The story told in the PBS docuseries “The American Buffalo” is one of total destruction according to the show’s director Ken Burns and producer and writer Dayton Duncan. However, for both Burns and Duncan this two-part series about America’s national animal and its relationship to our national identity is about more than driving the species to the brink of extinction. As Burns argues in an exclusive chat with Gold Derby, “If you go a little bit farther down that trail, it gives you hope.” Watch more of our video interview with Burns and Duncan above.
The series examines the buffalo in parallel with American expansion and our nation’s actions regarding indigenous populations. We see how the buffalo, which once numbered in the tens of millions, were whittled down to only a few hundred wild specimens in what Burns calls “the greatest slaughter of wildlife” in the history of the world. The series also examines the dichotomy between how native peoples and Americans viewed their relationship with nature. “These are two competing visions of how you own land,” Burns explains. “[Americans] say they own land. Native peoples are into stewardship.” However Burns says that reconciling those divergent points of view leads to something unexpected. “Somehow out of this horrific extermination, something is born of it,” he says. “A conservation movement is born in part from a need to preserve not just animals, but the places where they are.
For Duncan, who has collaborated with Burns for more than three decades, it was important that the story be allowed to unfold on its own terms rather than having a narrative forced on the viewer. “You want to shed yourself of any preconceptions that you already know what the story is,” he says. “I think what I learned from Ken is to hold back the rush to try and get [the story] out there and to let tell you what are the touch points, the most important moments and the themes that are always present as your are struggling just to tell a good story.”
Another prominent theme in the series is the juxtaposition between contradictory events and ideas. For example, many of the leaders of the movement to save the buffalo were also staunch believers in eugenics. The buffalo were rounded up for private collections only to one day be returned to the lands. For Burns, this juxtaposition is emblematic of the nation’s identity. “it’s who we are as a nation,” he says. “Whatever the subject is, it’s always true that there’s complexity. There’s nothing simpla and binary.”
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