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The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. Hey guys, it's uh Steve and I have such an important message that it's so important to fill.
The engineer advised me on how to hold my phone to get the best quality where it's about six inches from my mouth at angle, so it doesn't go when you talk. That's how important this messages. The auction House of Eyes met Eater 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 Durham family farm with Bubbly
Doug durn himself. It's the winner's choice. You do a buck hunt for one or a deer hunt for one. Opening day a 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 trappers 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 Jamie Jamie Underscore Wild Art. Okay, go look at her work. You can get an art commission from her. We have a signed arrow, a chunk of an aluminum arrow, signed by Ted Nugent in nineteen ninety one from a whiplash bash. And we have what in the art world they call the provenance. We have how this arrow flowed through ownership to get into your hands, says Ted Nugent ninety one on an aluminum arrow shaft. Great story to
go with that. Everybody knows our beloved Seth Morris used to go by the flip Flop Flesher. His wife is a professional artist. 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 weather be Mark five 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 media episode, a lot of media episodes, a left handed whether it be Mark five and three hundred win mag that exact rifle. We have a Carolina custom rifle that I use in a bunch more Meat Eater episodes, including the famous Moose Charge episode. That rifle is available for auction, and there is a dinner for four at my house. So the winning bidder and three guests will at a time that we picked together, will come to my house to be
wined and dined for auction. Doug Duran was bragging up how his auction item was kicking my dinner's ass. But I have to point out right now that it's probably humiliating to Doug the degree to which my dinner is kicking his farm's ass. So you better go help Bubbly out before he gets sad. Got to go to the Meeater dot com and find you know, there's all kinds
of links and stuff. Auction house of Oddities or go to at Steve even Ranella on Instagram and we will put the auction House of Oddities link in my bio. You'll find it. Thank you, everybody. Now back to regular programming. All right, everybody, we're here with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. When I say ken Burns, I mean that Ken Burns. His first feature film came out in nineteen eighty one, about the Brooklyn Bridge. Since then he has made over
three dozen films. Now, in a recent conversation you mentioned to me thirty films, but you said about now was surprised that someone would say about Well, I.
Never count them in that weird sort of way. I know how many kids I have, but I I didn't. PBS says forty now, and it's gonna pass that in.
But the funny French Schnyder says, three dozen. Listen, the.
Most important thing is that one could be a one hour film and one could be a ten part eighteen nineteen hour film. This still counts as one. So whatever it is, it's a lot of hours.
Yeah, and since but you agree, you have certitude that your first film was Brooklyn Bridge in nineteen eighty one.
Actually, PBS and an app that we have called unim which is sort of curating the evergreen themes that are in our film. Actually not an app, it's a website Unham as an e plurbus. Unham has released the film I made in college as my senior thesis at Hampshire College about Old Sturbridge village kind of the colonial Williamsburg of New England, which is called Working in World, New England. And it's seventeen ninety to eighteen forty kind of got five to it and it's all live stuff. But the
last shot is a pan across a painting. Oops.
Oh, the birth is the genesis moments of the effect. So there's forty one films major works on the Civil War called the Civil War or and and I want to tell you I hadn't told you this before. You've heard this hundreds of times from thousands of people. That overtook like that consumed our family life. That film even even to where my parents bought the CD, would play the music in.
The house, my children, like you, all four of them.
It was just like it consumed people in a way, and it was it created at that time. You know, now things are so diffuse and dispersed, but it was like one of those recognized is one of those elements of sort of like a shared It was unifying, like a shared national experience.
You know, it's pretty interesting that something that tore us in two became something that unified us in a in a way, I think we thought we knew about the Civil War and had kind of super views about it, or ideas or even mythologies that were incorrect, and this was sort of trying to tell a really deep, complicated story, and I think people wanted to know. It's the most important event in American history, in American history, and so everything that we were led up to it and everything
that we've become has issued from it. So I think there was a curiosity, no matter what idiot was making 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 ungrammatical. So what it did is take people when Lee was offered the head of the Union Army and turned it down. He said I cannot raise my sword into my country, by which he meant Virginia. After that, when you said your country, you met the United States of America. And so that's just one hell of a good story. And basically the whole eleven and a half twelve hours is how an r
became it is. Didn't solve a lot of things about race, didn't solve a lot of other things, but it sure at least for a while, made us.
It is so also World War Two, A major work on World War two called The War, the Vietnam War, also the dust Bowl, Country Music, the National Parks, the West Jazz, and then projects centered around pivotal American figures, including Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Jackie Robinson, and currently working on and this is what it's a little bit of surprise in here, working working on a film about LBJ. Working on a film about the American Revolution, which I
want to ask you about. But Leonardo da Vinci, Yeah, so that's not America.
So in dating, so when I was thinking about doing Benjamin Franklin, I had dinner one night with one of his biographers, Walter Isaacson, who's a dear friend maybe no longer heard my hesitation. And Walter and I were having dinner in Washington, d C. And all of a sudden he started to try to sell me a twofer. He said, you know, you know, he's this great scientist and artist, a political artist and writer. You know he's gonna argue he's I think, undeniably the greatest American writer of the
eighteenth century. And he's funny and all of this. But you know, and Walter had done another biography on Leonardo and he said, same thing. You've got this guy who's this great scientist but also this great artist, and you know you should do I said, look, I don't do
a non American topics. I only do American topics. But I walked out and was talking to one of one of the producing teams that produced the Central Mark five and that Jackie Robinson biography that you mentioned and the Muhammad Ali thing, and I said, Leonardo.
They said, yes, let's do it.
So I thought, why the hell not? You know, why be stuck. We'll tell you why not my mid sixties.
Because it's it's you're you're an America.
Wait till you see, wait you see we're we're but we're halfway through editing and it's just so exciting and riveting. And Sarah, my oldest daughter, who's that partner, and her husband, David McMahon, who is the other partner. I've just returned from a year with two of my four grandchildren in Florence, and what we've got is just an amazing stuff. And let's remember it's Florentine Films. So we were ment no, I see that eventually to get to somebody in in Florence, right, So well.
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 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 he said, and it's not what people think, or you know,
what is the because I guess it's not helpless. I can't remember what exactly said, but you you intimated that there's a that there's an element that has become misunderstood about the American Revolution.
Perhaps well like the Civil War, it's less misunderstood, it's just not understood. And that's the work that we try to do is a pretty deep dive that helps to sort of dissolve the you know, the the arteries that are clogged with the false stories that it wasn't the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It was about slavery. There's no mention of states rights or and all of the cation or interposition. In the South Carolina Declaration of Secession,
it mentioned slavery an awful lot. That's what it's about. The Ku Kluk clan are not the heroes of the post Civil War era. That's what birth of a nation and gone with the winds suggests. So we begin to inherit a lot of stuff, and we think that the people who fought against the British were sturdy New England of farmers and Virginia, you know, farmers, and they left their work and their job the Minuteman idea, and we only know Lexington and conquered. We kind of know Washington
crossing the Delaware for Trenton at Christmas Day. People think it's Christmas Eve and then that's it, and they don't know that the biggest battle of the entire thing is the Battle of Long Island or Brooklyn, where Washington makes classic mistakes. Another big mistake is Brandywine, the same mistake Germantown. All of these stuff Sarah Toogain, which Washington's not involved as a great victory. So we want to go through
the military history and get you to know. You to know what Guilford Courthouse was about in South Carolina, or cow Pens or Camden all in South Carolina. We want you to know about King's Mountain and Yorktown and the places where it's fault. It's like a three part opera, you know, in New England, Central States, and then South Amerka. But it's also a much more complicated picture. It isn't just fifty five white guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, right.
