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'The American Buffalo' - 2023 documentary by Ken Burns on DVD - $2 (Midtown East)
E. 40th St. near 5th Ave.
media type:
dvd
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This is one of dozens of 'nature' documentaries that I have. I am also open to bartering.
From a review:
The bison is such an improbable animal, it's hard to believe it exists. It's almost a miracle that it does.
Perilously close to becoming little more than stuffed museum exhibits, these majestic beasts have survived only through the efforts of a few dedicated people. The century of unbridled greed and wanton killing that made that work necessary comes to life in Ken Burns's The American Buffalo, which aired on PBS October 16 and 17.
The executive producer's two-part documentary, which chronicles how Indigenous people and bison (aka American buffalo) are intrinsically intertwined, had been brewing for thirty-five years.
"The buffalo was a big part of our [1996] series The West," Burns says from his New Hampshire home. "It was a big part of Lewis & Clark. It was a big part of National Parks, but it needed its own treatment. And, of course, it's not just the biography of an animal; it's the biography of the people who have had 600 generations of experience with it, rather than the four or five that some of us have had with it."
For thousands of years, Indigenous people and bison coexisted, as herds of these animals roamed through much of what is now the United States. Different tribes held different beliefs about the animals' origin, but all lived harmoniously with them. When they hunted bison, they used every part.
"Nothing was wasted," Gerard Baker, a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa Nation, says onscreen. "Even the waste wasn't wasted."
Hide was stretched across branches to craft boats, bladders became water containers, sinews begat snowshoes, teeth were ornaments, tongues were used as hairbrushes and tendons served as bowstrings. Native American hunters killed only as many bison as they needed, as they always had. Then, in 1805, "Lewis and Clark ventured farther West than any white Americans had gone," narrator Peter Coyote says.
Naturally, when they saw these beasts for the first time, the explorers were stunned. The Western hemisphere's largest land mammal, a buffalo can weigh more than a ton, stand taller than six feet at the shoulder and grow to ten feet long. Even with such bulk, it can clear a six-foot fence and gallop thirty-five miles per hour. It's not just the size that's impressive. When you see them up close — which is inadvisable, even if they do look like shaggy Dr. Seuss characters — it's very clear that these are sentient beings.
"The first time I met a buffalo, looked into his eyes, it was like looking into the past and future at the same time, because I really do think they have seen the whole tragedy that plays out on the Great Plains," writer and buffalo rancher Dan O'Brien says in the film. During the 1800s, sharpshooters left a trail of carnage across the plains, as hunters slaughtered as many as one hundred bison a day. Skinners stripped the hide from the neck down. Sometimes they took meat. Tongues were removed because they fetched twenty-five cents each.
In the series, photos pan over endless grasslands that became killing fields littered with the enormous heads and sloping silhouettes of buffalo corpses left to rot. The two cultures' diametric attitudes are revealed in the photos and paintings Burns uses to illustrate this ugly chapter of American history. Indigenous people are shown thanking the buffalo and revering it for sustaining them. A white man is shown triumphantly posing atop a mountain of bleached buffalo skulls. The documentary highlights this gulf between veneration and entitlement.