-E

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She has a gallery. I mean, she makes her living with art. We have original artwork from her. Kelsey Morris, original artwork. We have my Weatherby Mark 5 used in many meat eater episodes. Forthcoming episode where I shoot a pretty stomper mule deer in Idaho. I killed a bull with it on a meat eater episode. A lot of meat eater episodes.

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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. And when I say Ken Burns, I mean that Ken Burns. His first feature film came out in 1981 about the Brooklyn Bridge. Since then, he has made over three dozen films. Now, in a recent conversation you mentioned to

me 30 films it's what you said about now surprised that someone would say about well i never count them in a in that weird sort of way i know how many kids i have but i didn't i didn't um i pbs says 40 now oh and it's gonna pass that in but the the funny thing schneider says three dozen listen the um the um the the most important thing is that one could be a one hour film and one could be a 10 part 18 19 hour film this still counts as one so whatever it is it's a lot of hours yeah and since but but you agree you have certitude that your first film was Brooklyn Bridge in 1981. has released the film i made in college uh as my senior thesis at hampshire college about old stirbridge village kind of the colonial williamsburg of new england which is called working in rural new england and it's 1790 to 1840 kind of vibe to it and the it's all live stuff but the

last shot is a pan across a painting oops oh it's the birth this is the genesis moment yeah of the effect so there's four there's 41 films uh major works on the civil war called the civil war and and uh i want to tell you i hadn't told you this before you've heard this hundreds of times from thousands of people um that overtook like that consumed our family life that film even even to where like my parents bought the cd would play the music in the house my children like you yeah all four of them it was just like uh 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 as one of those elements of sort of like a shared it was unifying like a shared national experience you know it's pretty interesting that something that tore us in two

became something that unified us and in a in a way i think we thought we knew about the civil war and had kind of superficial views about it or ideas or even mythologies that were incorrect and this 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 um 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 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

of people is nice is is ungrammatical so what it did is take us people when when lee was offered the head of the union army and turned it down he said i cannot raise my sword against my country by which he meant virginia after that when you said your country you meant the united states of america and so that's just one hell of a good story and And, and basically the whole 11 and a half, 12 hours is how an R became an is didn't solve a lot of things about race. Didn't solve a lot of other things, but it, it sure, at least for a while made us an is.

Yeah. Uh, 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 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 on, and this is where there's a little bit of surprise in here, working on a film about LBJ, working on a film about the American Revolution 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 so when date how'd that happen so when i was thinking about doing um benjamin franklin i had dinner one night with uh one of his biographers uh um walter Walter Isaacson, who's a dear friend, maybe no longer. You heard my hesitation. And Walter and I were having dinner in Washington, D.C., and all

of a sudden he started to try to sell me a twofer. He said, you know, he's this great scientist and artist, a political artist and writer. He's he's I think undeniably the greatest American writer of the 18th century and he's funny and all of this but you know and Walter had done another biography on Leonardo 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 I said look I don't do a merit non-american topics I only do American topics. But I walked out and was talking to one of the producing teams that produced the Central Park Five and that Jackie Robinson biography that you mentioned and the Muhammad Ali thing. And I said, Leonardo, they said, yes, let's do it.

So I thought, why the hell not? You know, why be stuck in my mid-60s? Because you're an American. Wait till you see. So I thought, why the hell not? You know, why be stuck in my mid-60s? Well, I'll tell you why not. You're in America. Wait till you see. Wait till you see. 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, have just returned from a year with two of my four grandchildren in florence and what we've

got is just an amazing stuff and let's remember it's florentine films so we were meant i could see that eventually to get to somebody in in florence right so well 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 the biggest thing is the is the american revolution that's just consuming almost all of my bandwidth yeah you mentioned to me um 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 you said, and it's not what people think. Or, you know, what is the... Because I guess it's not helpful because I can't really remember what exactly you said.

But you intimated that there's an element that has become misunderstood about the American Revolution, 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 arteries that are clogged with the false stories, that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It was about slavery. There's no mention of states' rights or nullification or interposition in the South Carolina Declaration of Secession. It mentioned slavery an awful lot. That's what it's about. The Ku Klux Klan are not the heroes of the post-Civil War era. That's what Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind 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 farmers and Virginia farmers. And they left their work and their job, the Minuteman idea. And we only know Lexington and Concord. 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 bat, the biggest battle of the entire thing is the battle of

Long Island or Brooklyn where Washington makes classic mistakes. Another big mistake is Brandywine, the same mistake, Germantown, all of these stuff, Saratoga, in which Washington's not involved, is a great victory. So we want to go through the military history and get you to know. We want you to know what Guilford Courthouse was about in South Carolina, or Cowpens, or Camden, all in South Carolina. We want you to know about Kings Mountain and Yorktown and the places where it's fought. It a three part opera, you know, in New England, central states, and then South America. But it's also a much more complicated picture. It isn't just 55 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 it's, you're 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 loyalist, forget it, you're still a slave, right? So there's unbelievably complicated dynamics. Women are involved from the very beginning. And any army is traveling, the American army particularly, but also the British and Hessian have wives and children 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 20, 30% are favoring staying with the ground. A lot of people 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.'s a sectional war it is north against south the revolution is a bloody violent civil war that engages all americans native americans when you said about civil war you mean that there were not a lot of non-combatant deaths right people people who don't didn't hear uh carry a rifle at that moment are tarred 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 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. you know in the beginning then then then say new hampshire and the new england states are particularly massachusetts but this changes they start a southern strategies beginning with savannah