A lot of these guys are slave owners. A lot of them are trying to get Indian land. A lot of this is about getting Indian land, and so you're now dealing with slavery, freed slaves, runaway slaves. British are offering freedom. If you belong to a rebel, if you belong to somebody who's loyalists, forget it. You're still a slave, right.
So there's unbelievably complicated dynamics. Women aren't involved from the very beginning, and any army is traveling, the American army particularly, but also the British and Hashian have wives and children and people that are there involved in it. And you've got French, and you've got German, and you've got British people. Some of the British people are pro American, some are obviously vociferously not. There's a Canadian dimension. There's loyalists among us.
At any given table, you might have twenty thirty percent our favoring staying with the ground. A lot of people just remain neutral. So it is our civil war is not a civil war. There's not huge civilian deaths except in Missouri and Kansas related to the issues of the civil War. You know, two people die in Gettysburg. That's not what happens in a civil war. It's a sectional war. It is North against South. The revolution is a bloody, violent civil war that engages all Americans Native Americans.
Well, when you said about civil war, you mean that there were not a lot of non combatant dot.
Right people who didn't he carry a rifle at that moment, are tird and feathered because they're a loyalist. I mean, we just made a film on Franklin, and Franklin's own son, William was the royal governor of New Jersey, deposed, imprisoned, eventually released, presumed to go to England and get out of the thing. Instead, he starts a terrorist organization dedicated to murdering patriots. Because, by the way, there are lots
of patriot organizations dedicated to murdering loyalists. And that means it's right within your own community, and it's from New Hampshire down to Georgia. Georgia's more more loyalists, at least you know in the beginning than say New Hampshire and the New England states are, particularly in Massachusetts. But this changes. They start a southern strategy, beginning with Savannah and then moving to Charleston because they presume that this loyalist population
will help them pacify. As a word from Vietnam, pacify the countryside never happens, and so they kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, well, maybe we should just go up to Virginia, which is the death knell of the British attempt to keep these rebellious calmnists, none of whom really know much about the other. The Carolinas do, but everybody else is pretty much an independent vassal state. Plus to the west there's forty or fifty other nations.
Yeah, yeah, I think we learned in doing Franklin. At least it was driven home to me, not just because Franklin and his son, but in the Revolutionary Wars the Civil War. Also because there is no state, there's probably no town in the thirteen Colonies that itself wasn't didn't have people on different sides.
Oh I see, yeah, you know.
And I remember when we were working on the West and writing about bleeding Kansas and Missouri, and at that time the wars in Bosnian you know what used to be hungry. We're going on with the bloody just murders of your neighbors, and I thought, well, that is a civil war. Yeah, you know, in the classic sense that people who are neighbors and collected together or you know, in a location are fighting each other.
And this applies to everybody.
So the oldest functioning democracy on the continent is the Hodna Shone, often referred to as the Iroquois Confederation, made up of six first five and then six nations. And what the revolution does is it splits them. Some are thinking, maybe we'll get a better deal with the Americans, but most of them know that they should. They know the British from history, and they're super worried, correctly that the whole impulse of the colonists is to move westward and
take their land. In fact, our whole series begins with we know you know how valuable our lands are. We know you want to take that. Oh well, because that's what this is about.
You refer to the reward system. Well, there were like participants. Well in the participates on the American side were often rewarded land.
That often, if you if you signed up for the duration, you got twenty bucks. If you got signed up for three years, you got ten bucks. But the twenty buck folks were also palm promised Indian But the revolution happens for really interesting reasons. One is when the British win the French and Indian War, which the rest of the world calls the Seven Years War. They got a huge empire and they can't pay for it. They're bankrupt from
the war. And so they see the settlers streaming people, English, Irish, German settlers streaming over the Appalachians in the Indian territory, and the Indians are fighting back and saying, no, you can't take our land. So they do a demarcation line and say you can't go over the Appalachians. Like, go, what, I have an opportunity to own land for the first time in one thousand and fifteen hundred years in my
family's history. What are you going to do that? And oh, by the way, we're so broke, we're going to begin to acts. The least tax people on earth, the American colonists, And so this is what it is. But there's always that pressure to move across the Appalachian and a great deal of the killing of the American Revolution takes place not just from Lexington conquered in Boston, down you know, to here, or up to Quebec or Taykwon de Rog. It's all there, and we detail it to Yorktown down
to Charleston and Savannah and even into a mobile. But it's in upstate New York with Native people being killed and having their villages. These are not plains Indians nomadic people. These are people with cities and towns and farms and orchards, having scorched earth policy. You know. Washington was called by many of the Iroquois Confederation tribes the town destroyer, and
they refer to the revolution as the Whirlwind. It also happened in the Southeast, and it all so happened in the Midwest, particularly with George Rogers Clark, who's just he's out to he's the Attila, the hunt of the story. He's out to just kill as many Indians as he can, to destroy as many villages to make that area which will later become the Northwest Territories, you know, suitable for settling. So it's a super complicated story, and yet it engages
some of the most noble aspirations of humankind periods. So that when someone came up to me and said, our last film that was broadcast was called The US and the Holocaust, I said, do you think after the birth of Christ, the most important event in world history is the Holocaust? I said, no, it's the birth of the United States.
That's great. I can't wait to see that one. How long will that one be?
That'll be twelve hours without a single photograph, right, that's the big challenge that we practiced in Franklin. I don't mean to suggest that it was easy. And Lewis and Clark, which is how you tell a story in which it's pre photographic, no photographs, no newsreel, no combat footage, no combat footed Whenever I travel and I give a species and if anybody's got a photograph from their relations, please
there giving my address, please send it in. But what happens is that necessity is a mother of invention, And so we begin to find new strategies like going out and filming yourself graveyard gravestones and and and trees and atmospherics what Emily Dickinson called the far theatricals of day sunrises, sunrit sets, and and try to find new ways to
do it. And it's beginning to work. We're knock on wood, you know, we've been editing now for several months, and and have you know, we're beginning to feel like we can exhale a little bit.
Yeah, uh, I also want to do a better job of introducing Dayton Duncan after our preamble about the forthcoming revolutionary film American Revolution. Dayton Duncan has written and produced many films with Ken Burns country Music. You can help me fill in the list Country Music, Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, The West, Dustball, dust Bowl, National Parks, National Parks.
Ratios, Drive, Ratio's Drive about the first car trip across the United States in nineteen oh three.
The West, The West, but also worked on Civil War, you know, lots of different projects.
Yeah, I would, because we're friends. As I was writing books, Ken would read the books that I was working on in progress, and he'd asked me to sit in and look at films in progress, not as an expert on the topic, but it's just somebody who shares his passion for narrative storytelling. And I'd say, well, this is really working. And I was confused, here, this is dragging here. I was, you know that do more of this and a little
less of this and that kind of thing. So I fiddled around on the ones I didn't produce and write, but was dedicated and lucky to work with him on ones that were particul clear passion or interest to me.
How'd you guys meet that's good story. Did you meet through Dayton's books or yep?
I I you know, when I decided to become a documentary filmmaker. Strike one on PBS, Strike two in American History, Strike three, Ye're out. I moved from New York City to Walpole, New Hampshire, to the house i'm living in now, to the bedroom I still sleep in forty four years ago. But before that, in order to survive, we would take day jobs from the BBC, who didn't want to send a union crew from New York City all the way up and incur all these expenses. And we just said
we won't charge per deems. We'll just get where you need to be in New England, which was, you know, waking up at one am to go be ready to shoot at six am, to finish at midnight, to drive another six hours ago on what kind of project like one day shoot. So one day the BBC was interviewing the Governor of New Hampshire, who was active in sort of the adapt active reuse of some of the old
abandoned mills, the Amiskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. That governor was named Hugh Gallen and his chief of staff was Dayton Duncan. So the first time I met Golrok is when.
