Finding Hope And Restoration: A Story Of Destruction Of Life And The Beginnings Of Remarkable Recovery

Just a few nights ago, my wife Tracy (our host for the evening) and I and 300 fellow viewers packed into the historic Franklin Theatre, set in the vibrant small town known as Main Street USA in Franklin, Tennessee. Our purpose: to watch a 59-minute pre-screening of The American Buffalo, the newest documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns and his longtime collaborator Dayton Duncan.

We had the privilege of first viewing a film that will soon be seen by tens of millions when it’s released by PBS to national audiences on October 16^th. That privilege became apparent to us all as we travelled that evening through a tough story of destruction and aggression, but also of rebirth and hope. The protagonist: the American buffalo. The documentary will undoubtedly spark a national dialogue around our painful American history, and offer a promising and encouraging roadmap for the future.

The evening featured the writer of the film, Dayton Duncan. The acclaimed writer, filmmaker, historian, and extensive collaborator with Burns, Duncan is familiar to the Middle Tennessee audience as the driving force and writer behind the 16-hour documentary series Country Music (as well as films The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Baseball, Jazz, and The Civil War). In introducing the film, Dayton shared that this documentary is a story he’s been wanting to tell with Burns for over 30 years.

“It’s one of the toughest tragedies that I know, but also one of the most inspiring American stories that I know,” he remarked to the audience in describing the story of the buffalo (also known as the American bison). It was also the first documentary about an animal that he and Ken had ever done. He told us that the bison is unique in that it “opens a window into the larger story of human beings on this continent, and of the nation.”

In framing the evening and what the audience was about to witness, my friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer Jon Meacham described Ken Burns as one of the most significant interpreters of American history, adding that each of his films typically reaches 30 to 40 million viewers. And while Ken couldn’t join us in person, he shared in pre-recorded remarks the message of “hope and lessons we can find in the return of the buffalo after almost near extinction,” noting that the story of this animal asks us to think about nature in a different way.

As an accomplished historian, Meacham candidly explained the reason behind capturing, learning, and retelling the past: “The point of history is to look it in the eye, assess what they got right and what they got wrong … (and) to think about what are we doing that in posterity they will look back on and say, what the hell were they doing?”

The audience chuckled at Meacham’s colorful language, but the point was made. Think about what we can learn from the past, how it reflects and informs today’s society, and consider what we are doing now that our future selves, our next generation, will look back on with a critical eye.

10,000 Years of Buffalo

You could tell at the start of the evening, many were unsure of what to expect from a film about buffalo. Would this be like National Geographic? But you could feel the mood in the room shift as the powerful story of our nation’s founding and westward expansion was told through the eyes of an unlikely witness, and ultimately tragic victim, the buffalo.

First, we learned, how intimately and deeply Native Americans wove the buffalo into every aspect of their daily lives, physically, mentally, emotionally. The tribes and bison had coexisted in a dynamic, mutually respecting equilibrium for more than 10,000 years. Native Americans held deep reverence for these animals. The buffalo is considered a sacred and spiritual animal in many Native American cultures, and a symbol of strength, abundance and connection. Rituals and ceremonies centered on the buffalo, reflecting gratitude and honoring its spirit. Buffalo hides made teepees and moccasins, they ate the buffalo meat, they used the bones.

America once teemed with tens of millions of bison, spanning from Florida to Lake Eerie to southern Canada over to the Rocky Mountains. Present day Middle Tennessee was home to bison, drawn to the French Lick, a large salt lick on the Cumberland River in what is now central downtown Nashville. As Austin Peay Professor Dwayne Estes, Executive Director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, told us in the discussion panel that followed the film, the trails the buffalo herds would create, called Buffalo Traces, later would become the routes of our wilderness roads and then in modern times regional highways.

The tribes and the bison, which had lived for centuries in harmony, saw their world upended with the westward expansion of European settlers. This led to the forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and the overhunting and mass slaughter of bison for commercial purposes. It became official US government policy to exterminate bison to weaken Native American tribes, who relied on the bison for sustenance and cultural practices. And when progress in tannery suddenly made the tough bison hides suitable for leather goods (namely for leather manufacturing belts), the global market for leather, which was facing a shortage, had a new supply in North America ready for the taking.

The Largest Destruction of Animal Life in Modern History

In record time, bison went from a population in the millions at the start of the nineteenth century to near extinction, with just several hundred left in the early 1880s. Grasslands that once hosted dense herds were instead covered with their carcasses that had been left skinned where they fell, creating a stench that carried far afield.