and then moving to charleston because they presume that this loyalist population will help them pacify that's a word from vietnam pacify 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 colonists none of whom really know much about the other the carolinas do but everybody else is pretty much an independent vassal state plus to the west there's 40 or 50 other nations right yeah yeah I think we learned in doing Franklin at least I it was driven home to me not just because Franklin and his son but in this in the Revolutionary War is a civil war also

because there is no state there's probably no town in the 13 colonies that itself wasn't didn't have people on different sides oh I see yeah you know and and and I remember when we were working on the West and writing about bleeding Kansas and Missouri and that at that time the wars the in Bosnia and you know what used to be hungry we're going on with the bloody murders of your neighbors. And I thought, well, that is a civil war in the classic sense. That people who are neighbors and collected know in a location are fighting each other and this applies to everybody so the oldest functioning democracy in on the continent is

the hodenosaunee 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 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 yeah yeah because that's what this is about and you're referring to the reward system well the real like participants well you know participants on the american side were often rewarded land that often if you if you

signed up for the duration you got 20 bucks if you you signed up for the duration you got 20 bucks if you got signed up for three years you got 10 bucks but the 20 buck folks were also promised promised indian aid 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 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 into 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 a what I have an opportunity to own land for the first time in a thousand 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 tax the least taxed 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 not just from Lexington and Concord and Boston down to here or up to Quebec or Taika Andoroka. It's all there. And we detail it to Yorktown, down to Charleston and Savannah, and even into Mobile. But it's in upstate york with native people being killed and having their villages these are not plains indians nomadic people these are people with cities and towns and farms and orchards having scorched earth policy you know um washington was called by many of the the iroquois confederation tribes, the town destroyer.

And they referred to the revolution as the whirlwind. It also happened in the Southeast, and it also happened in the Midwest, particularly with George Rogers Clark, who's just, he's out to, he's the Attila, the Hun of the storm. He's out to just kill as many Indians as he can and destroy as many villages to make that area, which will later become the Northwest Territories, suitable for settling. So it's a super complicated story. And yet, it engages some of the most noble aspirations of humankind, period. period so that when someone came up to me and said our last film that was broadcast was called

the u.s 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 united states oh that's great i can't wait to see that one how long will that one be that'll be 12 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. And Lewis and Clark, which is how you tell a story

in which it's pre-photographic, no photographs, no newsreels. No combat footage. No combat footage. Whenever I travel and I give a speech, I say, if anybody's got a photograph from the revolution, please, I'll give you my address right away. 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, gravestones and trees and atmospherics, what Emily Dickinson called the far theatricals of day, sunrises, sunrises, 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 um you know we're

beginning to feel like we can exhale a little bit yeah uh i also want to do a better job of introducing uh dayton duncan after our 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. Dust Bowl. Dust Bowl. National Parks.

National Parks. Horatio's Drive. Horatio's Drive, about the first car trip across the United States in 1903. The West. The West? The West. But also worked on Civil War, you know, lots of different projects. Yeah, because we're friends.

As I was writing books, Ken would read the books that I was working on in progress, and he'd ask me to sit in and look at films in progress, not as an expert on the topic, but as somebody who shares his passion for narrative storytelling. And I'd say, well, this is really working, and I was confused here, this is dragging here, or I was, you know, 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 them on ones that were a particular passion or interest to me. How'd you guys meet? Yeah, it's a good story. Did you meet through Dayton's books? No.

When I decided to become a documentary filmmaker, strike one on PBS, strike two in American history, strike three, you're out. I moved from New York City to Walpole, New Hampshire to the house I'm living in 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 diems. We'll just get where you need to be in New England, which was, you know, waking up at 1 a.m. to go be ready to shoot at 6 a.m. to finish at midnight to drive another six hours. 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 adaptive reuse of some of the old abandoned mills the amaskeg mills in manchester new hampshire that governor uh was named hugh gallon and his chief of staff was dayton duncan so the first time i met oh really is when you want to talk to Hugh Gallen you had to go through me 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 um at sort of political events in the state it's a small state and intimate and then when i was getting married uh i said i had crossed every t and dotted every i 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, our, our wives and then my children and his children became the Dayton moved here. And so, uh, we, he, he gave me 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 gonna 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 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, it looks like Winifred is way up there. And what, you know, Dayton would say, what are you going to get when we get into town? I said, well, I think I'll start with a cold vichyssoise soup. And then I'm going to move to a salad of endive with a vinaigrette dressing. And then I will have probably either the Chateaubriand or the Dover sole.

And then I hope to follow it off with a beautiful creme brulee. 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'd go 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 where do you what do you think we should uh get uh and he would elaborate thing and then i would go what do you 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 the guide and we'd be drinking fresca 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 dak. Yes. And North Dakota. Yes. And maybe Montana as well. And Montana. Oh, wow. And the first time you ever saw any buffalo. The first time. That's when we were filming. Yeah, that wasn't in a zoo. Yeah, right.

