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Ep. 472: The American Buffalo with Ken Burns · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless,
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  Speaker 1: on a hunt at the Durham family farm with Bubbly
• 1:18
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  Speaker 1: We have a signed arrow, a chunk of an aluminum arrow,
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  Speaker 1: signed by Ted Nugent in nineteen ninety one from a
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  Speaker 1: through ownership to get into your hands, says Ted Nugent
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  Speaker 1: Mark five used in many Meat Eater episodes, forthcoming episode
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  Speaker 1: I killed a bull with it on a media episode,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: a lot of media episodes, a left handed whether it
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  Speaker 1: be Mark five and three hundred win mag that exact rifle.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: We have a Carolina custom rifle that I use in
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: a bunch more Meat Eater episodes, including the famous Moose
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  Speaker 1: is a dinner for four at my house. So the
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: winning bidder and three guests will at a time that
• 3:27
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• 3:30
  Speaker 1: wined and dined for auction. Doug Duran was bragging up
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: how his auction item was kicking my dinner's ass. But
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: I have to point out right now that it's probably
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: humiliating to Doug the degree to which my dinner is
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: kicking his farm's ass. So you better go help Bubbly
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: out before he gets sad. Got to go to the
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: Meeater dot com and find you know, there's all kinds
• 3:54
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• 3:58
  Speaker 1: to at Steve even Ranella on Instagram and we will
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: put the auction House of Oddities link in my bio.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: You'll find it. Thank you, everybody. Now back to regular programming.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: All right, everybody, we're here with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: When I say ken Burns, I mean that Ken Burns.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: His first feature film came out in nineteen eighty one,
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: about the Brooklyn Bridge. Since then he has made over
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: three dozen films. Now, in a recent conversation you mentioned
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: to me thirty films, but you said about now was
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: surprised that someone would say about Well, I.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: Never count them in that weird sort of way. I
• 4:41
  Speaker 3: know how many kids I have, but I I didn't.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: PBS says forty now, and it's gonna pass that in.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: But the funny French Schnyder says, three dozen. Listen, the.
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: Most important thing is that one could be a one
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: hour film and one could be a ten part eighteen
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: nineteen hour film. This still counts as one. So whatever
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: it is, it's a lot of hours.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and since but you agree, you have certitude that
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: your first film was Brooklyn Bridge in nineteen eighty one.
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: Actually, PBS and an app that we have called unim
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: which is sort of curating the evergreen themes that are
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: in our film. Actually not an app, it's a website
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: Unham as an e plurbus. Unham has released the film
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: I made in college as my senior thesis at Hampshire
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: College about Old Sturbridge village kind of the colonial Williamsburg
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: of New England, which is called Working in World, New England.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: And it's seventeen ninety to eighteen forty kind of got
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: five to it and it's all live stuff. But the
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: last shot is a pan across a painting. Oops.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: Oh, the birth is the genesis moments of the effect.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: So there's forty one films major works on the Civil
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: War called the Civil War or and and I want
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: to tell you I hadn't told you this before. You've
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: heard this hundreds of times from thousands of people. That
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: overtook like that consumed our family life. That film even
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: even to where my parents bought the CD, would play
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the music in.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: The house, my children, like you, all four of them.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: It was just like it consumed people in a way,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: and it was it created at that time. You know,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: now things are so diffuse and dispersed, but it was
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: like one of those recognized is one of those elements
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: of sort of like a shared It was unifying, like
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: a shared national experience.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: You know, it's pretty interesting that something that tore us
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: in two became something that unified us in a in
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: a way, I think we thought we knew about the
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: Civil War and had kind of super views about it,
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: or ideas or even mythologies that were incorrect, and this
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: was sort of trying to tell a really deep, complicated story,
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: and I think people wanted to know. It's the most
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: important event in American history, in American history, and so
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: everything that we were led up to it and everything
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: that we've become has issued from it. So I think
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: there was a curiosity, no matter what idiot was making
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: the film, that people would be drawn to where we
• 7:29
  Speaker 3: came from. And the simplest thing I can say is
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: that before the Civil War, when speaking about our country,
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: we said the United States are plural, which is grammatically correct.
• 7:41
  Speaker 3: After the war, we said the United States is and
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: we still to this day, which is wrong. These group
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: of people is nice, is ungrammatical. So what it did
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: is take people when Lee was offered the head of
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: the Union Army and turned it down. He said I
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: cannot raise my sword into my country, by which he
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: meant Virginia. After that, when you said your country, you
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: met the United States of America. And so that's just
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: one hell of a good story. And basically the whole
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: eleven and a half twelve hours is how an r
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: became it is. Didn't solve a lot of things about race,
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: didn't solve a lot of other things, but it sure
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: at least for a while, made us.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: It is so also World War Two, A major work
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: on World War two called The War, the Vietnam War,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: also the dust Bowl, Country Music, the National Parks, the
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: West Jazz, and then projects centered around pivotal American figures,
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: including Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Jackie Robinson, and currently working
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: on and this is what it's a little bit of
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: surprise in here, working working on a film about LBJ.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: Working on a film about the American Revolution, which I
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: want to ask you about. But Leonardo da Vinci, Yeah,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: so that's not America.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: So in dating, so when I was thinking about doing
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: Benjamin Franklin, I had dinner one night with one of
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: his biographers, Walter Isaacson, who's a dear friend maybe no
• 9:17
  Speaker 3: longer heard my hesitation. And Walter and I were having
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: dinner in Washington, d C. And all of a sudden
• 9:24
  Speaker 3: he started to try to sell me a twofer. He said,
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: you know, you know, he's this great scientist and artist,
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: a political artist and writer. You know he's gonna argue
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: he's I think, undeniably the greatest American writer of the
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: eighteenth century. And he's funny and all of this. But
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: you know, and Walter had done another biography on Leonardo
• 9:43
  Speaker 3: and he said, same thing. You've got this guy who's
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: this great scientist but also this great artist, and you
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: know you should do I said, look, I don't do
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: a non American topics. I only do American topics. But
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: I walked out and was talking to one of one
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: of the producing teams that produced the Central Mark five
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: and that Jackie Robinson biography that you mentioned and the
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: Muhammad Ali thing, and I said, Leonardo.
