The American Buffalo numbered in the tens of millions before westward expansion took hold on the plains. But a combination of greed and federal policies designed to undermine Native Americans, whose existence depended upon the creature, nearly wiped out the buffalo. “The American Buffalo,”a new film by Ken Burns, explores these issues. The two-part series starts Monday night at 7 p.m. on New Mexico PBS. KUNM spoke with consulting producer Julianna Brannum, who is a citizen of the Comanche Nation.
JULIANNA BRANNUM: It's a tragic, heartbreaking tale. And it says a lot about who we are as people and how we interact with the natural world. And so I think it's a really timely piece.
KUNM: Why was the buffalo so central to the lives and culture of many Native American tribes and communities.
BRANNUM: To the plains tribes, it is central to who we are our lifeways depended on them. Our spiritual practices depended on them.
KUNM: I liked the phrase they said, your ancestors, other plains tribes used everything from the tail to the snort.
BRANNUM: Yeah, I love that, you know, we would even use the snorting sounds the grunting noises in ceremonies. I was just at a an exhibit at the panhandle plains Museum in Amarillo. And there were rattles made out of buffalo testicles. So every thing you can imagine was used.
KUNM: But it also goes into the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo in a very short period of time. What were the reasons behind that?
BRANNUM: Greed and U.S. Indian policy to subjugate Native Americans. They knew that we were so dependent on that, that without that, perhaps we would perish. You know, it was, I think, in some ways, a form of genocide. But there was also the greed element. Once people learned there'll be money to be made, and a lot of money to be made, it just went crazy. And there was also a dependence on -- we needed leather to create the belts to run factories. That was a really cheap and durable form of leather. So they exploited that.
KUNM: It was striking to hear, I think it was M Scott Momaday say that many tribes revered the buffalo, not just for what it could provide, but literally said he's our brother. And it's not a metaphor.
BRANNUM: He's talking about our relationship to the natural world as well, and how we, as Native people, have seen ourselves as one part of the natural world, one piece of it, one cog in the wheel. And all living things are equal to us. And I think that's where the real difference in our value systems is, you know, really seeing -- because for a lot of Westerners or European Americans, Americans, we see ourselves as being above, sort of the conqueror of the natural world. And for Native people, it's the complete opposite. There's a kinship. That's why we reference Mother Earth. And so we truly believe that as part of all of our life ways, are kind of centered on that concept.
KUNM: Given that, what can we learn from the buffalo’s decimation and then the people who worked together to ensure it would not go extinct?
BRANNUM: We explore in the film this very diverse and very unlikely coalition of Americans from Native American ranchers, to cattlemen, but you also have these complicated figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who was, you know, a white supremacist in a lot of ways, and a lot of these folks that helped to return them, and we don't shy away from talking about that. We realized that some of these individuals were racist, but they were involved in the restoration of the animal. And we do need to talk about that. We do need to talk about the complicated relationships that we had. And I think there's plenty of things that we can learn today in terms of environmental management, and how we look at the natural world.
KUNM: The buffalo were such huge beasts, they were rolling, right, on the ground and getting a dirt path, but they create swales that then were indentations that could be ponds, that was fascinating.
BRANNUM: I know it is fascinating. And those little ponds bring so much biodiversity, they create a water source for lizards and for birds and for frogs. And with the little spores and things seeds on their furm they would replant this, almost like a pollinator, right. And so and then that would draw in, you know, the other animals that needed to eat that to survive. So like those buffalo wallows were, I mean, everywhere, because there were so many millions of these animals and they were all wallowing but creating this incredible biodiversity.