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 been animated as an anthropologist's sons by native people and buffaloes and stuff like that. But I saw a buffalo at the ranch where years later um the uh dances with the wolves was shot oh the ranch north of pier yeah that was the halk ranch at that time i've heard triple u i think was the name of the ranch uh they had one of the largest herds in America at the time. And I had met the guy, the rancher,

when 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 we're doing ridiculous hours to get up and shoot at dawn and then drive and find the place we're going to shoot next and go till sunset in the northern plains in the middle of the summer.

So you're talking about sunrise at 4 o'clock and sunset at 10. But of just seeing his, it was important to me when we were making that film of seeing his eyes so wide at the landscape. Yeah, 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 faces of Lewis and Clark and the members of the Corps of Discovery, we were standing with them looking 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 came from this part of the country up in New england in the east where basically you have vertical views through gaps and trees and stuff and now you're in this horizontal world 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, uh, barking dogs and Piet Shians and prairie dogs as John Ordway called them. And that's what they became and antelope and, you know, jackrabbits and, uh, the, uh, and bison they knew about, but, knew about 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. Elk on the plains. animal at one time and just this wonderland of landscape and wildlife that they encountered as the first u.s citizens to ever go that far west and as the first u.s citizens white citizens to see in that um you know paradise 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 animals

that in the next 80 years would be irrevocably changed. 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 10,000 years before the United States as officially was entering into it. 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. Yeah. What happened?

But you know, they saw, they saw Buffalo everywhere. 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 monoculture now to the prairies when it was, as they say, our Serengeti. I think 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 plains were with species of both flora as well as fauna

and how what it would have been like to imagine or now reimagine the possibilities that there were elk, there were grizzlies, there were wolves and so now and in a variety of plant life that is just a spectacular Eden as as Dayton 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 sounds have disappeared. Lewis and Clark, as I say, 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 80s, retracing their route, it was a wildlife desert now. And to see Buffalo out on a range took a lot of work i mean i had to as a reporter had to you know dig down to find out where can 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 National Parks film and also in the West in the West element and also in this Buffalo film who's a man Dan hadats

of the tribes that sheltered Lewis and Clark in the winter of 1804 1805 and I got to know him very well but uh at one point he became the district ranger of theodore roosevelt national park the north unit and one of his jobs was sort of managing their buffalo herd so um 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 both for sustenance, physical sustenance, but also for spiritual sustenance for native people who had been living with them for 10,000 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, oh, they've been living with them for 10,000 years and everything, and then they were gone, and that was really devastating. just doesn't yeah touch it you know about how how intricate intricate intricate intricate whatever how closely thank you they were their lives were intertwined and the meaning that they had 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, of being, um, that, uh, is you can,

you can talk about it, but having people like Gerard and other people that we interviewed in our film describe him because they're talking about their people whose bones are out there too. Yeah. Talking about how deep it was and therefore how devastating it was

and therefore how important it is now to try to restore some more buffalo to reservations, to their own ancestral lands, the buffaloes and the ancestral lands that are left at least on reservations for tribes to revive that sacred connection that they had and also to provide them with food sovereignty as well. It's been broken for five, six generations. That's a big break because if you think about it, it's 600 generations of experience up to that point. And then all of a sudden,

we have in filmmaking a phrase called POV, which means point of view. And we tend to realize that we are susceptible to one POV. And while it might be generous enough to encompass other points of view, it does so in the kind of sometimes patronizing kind of noblesse oblige way. Well, yes, there are other views of this but you really in this in the case of this question have to yield to those people who have 600 you know generations of experience and not just four or five or six generations of experience with regard to this animal and 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 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 um presumptions about how you act in concert with this because if you're just killing a buffalo and taking the tongue which 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 Gerard 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 thing of, you know, from the moment you're born into a 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 and so we need to actually look at the story that takes place from a variety of POVs and actually seed something, even as filmmakers, tightly in control of the narrative is that 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 or kinship with other species, entirely different point of view. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians

whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. 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. October 16th and 17th. October 16th and 17th. Yes. A thing that it does

very convincingly, and I've read references of it and pondered it before, but you guys capture it really well, is this idea of between the plains tribes and the animals, that there's, in the spiritual dimension and otherwise there's like this this real equal footing meaning it was even that at one in in some belief systems it was even at once upon a time um the buffalo were dominant over humans but through various circumstances the humans became dominant over buffalo but if humans um did sort of moral infractions

against the animals, the animals would deprive themselves. And you had to, in writing about the film later, I wrote a thing for Outside Magazine about the film, in writing about it, it'd be that bad hunting could be more than bad luck like bad

hunting could could be a a sign of some moral transgression that's right meaning you needed to make things right yeah it's sort of like eastern religious karma idea yeah 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 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 two buffalo and if you didn't what were you doing if they were not there had

had you done something wrong and it was it's a wonderful, and it's different from the steamroller effect. It's about respect. I mean, the cosmology is so different, a worldview of human beings and their relationship to the natural world than what was brought to the Americas in 1492 and following, which was we're all part of this web, and we're all, in essence, on an equal basis, everything. And it all comes from the sun, and that great unknown that the Lakotas would call the Wakantanka, the great incomprehensibility, they understood that the sun was the source of all life,