Buffalo runners, as the pioneer hunters were romantically called, at first had to ride up to shoot the buffalo at close range, but with the invention of a more powerful gun, they could instead set up stands 400 meters or more downwind and pick them off in large numbers. The industry for buffalo hides made some White Americans rich, but it decimated the species as well as the Native American tribes whose lives depended on the bison.

What their decimation did inspire, however, was a new, remarkable conservation movement. While the motives behind this movement may have been mixed in their altruism, it became the vital puzzle piece that ensured the bison’s survival. President Teddy Roosevelt in 1905 created the nation’s first big-game preserve, called the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve, after consulting with leaders including those from Native tribes. This included a push to reconstitute the buffalo. With nearly none left in the wild, fifteen buffalo were transported by railway car from the Bronx Zoo in New York City, back to their native home in the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma.

Reflecting on The American Buffalo

Recognizing the tough history we were asking our audience to absorb in viewing The American Buffalo’s most compelling segments, we paired the film with a follow-on panel to help unpack the powerful content. We spent another 45 minutes reflecting on what we just saw, with a dialogue among conservationist and Grammy Award-winning artist Kathy Mattea, Duncan, Estes, Meacham, and me.

Kathy Mattea shared backstories on the disciplined craftsmanship and precise attention to detail she observed working with Dayton Duncan for over seven years in putting together the masterpiece Country Music, the eight-part series that draws so heavily on Tennessee history. And she emphasized the critical role that Nashville Public Television (WNPT) and PBS PBS plays in all of our lives by capturing so much history and making it so accessible to all.

Estes, also known affectionately as the “Prairie Preacher” for his passion, conviction and knowledge for grasslands of the Southeast, drew on our local history and shared how the well-known Nashville road, Demonbreun Street, was named for our region’s most well-known buffalo runner and fur trader, Timothy Demonbreun.

And Dayton further cemented in time and place these majestic animals, noting that even our nation’s first President George Washington had hunted them. Meachum built on this narrative, explaining that most of our nation’s founders had complex histories that included choices and actions that are considered immoral or even illegal today, but that we have to view their lives in context, learning from both the good and the bad.

Our panel also considered how the bison were integral not only to the tribes, but as Estes so clearly explained, to the health of the grassland ecosystems. They were the reason certain plants were able to grow, and the wallows they created from digging and rubbing in the dirt made areas for standing water that hosted other biodiverse natural life. It did not go unnoticed in the natural world that the largest land mammal in North America was suddenly gone.

Rebuilding from Near Extinction – We All Have a Role to Play

We are experiencing a promising sea change.

The film spotlighted how humans were the only species capable of such massive destruction – and that humans did cause the destruction — but also the only species that intentionally self-reflects and has the capacity and can engender the will to undo and collectively save what we once sought to destroy. And therein lies the hope, now slowly but steadily becoming the reality.

Today, against all odds, the buffalo’s numbers have increased from several hundred to half a million. The film tells the story of healing and restoration. And how collaborative commitments to conservation can make a difference. For example, we at The Nature Conservancy are partnering with the InterTribal Buffalo Council, an 82-member organization leading the repatriation of buffalo to Native Nations across the United States. Newly introduced federal legislation, the bipartisan Indian Buffalo Management Act, could further this work by helping promote and develop tribal capacity to manage buffalo.

The American Buffalo asks us to look our nation’s past in the eye, assess what we did right and what we did wrong, and apply those lessons to our world today. We cannot expect “the largest destruction of animal life discoverable in modern world history” as was the case with the buffalo, explains historian Dan Flores in the film, or today’s other rapidly disappearing species, to have no lasting ramifications. The health of our environment, the biodiversity and delicate balance of our ecosystems, is intrinsically tied to the health and well-being of Americans, and all human beings. The window of time we have to reverse this continuing damage is closing, but not shut altogether.

As Dwayne Estes told our audience, we may not be able to bring back the millions of acres of grasslands the bison once contiguously roamed, but we can preserve 5,000 acres here, another 3,000 acres there, and bring them back to their rightful homes while coexisting with humans today. This same incremental, intentional approach provides promise for the preservation of tomorrow. Each of us has a role to play.

Watch the film on October 16^th, and let’s consider what steps each of us can take to avoid repeating the worst of history, and instead repeat the best. The American Buffalo is a story of loss but also one of redemption and hope and provides a roadmap that we together can adopt to help preserve our natural world upon which all live depends, for our children and generations to come.

Special thanks to my wife Tracy, whose lifelong commitment to nature, biodiversity, and in particular the American buffalo led to creation of the evening. She and Eric Dilts, director of the Franklin Theatre, brought this event earlier in the day to more than 300 school children from across Williamson County.

The day’s events were supported by the Heritage Foundation of Williamson County, Nashville Public Television, the Better Angels Society, the Franklin Theatre, and scores of volunteers.