We wanted to talk to Hugh Gallan. They had to go through Mate, yes.
And he had a reputation already is kind of this tough. So we did a shoot and we sort of noticed each other, and I think he thought, oh, this child is making a film, what is he doing? But it turned out all right, And then later we'd bump into each other at sort of political events in the state.
It's a small state and intimate. And then when I was getting married, I had crossed every t and dotted every eye except the very important marriage license, and I needed to cut through red tape in about a day and a half. So I called my buddy. Eventually our wives and then my children and his children became the dayon moved here, and so.
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 going to tell your story, but let's tell Lewis and Clark. And so we had some stuff in the way, like
the Civil War and baseball in the West. But you know, one of the most satisfying parts of my professional experience has been working with Dayton, particularly on Lewis and Clark, particularly out on the road in Montana, driving from one town to another and looking and making jokes about, well, well, it looks like Winnifred is way up there, and what you know. Dayton would say, what are you going to
get when do we get into town? I said, well, I think I'll start with a cold vs. Swas and then I'm going to move to a salad of odive with a vinaigrette dressing, and then I will have probably either the Chateau Brion or the Dover Soul, and then I hope to follow it off with a beautiful crem breulat. And then there would be a beat and he'd say, what do you want on your cheeseburger? And so we would go into town and we go to the cafe and we get a delicious cheeseburger, and then I'd repeat
it the other way I would. I would say to Dayton, well, you know, we're coming up on it. Where do you what do you think we should get? And he would elaborate thing and then I would go, what do you want on your cheeseburger? So that's it was. It was our routine. But in that time we got we've you know, Dayton had already known the West, but I fell in love with it, and and he was the guide and we'd be drinking fresca.
Yeah, I think one of the joys of my life. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I was with you the first time that you were ever in South Dakota. In North Dakota, yes, and maybe Montana. And the first time you ever saw any buffalo for some that wasn't.
Yeah, I saw a buffalo when I was a little boy. And it's either Philadelphia or Baltimore. I don't remember what zoo. And I'd already's been animated as an anthropologist, sons by native people and buffaloes and stuff like that. But I saw a buffalo.
At the ranch where years later The Dances with Wolves was shot. Oh, the ranch north of Pier that was the Halk Ranch at that time, I've had a triple U I think was the name of the ranch. They had one of the largest herds in America at the time, and I had met the guy that the rancher when I was doing my book out West and interviewed him. But then so we filmed there. But that was what
I was going to say. One of the joys of my life was on those moments with Ken, even though you know we're doing ridiculous hours to get up and shoot at dawn and then drive and find the place we're going to shoot next and go tell sunset in the northern plains and the middle of the summer, so you're talking about sunrise at four o'clock and sunset at ten.
But of just seeing his was important to me when we were making that film, of seeing his eyes so wide at the landscape, encountering the landscape of the Great Plains, and it reminded me that we needed to make sure in our film that we somehow because we can't show the faces of Lewis and Clark and the members of
the Core of Discovery. We were standing with them looking at it and using their quotes from their journals, but to make sure we got across the sense of wonder that they had because they know they came from this part of the country up in New England and the East where basically you have vertical views through gaps and trees and stuff. And now you're in this horizontal world and you're encountering animals that, as they would write in
their journals, not known back in the United States. I mean they're writing that when they're in Nebraska and South Dakota. They're talking about back in the States, you don't have these things that barking dogs and piet sheens and prairie dogs as John Ordway called them, and that's what they became.
And antelope and you know, jack rabbits and the and bison they knew about, but because they used to be in the East Coast, but not in those numbers and the astonishing numbers grizzly bears living on the plains elk elk one was a plain's animal at one time, and just this wonderland of landscape and wildlife that they encountered as the first US citizens to ever go that far west, and as the first US citizens, white citizens to see.
In that.
You know, paradise of wonderland of wildlife and landscape, and for me that's the marker, you know, that was what the West was after the United States had claimed it through the Louisiana Purchase but didn't control it. But it was a view of a land and a people and animals that in the next eighty years would be irrevocably changed.
And so they were the first in one respect, and they were the last in another respect to encounter that place that had been evolving for me ten thousand years before the United States as officially was entering into it. And my book Out West was about the difference between what they saw and what I saw, and to tell the history of the West in between those they saw.
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 mono culture now to the prairies when it was, as they say, are serengetti. And that's I think 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 planes were with species of both both flora as well as fauna, and how what it would be like to imagine or now reimagine the possibilities that there were elk, there were grizzlies, there were wolves and so now and in a variety of plant life that is just a spectacular eden as as as day and says Is as people talked about it, you know, this was this was our new the new
territory we were acquiring, and it was just full. And then very shortly afterwards it's not full. The rounds have disappeared.
Yeah, Lewis and Clark, I say, we just saw them. And just talking about buffalo. They saw them everywhere. Once they reached what's now South Dakota and the plains that I crossed in the early eighties, retracing their route, it was a wildlife desert now, uh. And to find to see buffalo out on a range took a lot of work. I mean I had as a reporter, had to you know, dig down to find out work. And I go see some you know, and talk and learn a little bit
about them. And so South Dakota and then my friend became my friend through that Gerard Baker who's in our in our Lewis and Clark film, and also in our National Parks film, and also in the West Colman, and also in this Buffalo of Them Who's a Mandanadatsa the tribes that sheltered Lewis and Clark in the winter of eighteen o four eighteen o five. I got to know
him very well. But at one point he became the district ranger of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the North Unit, and one of his jobs was sort of managing.
Their buffalo herd.
So through him I got not only introduced, you know, personally to buffalo, but more importantly, and we hope that our film gets this across, the importance that they had both for sustenance physical sustenance, but also for spiritual sustenance for Native people who had been living with them for ten thousand years. And he really got that across to me. And that's what another thing we hope in this film
that we make perfectly clear. You know, you can say it, well, they've been living them for ten thousand years and everything, and then they were gone and that was really devastating. That just doesn't touch it, you know, about how how intricate, intricate, it intocreate in whatever how closely thank you they were. Their lives were intertwined and the meaning that they had 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.
Being.
That is, you can you can talk about it, but having people like Gerard and other people that we interviewed in our film describe it because they're talking about their people.
Bones are out there too, talking about how deep it was and therefore how devastating it was, and therefore how important it is now to try to restore some more buffalo two reservations to the land, their own ancestral lands, the buffaloes and the ancestral lands that are laughed at least on reservations for tribes to revive that sacred connection that they had and also to provide them with food sovereignty as well.