and the biggest representation of the sun was the buffalo. The buffalo ate the grass that the sun made possible and then turned that into meat that they then relied upon for their food, but also everybody part for something else. And that relationship was one in which a number of the people we interviewed say in our film,

the buffalo give themselves to us. That's part of how this works. It came dancing. Yeah. And if we don't, through our ceremonies and our practices, respect that, then they might withhold that and they would go back to where they came from. A 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 we've learned our lesson. We'll start afresh here. We'll reset. And we promise that 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, remarkably when the first national preserve for bison back on the plains is created

in the early 1900s uh through theodore roosevelt it was in the wichita mountains where according to the kiowas they would go they had first emerged and is where they would go. They had first emerged and is where they would go when they hadn't been respected. 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 herd after the buffalo had been slaughtered by the hide hunters, disappearing into what's called now mount scott and the wichita 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 they that's where they went and when they came back for the kiowas and um comanches it was at the Wichita Mountains where the preserve was founded. You know, Theodore Roosevelt, believe me, wasn't doing it because he knew the legend 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 to do it. But there were people there, Quanah Parker and others, who understood that deeper thing and were- And who had interacted with the animals as young- As young people. As children and all of a sudden here they are back.

There were still some people alive that remember 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 and the startling irony is that the buffalo that are going to seed the wichita mountains refuge come 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 boxcars and make the reverse trip out to their you know as we said new old

home and that i think is part of trying to understand the undertow of this story look we have a very good interview in that in our film yeah what's his name steve ranella somebody yeah oh yeah yeah helps us helps us get that from the beginning irony rather promising middle-aged man yeah so so the the thing to remember is that um human nature never changes it's the same for all right villains? Villains and heroes and all of that stuff that we superficially apply. So there are lots of ways of thinking and lots of ways of behaving and whatever,

but native peoples are warring with one another and committing atrocities. But I 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 19th century that took an animal that numbered in perhaps 30 million at the beginning of the 18th century down to basically nobody could find beginning of the 1800s the beginning of the 19th century yeah beginning

of the 19th century there are at least 30 million there by by the end of the 1880s you can't find one outside of a zoo or private collections there's some in yellowstone they're 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 about the buffalo 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 uh to ask an earlier question. You guys, in your work, you touch on the buffalo in the Dust Bowl early on and establishing the comeuppance for tilling the Great Plains. And you have this thin 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 the animal in Lewis and Clark. In the West. The West, of course. The national parks.

But at what point in the back of course the national parks um but at what point um in the back of your heads in the front of your heads whatever at what point did you think what let's just go at some point let's just tackle the animal we've been talking in its own freestanding project we've been talking about that for more than three decades okay we found a proposal from the mid 90s that was like really fully developed and we really you know we're about to do it and who generated the proposal dave we were all but we talked about it from the early 90s you know about this would be a great film in and of itself and what's so good is that this you know and this happens some projects you know you say this country music, you're suddenly in it.

Other stuff, same way. And others sit there. You mean the process from conception to- From the first articulation of it, front of mind, back of mind. So you say something, and all of a sudden, you're racing towards it, and you're working. Country music was like that. Yeah, it was like that. National parks.

National parks, like that. Many of the projects, Vietnam, like that. We was like that and national parks national parks like that many of the project of vietnam like that you know we knew we were going to do it um you know it took us a long time to do the war because after the civil war we said no more wars and then we had to decide that we were 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 10-year plan and it's not there but then maybe there's a 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 permit them to obtain.

Doesn't fit with your belief system? Okay. But that's the way the whole world works 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 doing this. And this particular team with Dayton and with Julie and said, 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 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.

We're like, we still, we don't remember what it is it is anymore and so and suddenly 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 and i think i think by by dealing with it in bits and pieces on those other films, even before we did some of those other films, we talked about one just on the Buffalo, but we just kept saying this is such a portal to telling a story that's not, this is like in our biography series. Yeah.

This is a biography of the 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 that if if you tell the story of the american buffalo you're also telling the story of native people, particularly on the plains. 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 natural world,

which reached its most dramatic crescendo on the Great Plains in the latter part of the 19th century and you're also just talking about lots of different you know the importance of you know what does the railroad mean what is manifest what's manifest destiny mean you know what does conservation mean who are the people that that that that step forward in there for their own individual private reasons or do-it-yourself Buffalo Salvation projects you know you know 20 20 head here and 20 over here in New England of all places and and some of them are doing it because, and on two reservations where they're being preserved and grown for the more traditional reasons.

But ranchers, Charlie Goodnight, the legendary cattleman in the Panhandle of 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 starts raising buffalo. He becomes very attached to them, and he becomes very attached to providing buffalo to Indian tribes near him for their ceremonial reasons. And George Bird Grinnell, who was a character in our film on the national parks plays a critical role in their salvation and some very you know a couple people who aren't particularly likable in modern times rightfully so William T Hornaday who becomes a just you, a crusader for saving them from the commercial destruction,

and who hates Indians and thinks that they're, 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 role. Yeah, you can't overlook it. Yeah. Yeah. You can't overlook either of them.

I mean, if we're talking about Buffalo, we can't just sort of say, well, but we're not going to talk about this other part. As Ken mentioned, our films deal with human beings who are their own amalgam of different impulses. And you have to be honest with your portrayal of it. Without saying, well, we can't talk about him

because he had this deplorable belief that there was this hierarchy of genetically driven purity of the human species. At the same time, he was doing everything he could to keep this magnificent beast from disappearing forever. There's a good, the complexities of the people involved, you explore a handful of them, but there was a story in there that I wasn't familiar with. So Palo Duro Canyon.

Listeners, if you're imagining the Texas panhandle there's a thing called the landscape feature called the Yano Estacado the staked plains and coming off of this bench are these like deeply incised canyons and the Comanche and others had long hunted

these canyons I had never heard this story that after the animals were mostly disappeared that, uh, I can't remember. You'll have to help me fill this in. Yeah. The Quanah Parker and the Comanche went to Palo Duro Canyon.

From the reservation. And they're like, if there's one place we'll find them, it's there. Right. And they get there and it's being ranched. charlie goodnight by charlie goodnight and he says you're not going to find any but i know you're not going to believe me um go take a look and then what do you tell them every two days you can have a couple of my cows

you can kill every whatever day you can kill some number of my cows to feed on. This is the beginning. It's, you know. And please satisfy your curiosity that they're gone. We really love the simplistic binary idea of villains. And Hornaday fits a villain because he starts off doing one thing and he does an admirable thing. But he does it for all the wrong reasons. Yeah, it says a lot of horrible things along the way.

But then you have these other things that are the Charlie good night stories in which you have a human being who's an Indian hater and Indian fighter and is, is a Buffalo hater and a Buffalo killer. He wants to raise his cattle in Palo Duro Canyon. He's got the first ranch there and his evolution ends up embracing his date and said, not only the buffalo. On an accident, 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, and 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 pressures of real extinction but he 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 neon sign 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 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 there are no heroes now, but heroism is not about, the Greeks tell us, about perfection. It's about strengths and weaknesses. And so you want to calibrate and calculate what those strengths are. Achilles had his hubris 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.

But he represents a kind of heroism that is not, you know, doesn't reach a Charlie Goodnight. You know, you cancel him for the early years and then all of a sudden embrace. So the idea of even cancellation in good history becomes kind of beside the point. You're going to try to include as much as you can and treat everybody with that kind of perspective that allows you to understand even the motivation of the hide hunters, even the motivation of this. So 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 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, 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 can take our kids and our grandkids to see them. And that's one hell of a great story. I was heartened by the, the,

the bold choice to use the word buffalo in the title and uh oh i'll let dayton address this i i had i had dinner with dayton 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. Well, there's a couple of people that are in this, this new Ken Burns documentary, the American Buffalo who have appeared on this podcast before. So we've had Dan Flores on a couple of times. Michael Punk's been on a couple of times. I recently interviewed Dan Flores about his new book,

wild 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 the thought right the peopling of the americas no one ever is comfortable saying uh here's what happened they'll say well for a while we thought this and for a while we thought that and currently we think this and there's certain subjects that every that 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 animals buffalo it usually comes with you feel this need

to go hear me out right and explain the whole thing and just the in the film um they they spare all that like it's not there just scientists whatever you said scientists call it bison known to scientists today as bison bison right and that allows us to use it interchangeably and not get into the whole etymology of our argument because it is buffalo new york not bison new york it the Buffalo nickel, not the Bison nickel. It's now been changed from a Bison reserve to the Buffalo. It's Buffalo bill. I mean, you've got all these examples.

So what you're acknowledging, and though Dayton can, I can press a button on Dayton. That's a great point. I'm going to steal that from you, the Bison nickel. I mean, you can hear the whole dynamics of the argument, but it's quite simple. 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 bison bison. And if you want to get into the fact that there are buffalo in Africa and buffalo in Asia and nothing's real and this is not really a buffalo, it doesn't matter. We say this 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 fur it has and what fur is lost so you know this is

what we call it 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 to do what he what he does which is it's it's you know it's he said someone took him to task at a recent q a and he had to do it he had to do it right we were going to talk for 10 we were going to talk for 20 minutes and 19 was his explanation of what it was i just picture the guy raised his hand being like but hold on a minute yeah right exactly you named it the wrong thing right so and oh you're maybe you didn't know this yeah but they're actually bison you see there are these other

and i want the last thing you want to do with dayton is to do that you know it's like it's like bear rabbit there's please don't give me a lengthy explanation of of please don't ask for a lengthy explanation of the bison buffalo controversy and then he brought up another instant where 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 to me the process of do we get into it how do we get into it and eventually it's just he killed himself how much of dinner did that discussion take it was post dinner so but it no just like you're like do i really need to do this i suppose i should do it i said well actually the way we solved it,

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 them my address and my phone number

and I'd be happy to talk to them and I'll be happy to anybody wants to chide us for naming this the American Buffalo instead of the American Bison and using it interchangeably with Bison to save time for this podcast and to avoid redundancy

they can contact me as long as they you know they're paying for the 20 minute phone call just thinking 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 and above so it bison. So you're saying bison, and then buffalo, and then the animal, and then bison, and then buffalo. So it just helps relieve the thing. But the point is, they're buffalo. And that's the name of our film,

and we're sticking with it. Right. You know. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end titty there,

OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all how did you guys uh 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 articulation, the passion is George Horsecapture Jr. Yeah. So I, you know, I'll let Dayton 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 worldviews to someone else's, not just in some kind of gracious after you, Alphonse, no, after you, you gaston 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 oh yeah so what it's disconcerted not not it's disorienting almost it is disorienting in the most, for me, emotional way. I have watched this film dozens and dozens of times.