It's been broken for you know, five six generations. That's a big break, because if you think about it, it's six hundred generations of experience up to that point and then all of a sudden, you know, we have in filmmaking a phrase called POV, which means point of view, and we tend to realize that we are susceptible to one po and while it might be generous enough to encompass other points of view, it does so in the
kind of sometimes patronizing kind of no bless obleiche. We well, yes there are other views of this, but you really, in the case of this question, have to yield to those people who have six hundred generations of experience and not just four or five or six generations of experience
with regard to this animal. I think for us the ability later in our professional lives to be able to seed to views not in just some sort of kind liberal, bleeding heart way, but in a real full we just give it over and challenge lots of things, presumptions about ownership of land, presumptions about superiority as a species, presumptions
about how you act in concert with this. Because if you're just killing a buffalo and taking the tongue, which is the first thing, you can imagine what the effect is on a culture that is using everything, as Dayton is suggesting, from the tail to the snout and as Girard says in our film, and also the snort, because the buffalo sounds get worked into rituals, so it isn't
just using every last thing. And Dayton wrote a beautiful thing of you know, from the moment you're born into a warm buffalo blanket and the time you die in a shroud of buffalo skin, all the ways in which the buffalo is used from tail to snout, and then having,
as Dayton has said so well, this spiritual dimension. And so we need to actually look at the story that takes place from a variety of povs and actually seed something even as filmmakers tightly in control of the narrative, is that we not we may not always be right or see it in a way. And how can we in developing this narrative see things from what is in many cases with regard to say, ownership of the land or kinship with other species, entirely different point.
Of the kinship question. I think is handled really well in the film. And again the film releases in October. Yes, yeah, called the American Buffalo.
I think that we're sixteenth and seventeenth.
October sixteen and seventeenes a thing that does very convincingly, and I'd like red references of it and pondered it before. But you guys, capturedly. Well, well, is this idea of between the planes, tribes and the animals, that there's a spiritual dimension in otherwise there's like this this real equal footing, meaning it was even that at one in some belief systems, it was even at once upon a time the buffalo were dominant over humans, but through various circumstances, the humans
became dominant over buffalo. But if humans did sort of moral infractions against the animals, the animals would deprive themselves and you had to to in writing about the film later I wrote a thing for Outside magazine about the film, and writing about it would be that bad hunting could be more than bad luck, like bad hunting could could be a sign of some moral transgression, meaning you needed to make things right.
Religious karma idea right that that that there was you had a kind of responsibility. There's a reciprocity and in quality between all of creation, and you needed to be in balance with that. And this is not just every tribe. It's specific tribes have specific myths about the creation and when man became dominant, But that dominance required a kind of humility in the face of what the buffalo then provided and pre horse. This is going to be a
very big deal. This is the survival of your band, your tribe might be on the success of one hunt that would provide you with enough meat for a month if you got to buffalo and if you didn't, what were you doing if they were not there? Had had you done something wrong? And it's really a wonderful ones And it's different from the steamroller effect.
Yeah, yeah, it's about respect. I mean, the cosmology is so different a world view of human beings in their relationship to the natural world than what was brought to the Americas in fourteen ninety two and following, which was we're all part of this web and we're all in essence on an equal basis everything and it all comes from the Sun and that great unknown that uh that the Lakotas are called the walk on Tonka, the you know,
the great incomprehensibility. They understood that the sun was the source of all life and the represent 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 you know, for their food, but also everybody part for for something else, and that the that relationship was one in which a number of the people we interviewed say in our film, the buffalo give themselves
to us. That's part of how this works. And yeah, and if if we don't uh, through our ceremonies and our practices respect that, then they might withhold that and they would go back to where they came from a 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 where you know, we will start a fish are we'll reset, and we'll we promise you know that we won't. We'll try our best not to do whatever that violation was that caused you to disappear,
and to a certain extent in our film. Remarkably, when the first national preserve for bison back on the Plains is created in the early nineteen hundreds through Theodore Roosevelt, it was in the Wichita Mountains where, according to the Kai was they would go they had first emerged, and it's where they would go when they hadn't been respected. And according to a legend told by a woman named Old Lady Horse, whose words we use in the film.
She describes a girl watching the last buffalo heard after the buffalo had been slaughtered by the hide hunters disappearing that into what's called now Mount Scott and the Wichita Mountains and said it opened up and inside was a world of fresh beauty, and the rivers ran clear, and the grass was green. And that's where they went. And when they came back for the Kias and Comanches, was
at the Wichita Mountains where the preserve was founded. That you know, Theodore Roosevelt believed me wasn't doing it because he knew the legend of that Old Lady Horse had told. It was just a good place. The federal government had taken some of the land from the Comanche Reservation during allotment, and it made sense.
To do it.
But there were people there, Guana Parker and others who understood that deeper thing and were and who had interacted with the animals as young as young. There were still some people alive that remember them the time when they covered the plains, and they were also their children who hadn't seen a buffalo. I mean, that's how dramatic that.
And the irony is that the buffalo that are going to seed the Wichita Mountains refuge from the Bronx, come from the Bronx zoo and they're loaded on this you know, in the busiest city, the biggest city in the Western Hemisphere. They're going to be loaded on these box cards and make the reverse trip out to their you know, as 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 described Steve somebody.
Helps us, helps us get that from the beginning.
Rather promising middle aged man.
So so the thing to remember is that human nature never changes. It's the same for all, right, villains and heroes and all that stuff that we superficially apply. So there are lots of ways of thinking and lots of ways of behaving and whatever. But you know, native peoples
are warring with one another and committing atrocities. But I think for us to be able to look and see that many of our own ancestors participated in a kind of thoughtless which is maybe the most charitable thing, you could say, thoughtless slaughter that reached a kind of industrial pitch in the last half of the nineteenth century. That took an animal that numbered in perhaps thirty million at the beginning of the eighteenth century down to basically nobody.
Could find the beginning of the eighteen hundreds, eighteenth century.
The beginning of the nineteenth century, there are at least thirty million. There By the end of the eighteen eighties, you can't find one outside of a zoo or private collections. There's some in Yellowstone there under tremendous threats from poachers and things like that. So how did this happen? And then why are we sitting here today not so worried 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 to
ask an earlier question. Guys, in your work, you touch on, uh, you touch on the buffalo and the dust bowl early on and establishing you know, the the come up and for tilling the great planes, and and you have this thin you know, layer of grass that has a root structure that goes buffalo grass, yeah, five feet subsurface, right, and has this tiny reflection on the surface and that ecosystem, and you touch on the animal there, you touch on the animal Lewis and Clark in the West of course,
the National Parks. But at what point, in the back of your heads, in the front of your head or whatever, at what point did you think we let's just go at some point, let's just tackle the animal in its own free standing project.
We've been talking about that for more than three decades. We found a proposal from the nineties that was like really fully developed and we really you know, we're about to do it, and we.
Generated the proposal Dane probly were all.
But we talked about it from the early nineties, you know, about this would be a great film in and of itself. And what's so good is that this?
You know, and this.
Happened some projects. You know, you say this country music boom, you're suddenly in it. Other stuff same same way, and others you know, sit.
There, I mean, I mean the process from from from from conception.
So the first articulation of it, you know, front of mine, back of mine. So you say something and all of a sudden you're racing towards it and you're working. Country music was like yeah, Cut was like that, and national park, national parks like that. Many of the projects of Vietnam like that. You know, when you we're going to do it. You know. It took us a long time to do the war because after the Civil War we said no more wars, and then we had to decide that we
are going to jump into that. But what was so great is that a lot of things have over the years kept kind of on the back burner or have just been there. Of course, the buffalo, it falls off lists, it comes back onto lists. You make a ten year plan and it's not there, but then maybe there's a
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 well, across thousands of cultures and eons of time, and so to
be able to have this little moment of daylight that we could say, okay, so after Franklin, we should be doing this, and this particular team with Dayton and with Julie and and and and said well, we'll fit the Buffalo in here. It was just the right time. And it feels so fortuitous in the same way that we celebrate country music for the impulse of just saying I mean, a friend suggested it to me in Dallas. I was kind of nervous because Dayton and I were thinking about
something else. I went back to Dayton, we don't have to forget that idea but country, and he's like, we forgot that idea, Like we still we don't remember what it is anymore.
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 by by dealing with it in bits and pieces on those other films. You know, even before we did some of those other films, we talked about one just on on the Buffalo, but we just kept saying, this is such a it's such a portal to telling a story that's not this is a by It's like in our biography series. Yeah, this is a biography of the American buffalo in one respect, but it's not just about the buffalo, because it never was just about the buffalo.
And what my friend Gerard and other people made clear to us is that if you tell the story of the American buffalo, you're also telling the story of Native people, particularly on the planes. You're also telling the story that's even larger than that, which is a collision of two worldviews of how we interact with the the natural world, which reached its most dramatic crescendo on the Great Plains
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. And you're also just talking about lots of different things, you know, the importance of you know, what does the railroad mean? What is manifest doest destiny mean? You know, what does conservation mean?
Who are the people that.
Step forward in there for their own individual private reasons, sort of do it yourself? Buffalo salvation projects? You know, you know twenty head here and twenty over here in New England of all places, and and someone were doing it because and on two reservations where they're being preserved and ingrown for the more traditional reasons. But ranchers. Charlie Goodnight, the legendary cattleman in the Pandema, Texas, you know, hated
buffalo and he really didn't like Indians much. And by the end of the film you find out that he's been raising he starts raising buffalo. He becomes very attached him, and he becomes very attached to providing buffalo to Indian tribes near him for their ceremonial reasons. And you know, George bird Grenella, who was a character in our film on the National Park, plays a critical role in their salvation. And some very you know, a couple people who aren't
particularly likable in modern times. Rightfully, so William T. Hornaday, who becomes just you know, a crusader for saving them from the commercial destruction and who hates Indians and thinks that they're and and a lot of other non white people and believes in the pseudoscience of eugenics. But he still is a person who played a crucial, crucial role. You can't overlook it, Yeah, yeah, you can. You can't
overlook either of them. I mean, you know, if we're talking about buffal We can't just sort of say, well, but we're not going to talk about this other part. You know, as Ken mentioned, our films deal with human beings who are their own amalgam of different impulses.
Uh.
And you have to be honest, uh, with your portrayal of it and with you know, without saying, well, we can't talk about him.
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, you know, doing everything he could to to keep this magnificent beast from disappearing forever.
It's you know, there's a good the the complexities of the people involved. Uh. You explore a handful of them. There was a story in there that I hadn't that wasn't familiar with. So Palo Duro Canyon. If if listener, if you're imagining the Texas Panhandle, there's a thing called the landscape feature called the yano estacado, the staked planes and coming off of this bench or these like deeply incised canyons, and the Commanchi and others had long hunted
these canyons. I had never heard this story that after the animals were mostly disappeared that I can't remember. You'll have to help me fill this in. Yeah, the Quanta Parker and the Comanche went to Palo Duro Canyon from They're like, if there's one place we'll find them, it's there.
And they get there and it's being ranched by 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. Go take a look and anywhere. Detell them. Every two days.
You're can have a couple of miccounts.
You can kill every whatever days and kills some number of my cows to feed on.
This is the beginning.
It's please satisfy your curiosity that they're gone.
We really love the simplistic binary idea of villains, and Horned Day fits a villain because he starts off doing one thing and he and he and he does an admirable thing, but he does it for all the wrong reasons.
But then you have these other things.
That are the Charlie Goodnight stories, in which you have a human being who's an Indian hater and Indian fighter and is a buffalo hater and a buffalo killer. He wants to raise his cattle in Palladero Canyon. He's got the first ranch there, and his evolution ends up embracing, as Dayton said, not only the buffalo on an accident.
His wife's lonely and she wants to raise a few buffalo calves, and so they end up with a herd that's not insignificant in the story of all these isolated herds that need to in some ways, if not coalesce, contribute to a coalescing in various places that will protect the buffalo from the measures of real extinction. But he 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 signed that says it's complicated. There's not a filmmaker, there's not a filmmaker on earth that when the scene is working, you just want to just don't touch it, don't touch it. But we always are finding out new and contradictory information about something undertow that threatens to sort
of derail what was effective about that particular scene. But we always will move towards that and lean into it, because you end up realizing, as Dayton said, you know that nobody I mean, we always lament they're no heroes now. But heroism is not about the Greeks tell us about perfection. It's about strength and weaknesses. And so you want to calibrate and calculate what those strengths. Achilles Head is Hubris 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 Charlie Goodnight. You know, you cancel him for the early years and then all of a
sudden embrace. So the idea of even cancelation in good history becomes kind of beside the point. You're going to try to include as much as you can and treat everybody with that kind of perspective that allows you to understand even the motivation of the high hunters, even the motivation of this. So you're you're you're not excusing. It isn't some big, you know, Kumbaya moment. This this is tragedy. This is violence, this is hatred, this is race animosity,
this is generosity and love and purpose. There are people from all over the country who band together, and we now have buffalo not skinned in some museum, as Hornaday initially was doing, not on a damn nickel, But there's hundreds of thousands of them that are alive, and we can take our kids and our grandkids to see them. And that's one hell of a great story.
I was heartened by the bold choice to use the word buffalo.
And the title, and I'll let Dayton address.
I had dinner with Date and last night and we were talking. I was talking about a question I had asked of Well, I'll point this out. So there's a number of people. There's a couple of people that are in this new Kemberton's documentary, the American Buffalo, who have appeared on this podcast before. So we've had Dan Floory's on a couple of times. Michael Punk's been on a
couple times. I recently interviewed Dan Floy's about his new book, While New World, and one of the questions I asked him was there we were talking about there are certain things that historians and writers when they talk about them, they feel like they have to explain the evolution of the thought, the peopling of the Americas. No one ever is comfortable saying here's what happened. They'll say, well, for a while, we thought this, then for a while we
thought that, and currently we think this. And there's certain subjects that every people have like they feel like I can't just say what the current thinking is. I have to say how we got to the current thinking. And we're talking about like when you when you use the word if you describe the animal's buffalo, it usually comes with you feel this need to go hear me out right and explain the whole thing. And just to end the film, they spare all that it's not there to say scientists whatever.
And he said, scientists call it bison.
Known to scientists to say bison bison, right.
And that allows us to use it interchangeably and not entymology of our argument, because it is buffalo New York, not bison New York. It's the buffalo nickel, not the bison nickel. It's now been changed from.
A bison reserves to go bufalo. 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, I'm going to steal that from you.
The bison nickel, I.
Mean, will you can 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. It is bison bison. And if you want to get into the fact that they're buffalo in Africa and buffalo in Asia and nothing's really and this is not really a buffalo, it doesn't matter. We say, this is what the earliest settlers called it, or a variety
of things. There's lots of Native American names for it, dozens and sometimes you know, one tribe will have dozens of names for it, depending on its age and its size, and its sex, and its health and where it is and how much skin and you know how much for it has and what firs lost.
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 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 UNA.
And you had to do it, and we were to talk for ten We're going to talk for twenty minutes.
And nineteen 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 right.
So oh you're maybe you didn't know this, but they're actually bison. You see, there are these other and I want I.
Want to do is to do that. You know, it's like it's like rabbit.
Please don't give me a lengthy explamanation of of Please don't ask for a lengthy explanation of the bison buffalo conovers.
And then he brought up another instant where or instance where he toyed with one of the one of the things, which is that Lewis right Lewis's death, that Lewis killed himself or was murdered. And he explained me the process of do we get into it, how do we get into it? And eventually it's just he killed himself.
How much of dinner did that?
It was post dinner. But I really need to do this. I suppose I should do it.