I have wept every time I get to his last remark, which we will not give away. And I have been watching myself agitated, disconcerted, being kind of elated that there might be another way to see this grasshopper you know yeah 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, you know, he is, you, you could 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 he, it's going to be nice to have him there as like, what do we call it now?

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 rap. 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 they would look at a stand of timber and think bored 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 600 generations history of George horse capture, junior of a, 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, as my ancestor, Robert Byrne said,

Oh, would 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 bee's knees to me. I met his father, George Horscapture. He's George Horscapture Jr., who was a very renowned anthropologist when we were working on the West and spent some time with him. Yeah, when I tried to find George Horscapture capture jr online i read a lot about his father yeah yeah and so i knew about him and then i learned um from uh friends that we have at

american prairie the non-profit that's trying to um reintroduce uh buffalo Buffalo and restore part of the prairie in Montana, which is not too far from the Fort Belknap Reservation, that George Horscapture Jr. was doing a program at the reservation dealing with Buffalo and would sometimes come and talk to to 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 belknap herd but that you know but 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 um to his his people and so i said well i 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 have written books about it, and also Dan O'Brien, who is a writer but also has a Buffalo Ranch in South Dakota,ota and rosalind lapierre who's a blackfeet metis but who's an ethnobotanist and historian you know michelle new how uh nyhouse who's a writer about extinctions and stuff you know you go through all the reading you do and you say oh well let's go talk to those people that might help

us tell our story. And some of those turn out to be really good and some of them don't. But also, we wanted to talk to descendants of Quanah Parker. Who's a character in our film? We learned about Marsha Pablo, whose great-grandfather was Michelle Pablo, 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 just 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 of the historical story, but just a flat-out point of view. He's got some 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 before the horses debut in the film and and we have other people sign out Rosalyn LaPierre

and Sarah Dant who's a environmental historian 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, pishkins, as the Blackfeet would call them. And they tell that story, and it just comes alive. And then George just comes on in the moment day, in the modern day.

So our music is going, 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. Yeah, and then you're looking up on a live shot. But we see a live shot with quiet and then you hear this voice come on. He says, you go to a buffalo jump these days,

and if people ain't talking like magpies. 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 opposite direction. the sadness, the sorrow, the screams of the buffalo, but he takes you in exactly the opposite direction. Yeah, and he says, but 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, that my family, my tribe, we're going to have enough meat to last us, you know, weeks, a month into the winter. And that's a good thing. And, you know, it's just like, it's like, holy smokes, you know, it's just like, of course they would celebrate, you know, you just got, you know, uh, we don't get into it in the,, 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 needed to do that because otherwise the survivors would go and tell and warn and warn we still use that term today it's called uh when they're educated yeah right you don't want to educate turkeys he uh he has a line that really stuck with 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 says, um, 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 and i touch on being in the film and and i quote him and i wound up needing to when i quote him when i say their people it's so disorienting like i said i needed to put in parentheses right so because the reader would never understand when he says their people he means the animals right but there's no parentheses in his mind no and that's the great thing about it i kept writing it i'd write i wrote it and i'd look at it and be like no one's gonna understand what he's talking about right you know but they're being like george is asking you to take the parentheses off and see things in an entirely new way in which that um that word then is part of a of a reciprocal relationship between all of creation and not just the dominant species

and everybody else i couldn't make it like you you can't make it work in writing without a parenthesis, clarifying what he's talking about by saying they're people. Yeah. That's the thing on the film. In film, when he's talking, he'll say some things that, you know, grammatically are confusing or something like that. But there is no confusion watching him say it. It's totally communicated yeah um the my winter ownership my cattle my land my this he's asking

you to say you know there's a who's the this is a response to good night yeah this is this is this is the um you know the early 19th century philosopher, Proudhon, I think who said property is theft. And that was part of the developing revolutionary and all the stuff that leads to theft. But he has that not as an intellectual idea in opposition to anything. It's just like, what kind of theory is this? What does my mean? 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 as opposed to, which is 600 generations old, on this continent, and say, whoa, well, maybe he's got a point here, right? And so I love being, you know, not calcifying. I love the fact that he kind of wakes you up. He also has a great moment, speaking of the bison nickel, the buffalo nickel,

in interaction with your comments about that, about this animal that gets put on a nickel on the other side of an indian head by the way but that uh the model for that was from black diamond black diamond that you describe and that what you know i went to the last known i went to the nas the last known location of black diamond's head which had become an italian uh clothing boutique oh my god yeah and i went in and told the woman working there um you know what used to be in here but but but as you as you point out that so here's this here in 1913 here's this symbol on one side is a uh a portrait of a Native American. Is that an individual's portrait?