And I said, well, actually, the way we solved it it was because I was one of the interviewees on the Lewis and Clark film is that I tell the story. And so I said, so we can have the narrator later say well, there are some people who claim he was murdered and all that, but I'm the one that's
saying it. The narrator's not. And just give him my address and my phone number, and I'd be happy to talk to and I'll be happy to anybody wants to chide us for naming this the American buffalo and said the American Bison and using it interchangeably with bison to save time for the broad podcast and to avoid if they can contact me as long as in.
Just think in sentences that comprise paragraphs that comprise blocks of narration that are pages of talk that you can't just see buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, or bison, bison, bison, So you're you're saying bison and then buffalo, and then the animal and then bison. So it just helps relieve the thing. But the point is they're buffalo, and that's the name of our film, and we're sticking with it, right, you know.
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 artic relation the passion is George Horse captured Junior.
Yeah, so you know, I'll a date and tell the story. But I think when I was trying to talk about what it might be like to seed the momentum, the impetus of your own world views to someone Else's not just in some kind of gracious after you elponse no after you guests now, but in a real way it occurs naturally because George does not see Junior, does not see things the way we expect people to see things, and.
So what it's disconcerted. It's disorienting almost.
It is disorienting in the most for me emotion away. I have watched this film dozens and dozens of times. I have wept every time I get to his last remark, which we will give away. And I have been watching myself agitated, disconcerted, having being kind of elated that there might be another way to see this grasshopper, you know, I mean, it's like suddenly there's another way to figure out how to square the circle, and that makes me
curious about it. So you know, he is You could listen to him about anything, because he is going to come out out of it a way that just upends your own kind of whatever it might be. There's nothing wrong with wherever we come from is wherever we come from, and what we bring is okay. But it's going to be nice to have him there as like what do we call it a disruptor? Right? It just literally but in a real sense, in a spiritual way. It's like
upending conception. Like Dayton used to have this wrap. We'd been on the road with the National Parks and he'd say, you know, people would look at a river and think, damn, they would look at a stand of timber and think board feet. They would look at a canyon and wonder what minerals could be extracted. But couldn't you with a national park idea let go of that and see things
in a different way. So the seeds of that impulse are part of the six hundred generation's history of George horse Capture Junior of a small, tiny tribe in north central Montana, and out of his wisdom is not an argument, not a fight, not a war, but the possibility that if I sit where you're seeing, you know, is my ancestor Robert Burn said, Oh, some power, the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us. George just suddenly goes and there's just some new light. That's
that's that's possible. He's the beas needs to me.
I met his father, George Horse Capture. He's George Horscaptor Junior, who was a very renowned anthropologist when we were working on the West and spent some time with him.
Yeah. When I tried to find George Horse Captured Junior online, I read a lot about his father.
Yeah, and so I knew about him. And then I learned from friends that we have at American Prairie, the nonprofit that's trying to reintroduce buffalo and restore part of the prairie in Montana, which is not too far from
the Fort bell Knapp reservation that George horsecaptured. Junior was doing a program at the reservation dealing with buffalo and would sometimes come and talk to them at American Prairie to you know, their their neighbors and they work together now with you know, American Prairie giving some of their buffalo for the Fort Belknapp heard, but that you know 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.
To his his people.
And so I said, well, I had never met him, but I you know, this is part of our process, you know, you want to give things a chance, right, And so we obviously went to people like yourself and others Dan Flores and other people who were who had written books about it, and also Dan O'Brien who is a writer but also has a buffalo ranch in South Dakota, and Rosslyn Lapierre who's a Blackfeet meti but who's an ethno botanist and historian. You know, Michelle knew how Nighthouse,
who's a writer about extinctions and stuff. You know, you go through all the reading you do and you say, well, let's go talk to those people that might help us tell our story. And some of those that turned out to be really good and some of them don't. But he also we wanted to talk to descendants of Quana Parker. We wonted acousa character in our film we won. We learned about Marcia Pablo, whose great grandfather was Michelle Pablo,
who had an important herd on the Flathead Reservation. And then so I just said, well, let's, you know, spend two hours with George and to see what he's got to say, and interviewed him in Fort Benton, Montana. And you know, right from the get go you knew this guy was bringing something that was not necessarily narrative storytelling of the historical story, but just a flat out point of view.
You know, 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 horse debut in the film, and we.
Have other people Rosin Lapierre and Sarah Dant, who's an environmental history explaining how that worked, how a tribe you know, would work communally to try to maneuver a herd and then get it moving toward what you couldn't see from the ground is that there's a cliff on the other side, and the buffalo jumps, as the Blackfeet would call him, and they tell that story and it's just comes alive. And then George just comes.
On in the in the in the moment is going uh is pretty uh. You know, it's a stampeding music, and it just sort of ends and resolves as they go over the cliff in your imagination and in a painting. And then you're looking up on a live shot, but we see a live shot with quiet, and then you hear this voice come on.
And he says, you go to a buffalo jump, you know these days, and if it quiet, if people ain't you know, ain't talking like magpies.
So you think you're going to hear about the sorrow of the buffalo that you can hear in a Native American way, the sadness, the sorrow, the screams of the buffalo. But he takes you in exactly the oppertuity.
Yeah, and he says, but you you know, you get the quiet and you think about that, and they're going to eat now, they're going to be able to eat, and that makes people happy.
You know that My.
Family, my tribe, we're going to be we're going to have enough meat to last us, you know, weeks a month into the winter, and then it's a good thing. And you know, it's just it's like holy smokes, you know, it's just like of course, you know they would celebrate.
You know, you just got you know, we don't get into it in the in the film, but in the book I mentioned that there were certain among certain native tribes if you didn't get all of them that went over the cliff, because they wouldn't all necessarily die going up, and they had people at the bottom to finish them off. We say that, but part of the thought was you needed to do that because otherwise the survivors would go and tell and Warren and Warren.
We still use that term day. It's called when they're educated. Yeah, right, you don't want to educate the He has a line that really stuck on me, and he uses it so fluidly, and it's not rehearsed. But he's talking about his people, his tribe or his collective people Native Americans, and he says my people and their people. When he says their people,
he's talking about the buffalo. And when I and the thing I wrote about your film and I touch on being in the film, and I quote him, and I wound up needing to when I quote him when I say their people, it's so disorienting. Like I said, I needed to put in parentheses so because the reader would never understand when he says they're people, he means the animals.
But there's no parentheses in his mind.
No, And that's the great thing about it, I wrote. And I'd look at it and be like, no, one's gonna understand what he's talking about. You know, they're being like but but George is.
Asking you to take the parentheses off and see things in an entirely new way in which that that word then is part of a of a reciprocal relationship between all of creation and not just the dominant species and everybody else.
I couldn't make it like you. You can't make it work in writing. No, you can't without a prent. You're clarifying what what he's talking about by saying there people. Yeah.
That's the thing with on the film and film when he's talking and he'll say some things that you know, grammatically, you know, are confusing or something like that, but there is no confusion confusion watching him say it. It's it's it's totally communicated.
My ownership, my cattle, my land, my this he's asking you to say, you know, there's a who's this.
This is a response to good night, Noah?
This is this is this is the you know, the early nineteenth century philosopher Prudom I think you said property is theft and that was part of the developing revolutionary and all the stuff that leads to. But he has that not as an intellectual idea in opposition to anything.
It's just like, what kind of theory is this?
What is my mean?
What does what does that mean to be? My? I mean, where does this come from? This does not compute in a way, And so he's by virtue of his clarity and his certainty. You are then required to let go for a second of your own sort of momentum, which in this case is four or five generations, six generations old, as opposed to his, which is six hundred generations old on this continent and say, WHOA, Well, maybe he's got a point here, right, And so I I love being uh,
you know, not calcifying. I love the fact that that that that he kind of wakes you up.