Who is that? I think so, and I can't remember his name. Well, at least I know there are theories of who it is. It may not be known. But definitely, Fraser said this one was- Black Diamond. Black Diamond is a, and as you say, and so we're left with this,

what is it a symbol of? It's a, you know, it's a wonderful thing is that, and, and that to us is 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? You know, uh, what is it? And then George comes on, you know, and just gives it the final thing he says 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 you know what is it why is it that for some people that you want to kill the thing you love?

This is it. Because look what we have done. We are beginning now. This is 1913 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 what two symbols represent the um the newness of america particularly the west then the native american and the buffalo and what and so we've we've done this to it 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 of in the Vietnam film the eighth I think

of out of ten is something a Marine said to us that we're just talking about warfare in general and he goes well that's the history of the world mm-hmm meaning warfare, well, that's the 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. This is not the aspect that we like to say. We want to say, oh, no, we're the Mona Lisa and we're the Tower of Pisa and we're the this and the that. We're also this. I think he gets that. 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 symbol is the grizzly bear yeah of which they don't have any right so uh there are things like that but but it's so and one of the comments that that uh one of the comments that i have in the film is how quickly the nostalgia yes began because you guys do a great job of uh buffalo bill cody yeah in the wild west show um where they are it's it's like uh 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 try to get passing but this is what it was like it was like he he didn't even look different. No. He's still advertising the same shtick.

He's just now flipped the coin, right? And it's different. But look at that. We romanticized 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.

60 million human lives were extinguished. And it's the good war. It's the worst war ever. 60 million human lives were extinguished and it's the good war to us, right? So this is always happening in our purview. And I think what we've been dedicated to is to try to take 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 says in the editor you said to me one day on the phone um uh you just said nothing is binary yeah nothing's binary nothing is binary and that's all we want to do we want to make something red state or blue state black or white young or old rich or

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, we'll resist that kind of on-off switch. Because in Charlie Goodnight, you have all of this complication. In William T. hornaday and and those that are uh spouting them like madison grant are are also doing magnificent things and so you know lincoln as late as 1861 was thinking of colonizing black people to mexico or south america or back to Africa. In 61, that's when the guns open up at Fort Sumter, right?

I mean, and yet he's the great emancipator, which he is. He's the visionary who saw, who wrote the Gettysburg Address, which is our 2.0 operating manual declaration. 1.0. Oops. The guy who says all 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 to say before is that maybe as we got older,

our chops get a little bit better and that we find a way to rejoice. Integrate it more. To rejoice in that complication. Can I say in terms of these complications and other things, you do a great job helping us in talking about how the people like Roosevelt, avid hunters, George Byrd Grinnell, an avid hunter, informing the Boone and Crockett Club, helped start a movement in which hunters were at the forefront of conservation. So you can't just have all this market hunting.

You can still have hunting, but it needs to be regulated and not just sort of wanton. And that's an important part of it. And Grinnell 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. But you take Roosevelt, who rushed west in 1883 because he'd heard that the bison were

about to be gone forever. And so he gets on a train and rushes out to what's now North Dakota. Wants to get one. He wants to shoot one while there's still a chance to do it so he can hang a trophy on his wall. 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 their disappearance is a great tragedy. But on the other hand, not only was it necessary for the advance of what he called white civilization, it was probably a blessing that it needed to be done because of its impact on us controlling native people. So he just said in a book that he's written that the elimination of the bison was maybe a little bit sad, but it was a blessing and necessary.

Who then, with Grinnell, forms the Boone and Cocker Club, who then, with Grinnell, helps save and enact regulations in Yellowstone to save that last remnant wild herd from being poached out of existence, who then signs the bill that creates, with an executive order, creating the first preserve for bison on the plains and also the one on the Flathead Reservation in northwest Montana. And as we say, the greatest conservation president in our history without question but he's all of those things yeah and there's nothing wrong with saying it's

all those things you can't just say if if your tilt is well he said this about their extermination he's done or opposite if these have said he's just, you know, there's only glory to be talked about with him. He was who he was. 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 Quanah Parker had appeared with some other native leaders in his inaugural parade in 1905. He then went out to hunt coyotes and Quanah 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 an Indian reservation, spending the night on the porch, sleeping on the porch of one of the Indian leaders, but then told him, 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 to overstate it, I don't think Theodore Roosevelt's views of, you know, the pecking order of the races, as 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, they're too old. There were two warriors who were, you know, Quanah Parker had his own journey. Oh, yeah. No one hated Texans more than he did. They abducted his mother and his little baby sister uh and and took them away from the comanches back to the white civilization because that's where they had been yeah if listeners want to get a i mean listeners will get a good sense of this from from the film

but also uh i would recommend as well uh empire of the summer yeah absolutely hear the story but anyway charlie goodnight was one of the texas rangers who abducted cynthia ann parker from the command she said bring her back to the texas settlements so kuana was uh a renowned warrior you know, in fighting particularly Texans, but also the U.S. military. But then when he finally decided the buffalo are gone, we have to, you know, forge a new path, became, you know, a leader of trying to help his people make the adjustment without giving up many of his traditional beliefs, including multiple wives and long hair and the use of peyote. But he became a good friend with Charlie Goodnight

and Goodnight helped Quanah get the remains of his mother and baby sister brought back from Texas and buried near the Wichita Mountains, which they had considered their home. And in thanks for that, Quanah gave Goodnight the lance, the Comanche lance that he had used to kill hide hunters at the Battle of Adobe Walls.

Okay? to kill hide hunters at the Battle of Adobe Walls, okay? So, I mean, in my mind, so that lance is now, in my mind, that not just a, you know, it's, what is it a symbol of? Well, it's a symbol of resistance, right? It's a symbol of friendship and possibly some, you know some redemption some yes some measure of redemption and reconciliation it's a it is something you know uh history of the world it's it has its own blood memory yeah you know one thing you guys did um and date and i recognize 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 in any of your films was at the end of the Vietnam War, which has a very, 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 the wall, the memorial, and narrows in on an individual who, speaking of personal change, and an individual who initially refused he was like

i was not gonna go look he hated the idea of the wall it was in that school 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 everything happen. 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 the power of it and the memory. And he would probably still say to you mentally, intellectually, I don't agree with this, but he was himself more than any of the other people proof of the power of that great work of art 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 we're emotional archaeologists not just excavating dry dates and facts and events

but something other what i was what george horse capture can do it but at that moment you take someone who is 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 our republic. I was, my family was gone. I was between houses. I was on the second floor of the Lewis and Clark Hotel

in Bozeman, Montana, looking over the parking lot, watching the end of that movie. And I sat in my, I thought something was wrong with me. I sat in that room and wept. Wept. Wept.

Like to the point where I was beginning to be concerned about myself at the end of the Vietnam War. We all, we had, you know, we, well we we all like like to the point where i was beginning to be concerned about myself at the end of the vietnam war we had that you know we um 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 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 uh i mean i wasn't in vietnam you know i i didn't do that i'm here in the lewis and clark you know but something opens up and it just you just it it spills out it's so healthy in the best sense

of the word to to to permit that and you know where 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 Buffalo. We didn't kill anybody. We saved somebody, a person. I mean, we think the Buffalo is a biography.

But we also permitted somebody like George Horsecapture 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 no thing in which does not exist in the universe you just get you get full expression there and george just lets me just let go of a whole bunch of baggage that i just perpetually carry put down think i'm not

going to pick up again and find out i'm still carrying the same stuff do you feel that you have to do something on the war in afghanistan i need 25 years after an event to do it i mean i don't i think that i'd like to challenge that yeah i don't think you do 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 and second iraq as well as afghanistan and try to understand them in in in that sort of post-colonial sway and and in in a global sense and also in the deeply personal thing particularly with with uh afghanistan relating to uh 9 11. so it's a wonderful story and it's very very complicated oh and and deserves 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 dads are vietnam vets yes but um i think that there are plenty of people who have lived lived through that 20-year war yeah who have really lost sight yeah of the evolution of of mission the evolution of the thinking there yeah what it was in the first place what it became the withdrawal i mean god you guys it's it needs to be someone it needs to be someone like your team to to to do it and i just don't know that you need to wait a ton of time 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 phrase but you also realize that nobody turns in a rough draft right yeah so what we like is the passage of time and the perspective that will do I'll give you a

good but not so quick but a pretty quick thing if we'd done the Vietnam film ten years after the fall Saigon right in 1985 America's in a bit of a recession we're talking about the Pacific Rim but we don't mean us we mean Japan has ascended. Vietnam would represent the symbol of our decline, the ball and chain that we would forever carry around with us. If I'd waited 20 years to 1995, 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 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 30 years to 25 and we're in both Iraq and Afghanistan and we're 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, you know, it comes out in 2017. 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 a better, to 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 Yadrang Valley and play May, this important Hal Moore story.

And we're just doing this and we've got this kind of 3D map that we're threading through the Yadrang Valley on a graphic, right I go I can do the Battle of Long Island right right we're going back to the revolution and people like 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 that happened, it will be when this comes out, it 250 years ago is just magnificent. So I'm not saying no to that. So you like somewhere between 30 and 250. 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, 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 point you're going, you know, oh, my God. So the perspective 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 weight is to be able to be in the age we're in now with the kind of scholarship, including yours, that helps us 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 90s or even late 80s right we gotta do that but the fact that we've waited as long as we have, nothing changed except the inter-Buffalo tribal council and 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 Flores and, you know, so many other scholars that appear in the film. Michael Punk. Michael Punk, for sure. Um, you begin to realize that we've got a richer, more dynamic, less binary, uh, story to handle.

Well, whatever, uh, 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 the American Buffalo. I think that you listeners when you watch it, parts are going to speak to you, parts are going to challenge you. It's healthy. It's good. You're going to probably, if you know the story well, you're going to have parts where you're like, well, yeah, what about? But that stuff's great, man. It's good for your brain. Exactly. I hope everybody watches it and really want to

thank you guys for coming on and giving us the time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it. Ride on, let it run. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun. Ride on, ride on my love. Ride on, sweetheart. We're done, beat this damn horse to death.

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