He also has a great moment speaking of the bison nickel, the buffalo nickel, in interaction with your comments about that about there this animal that gets put on a on on a nickel on the other side of an Indian head. By the way, but that, uh, the model for that was from the black Black Diamond that you describe and that.
But I went to the nast the last known location of Black Diamond's head, which had become an Italian clothing boutique.
Oh my god.
And I went in and told the woman working there, you know what used to be in here.
But but but as you as you point out that, so here's this here in nineteen thirteen, here's this symbol on one side as a.
Portrait of a.
Of a Native American individual's portraits. I think so, and I can't I can't remember saying well, at least I know that there are theories of who it is. It may not be known, but definitely Fraser said this, this one was black black diamond is as you say. And so what we're left with this what is it a symbol of It's a you know, it's a wonderful thing. And that to us, it comes near the end of the film, is what is the buffalo a symbol of
in American history? Is it a symbol of plenty? Is it a symbol of destruction?
You know?
What is it?
And then George comes on, you know, and just gives it the final things in my confusion, he says, I was looking at thinking like he's looking at that nickel right at that moment. It just makes me why did they put that buffalo on there?
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 that's Look, look what we have done. We are beginning now this is nineteen thirteen, to fetishize and to romanticize the Native man and the buffalo, something we have just spent the last century trying to exterminate, and now all of a sudden it's the symbol of us. What two symbols represent the newness of America, particularly the West and the Native American and the buffalo, and so.
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 in the Vietnam film, the eighth I think of out of ten is something in a marine said to us that we're just talking about warfare in general, and he goes, well, that's the 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 then that we're also this.
That's what I've tried that. No, I've tried to find parallels. I mean, there are many parallels for that in minor forms that you can look at our most populous state right their state symbols the Grizzly Bear, of which they don't have any right. So there are things like that. But it's so and one of the comments that one of the comments that I have in the film is how quickly. The nostalgia, yes, began because you guys do
a great job of Buffalo Bill Cody. Yeah, in the Wild Wife show where they are it's it's like a it's like he got on a train. I mean, it's like he got on a train from participating in the Final Slaughter to arrive on the East Coast to mythologize the thing he'd tried to be passing. But this is what it was like. It was like he he didn't even look different.
No, he's still advertising the same stick. He's just now flipped the coin right.
And it's different.
But look at that. We romanticize the revolution. We took the Civil War and made it not about race. It was brother coming together. You know, all of this sort of stuff. We call the Second World War the Good War.
It's the worst war ever, sixty million human lives were extinguished, and it's the good war to us, right, So this is always happening in our in our purview, and I think what we've been dead cad to is to try to take this the onus of a superficial treatment off it and just say it is possible to tolerate complexity, It is possible to give and take away. At the same time, with an individual or a moment, it is possible to sit in contradiction. It's complicated. As the sign says in.
The editing, you said to me one day on the phone. Uh, you just said, nothing is binary.
Yeah, nothing's binary.
If nothing is bindy. And that's all we want to do.
We want to make something red state or blue state, black or white, young or old, Richard, poor, male or female, gay or straight, whatever it may be. We want to make sure that there's just an on off switch for it, so that we know where we stand with everything, and everything is will resist that kind of on off switch.
Because in Charlie Goodnight, you have all of this complication, In William T. Hornday, all of this complication in Theodore Roosevelt, the great conservation President, who in fact subscribes to many of the abhorrent eugenics views of Hornaday, and those that are spouting them, like Madison Grant, are also doing magnificent things. And so you know, Lincoln as late as eighteen sixty one was thinking of colonizing black people to Mexico or
South America or back to Africa. In sixty one, that's when the guns open up at Fort Sumter, right, I mean, and yet he's the great emanticipator, which he is. He's the visionary who saw who wrote the Gettysburg Address, which is our two point oh operating Manual Declaration one point oh 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 integrate it more to rejoice in that complication.
Was can I say, in terms of these you know, complications and other things. You do a great job helping us in talking about how the people like Roosevelt avid hunters, George Bird Grenell an avid hunter, you know, informing the Boone and Crocket Club, you know, helped start a movement in which hunters were at the forefront of conservation. So you've got to you can't just have all this market hunting. You can still have hunting there, but it needs to be regulated and not just sort of wanting.
Uh.
And that's an important part of it. And Grennell is a personal hero of mine in that respect, who also saw conservation differently than some of the others of his age, because he also had a deep connection with native people, was actually interested in them as human beings and everything. But you take Roosevelt who rushed west in eighteen eighty three because he'd heard that the bison were about to
be gone forever. And so he first thing, he gets on a train and rushes out to what's now North Dakota. He wants to shoot one while there's still a chance to do it, so he can hang a trophans. While in the book he writes after he buys a ranch also in that place and keeps coming back for several summers about hunting adventures of a rancher, a ranch man. He talks about the buffalo and said, this is their
disappearance is a great tragedy. But on the other hand, not only not only was it probably not only was it necessary for the advance of what he called white civilization. Uh, it was probably a blessing that it needed to be done because of its impact on us, you know, controlling Native people. So he just just said in a book that he's written that the elimination of the bison was maybe.
A little bit sets disappearance, but it was, but it was, but it was.
A blessing and necessary. Who then at the then, with Grennell, forms the Boon and Cocker Club, Who then, with Grennell helps save and enact regulations in Yellowstone to save that last remnant wild herd from being poached out of existence. Who then signs the the bill that creates with a you know, executive order creating the first preserve for bison in on the plains and also the one on the Flathead Reservation in north west Montana. And as we say,
the greatest conservation president in our history, without question. But he's all of those things. And there's nothing wrong with saying it's all those things. You can't just say if your tilt is, well, he said this about their extermination, he's done or opposite if theseus said, he's just you know, you know, there's only glory to be talked about with him.
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 Kwanta Parker had appeared with some other Native leaders in his inaugural parade in nineteen o five, he then went out to hunt coyotes and and Kwana invited him to come to his fairly elaborate house called
the Star House on the reservation. And can you imagine the President of the United States going to a Indian reservation, spending the night on the porch of one of the Indian leaders, but then told him, you know, from what you've told me and everything, I think this is a good place for us to have the first Buffalo preserve. I mean, that's a journey. I mean, I don't think,
I don't want overstated. I don't think Theodore Roosevelt's views of you know, the pecking order of the races as he would call them, changed that much in terms of his opinion of Native people. But you know, he loved to hunt, and he loved you know, Uh, they're too old. There were two warriors who were you know, Quanta Parker had his own journey.
Oh No.
One hated Texans more than he did. They they abducted his mother and his little baby sister, uh and and took them away from the command. She's back to the White civilization because that's where they had been.
Listeners want to get a listeners get a good sense of this from from the film. But also I would recommend as well empire the summer move absolutely.
But anyway, Charlie Goodnight was one of the Texas Rangers who abducted cynthiy Anne Parker from the commands she used to bring her back to the Texas settlements. So Quanta was uh a renowned warrior, you know, uh in fighting
particularly Texans but also the US military. But then when he finally decided the buffalo are gone, there's we have to you know, forge a new path, became, you know, a leader of trying to help his people make that adjustment without giving up his many of his traditional beliefs, including multiple wives and long hair and in the use
of of peyote. But he became a good friend with with Charlie Goodnight and gave him and good Night helped Kuana get the remains of his mother and baby's sister brought back from Texas and buried near the Wichita Mountains where they, you know, which they had considered their home. And in thanks for that, Quana gave good night the lance, the commandchee lance that he used to kill hide hunters
at the Battle of Adobe Walls. Okay, so I mean, so that lance is now in my mind, that not just a you know, it's what is it a symbol of well, it's a symbol of existence, right, It's a symbol of friendship and and possibly some you know, some redemption, some yes, some measure of redemption and reconciliation. It's it is something, you know, it has its own blood memory.
You know.
One thing you guys did and dating I recognize that this isn't one of the ones you wrote or produced, but one of the you mentioned celebrating these personal evolutions and the complexities. I thought one of the most beautiful things and and any of your films was at the End of the Vietnam War Ah, which is a very very good telling of just the deep complexity of the war and what it did to America, what it did
to Vietnam. But it ends on among end on the wall the memorial and narrows in on an individual who speaking of personal change, and an individual who initially refused. He was like, I was not going to go. Look.
He hated the idea of the wall, and it was in that school, and it was very contentious that it was this black gash, that it was celebrating defeat, that it was the list of the dead, it was in no way responsible for honoring what had particularly gone on and had resisted, and was adamant about not going amongst a group of people that have already gone and had everything happened. And when he began to answer the question
about this, he started off with the defiance. By the end of his sentence of story, he has gone to see a friend and he breaks down on camera because he the power of it and the memory. And he would probably still say to you mentally, intellectually, I don't agree that it's this. But he was himself, more than any of the other people, proof of the power of that great work off to transcend. I mean, Tolstoy said, art is the transfer of emotion from one person to
the other. We hope that our films do that. That were emotional archaeologists, not just excavating dry dates and facts and events, but something other what George Horse capture can do it. But at that moment, you take someone who's
opposed and lead him in his own mind. He's just narrating what he did in some living room, safely out of the thing to the monument, and he loses it, and it just tells you what the force of that thing is and how spectacular, I mean, second only to the Lincoln Memorial, which is the greatest thing ever in our republic.
I was, my family was gone. I was between houses. I was on the second floor of the Lewis and Clark Hotel and the Bows in Montanne, looking over the parking lot, watching the end of that movie. And I said, my I thought something was wrong with me. I sat in that room and wet wept, well, we wept, we all, like to the point where I was beginning to be concerned about myself. At the end of the Vietnam War.
We had, you know, we.
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? I mean, I
wasn't in Vietnam, you know, I didn't do that. I'm here in the Lewis and claud you know, but something opens up and it just you just it spills out. It's so healthy in the best sense of the word to permit that, And you know we're the rap in Florentine films is that we kill people really well. You know, I was so happy at the end of this film. In the Bubbalo, we didn't kill anybody. We save somebody,
a person. I mean, we think The Buffalo is a biography, but we also permitted somebody like George horse Capture to do something that for many of us, exactly the same thing happens. All of the tensions of trying to maintain the fraudulence of this binary, yes known thing which does not exist in the universe. You get full expression there and George just lets me just let go of a whole bunch of baggage that I just perpetually carry put down.
Think I want not going to pick up again and find out I'm still carrying the same stuff.
Do you feel that you have to do something on the war in Afghanistan?
I need twenty five years after an event to do it, I mean.
But 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 second Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, and try to understand them in that sort of postcolonial way and in a global sense and also in the deeply personal thing, particularly with Afghanistan relating to nine to eleven. So it's a wonderful story and it's very very complicated.
And deserve even the people that it's like, you know, for me to look at. You know, I was born the last year of active engagement in Vietnam, but I was raised around my buddy's dad's Are Vietnam bats, Yes, But I think that there are plenty of people who have lived through that twenty year war, who have really lost sight of the evolution of mission, the evolution of the thinking there, what it was in the first place,
what it became the withdrawal. I mean, you, guys, it needs to be someone, It needs to be someone like your team to do it. And I just don't know 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 thing. But you also realize that nobody turns in a rough draft, right, So what we like is the passage of time and the perspective that will I'll give you a good but not so quick, but pretty quick thing. If we'd done the Vietnam film ten years after the false I Gone right nineteen eighty five, America's in a bit of a recession.
We're talking about the Pacific rim, but we don't mean us. We meet Japan, which is ascended. Vietnam would represent the symbol of our decline, the ball and chain that we would forever carry around with us. If I'd waited twenty years till nineteen ninety five, we are the sole superpower in the middle of what was then the greatest peacetime economic expansion in the history of our country. We had won the First Gulf War with one arm tied behind our back, with a coalition of dozens and dozens of
countries supporting us. The Beacon, the city on the Hill Vietnam would have would be an important story to tell, but it wouldn't be representative of any decline. You go thirty years to twenty five and we're in both Iraq and Afghanistan and were bogged down, and now people are making Vietnam references. So once again you're going, well, maybe
Vietnam is more symbolic of that. So we know it comes out in twenty seventeen, and so we are able to look from you know, it's like the Bitterroot Mountains, from a lot of different peaks and a lot of different valleys to see.
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 Drang Valley and play may this important? How more story? And we're just doing this and We've got this kind of three D map that we're threading through the Ya Drag Valley on a graphic right, and I go, I can do the Battle of Long Island right right. We're going back to the revolution and people are like what what?
But now we're like years deep into it, so to me, and we're still it's still contentious. The stuff we're arguing about in the editing room among scholars about this thing that happened it will be when this comes out. It two hundred and fifty years ago is just magnificent.
So I'm I'm not saying no Toice that like somewhere between thirty and two fifty.
Yes, well, yeah, as an American filmmaker, I mean we are, you know, working on Leonardo, so we're two centuries before that. I mean he's we say in two different places it will have to be down to one in the Leonardo film. It would be another four hundred and fifty years before anybody would be able to duplicate what you've done, right, or his theories of this had benefited from. I mean, he he had some theories of gravity that Isaac Newton is still a century away, and Einstein is you know,
four centuries away, and Newton and Einstein have calculus. He does not, and he's got some stuff on gravity. He's
a painter, right, he's a painter. And it's at that point you're going, you know, oh my god, So we're the perspective is is pretty important to us just because and I think it's one of the arguments and maybe we've said it, of the Buffalo wait is to be able to be in the age we're in now with the kind of scholarship, including yours, that that helps us understand and evolve the story that we were drawn to and said, boy, we need to do a film on
just the Buffalo because it cut touches all the corners, as Dayton says in the film, back in the early nineties or even late eighties, Right, We've got to do that.
But the fact that we've waited as long as we have nothing changed except the Inter Buffalo Tribal Council and stuff like that, and you know, wolves released in Yellowstone, and you know, whatever is back has happened in the last But to be able to enjoy your and Dan Floores and you know, so many other scholars that appear in the film, Michael punk Michael punk For sure, you begin to realize that we've got a richer, more dynamic, less binary story to handle.
Well. Whatever whatever you guys make now and in the future, Uh, I will watch it and I will be moved by it. I will think how I would have done parts different. And I think our audience is really going to get a lot out of out of the American Buffalo. I think that you listeners when you watch it, parts are gonna speak to you, parts are gonna challenge you. It's healthy, it's good. You're gonna probably if you know the story, well, you're gonna have parts you're like, well, yeah, what about right?
But that stuff's great, man, It's good for your brain, so exactly. Yeah. I hope everyone watches it and really want to thank you guys for coming on and giving us the time you. Thank you, thank you, appreciate it all.
Seeal Grey shine like silver in the sun. M h ride.
Ride, ride on alone, sweetheart.
We're done beat this damp horse to death, taking a new one and ride away. We're done beat this damn horse today, So take a new one and ride on.