• 10:06
  Speaker 4: They said, yes, let's do it.
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: So I thought, why the hell not? You know, why
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: be stuck. We'll tell you why not my mid sixties.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: Because it's it's you're you're an America.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: Wait till you see, wait you see we're we're but
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: we're halfway through editing and it's just so exciting and riveting.
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: And Sarah, my oldest daughter, who's that partner, and her husband,
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: David McMahon, who is the other partner. I've just returned
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: from a year with two of my four grandchildren in Florence,
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: and what we've got is just an amazing stuff. And
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: let's remember it's Florentine Films. So we were ment no,
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: I see that eventually to get to somebody in in Florence, right,
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: So well.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: I think there's gonna be there's gonna be a lot
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: of uh, you're gonna have to explain that, probably a
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: whole bunch.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: The biggest thing is the is the American Revolution. That's
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: just consuming almost all of my bandwidth.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you mentioned to me just in passing, and of
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: course we need to get to what we're here to
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: talk about, which is your your new film, The American Buffalo.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: But you mentioned to me something I wish I wish
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: I could remember more precisely. You said, you're working on
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: the American Revolution and you mentioned I think concord and
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: he said, and it's not what people think, or you know,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: what is the because I guess it's not helpless. I
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: can't remember what exactly said, but you you intimated that
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: there's a that there's an element that has become misunderstood
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: about the American Revolution.
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: Perhaps well like the Civil War, it's less misunderstood, it's
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: just not understood. And that's the work that we try
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: to do is a pretty deep dive that helps to
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: sort of dissolve the you know, the the arteries that
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: are clogged with the false stories that it wasn't the
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: Civil War wasn't about slavery. It was about slavery. There's
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: no mention of states rights or and all of the
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: cation or interposition. In the South Carolina Declaration of Secession,
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: it mentioned slavery an awful lot. That's what it's about.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: The Ku Kluk clan are not the heroes of the
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: post Civil War era. That's what birth of a nation
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: and gone with the winds suggests. So we begin to
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: inherit a lot of stuff, and we think that the
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: people who fought against the British were sturdy New England
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: of farmers and Virginia, you know, farmers, and they left
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: their work and their job the Minuteman idea, and we
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: only know Lexington and conquered. We kind of know Washington
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: crossing the Delaware for Trenton at Christmas Day. People think
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: it's Christmas Eve and then that's it, and they don't
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: know that the biggest battle of the entire thing is
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: the Battle of Long Island or Brooklyn, where Washington makes
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: classic mistakes. Another big mistake is Brandywine, the same mistake Germantown.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: All of these stuff Sarah Toogain, which Washington's not involved
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: as a great victory. So we want to go through
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: the military history and get you to know. You to
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: know what Guilford Courthouse was about in South Carolina, or
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: cow Pens or Camden all in South Carolina. We want
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: you to know about King's Mountain and Yorktown and the
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: places where it's fault. It's like a three part opera,
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: you know, in New England, Central States, and then South Amerka.
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: But it's also a much more complicated picture. It isn't
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: just fifty five white guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, right.
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: A lot of these guys are slave owners. A lot
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: of them are trying to get Indian land. A lot
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: of this is about getting Indian land, and so you're
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: now dealing with slavery, freed slaves, runaway slaves. British are
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: offering freedom. If you belong to a rebel, if you
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: belong to somebody who's loyalists, forget it. You're still a slave, right.
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: So there's unbelievably complicated dynamics. Women aren't involved from the
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: very beginning, and any army is traveling, the American army particularly,
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: but also the British and Hashian have wives and children
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: and people that are there involved in it. And you've
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: got French, and you've got German, and you've got British people.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: Some of the British people are pro American, some are
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: obviously vociferously not. There's a Canadian dimension. There's loyalists among us.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: At any given table, you might have twenty thirty percent
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: our favoring staying with the ground. A lot of people
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: just remain neutral. So it is our civil war is
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: not a civil war. There's not huge civilian deaths except
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: in Missouri and Kansas related to the issues of the
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: civil War. You know, two people die in Gettysburg. That's
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: not what happens in a civil war. It's a sectional war.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: It is North against South. The revolution is a bloody,
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: violent civil war that engages all Americans Native Americans.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: Well, when you said about civil war, you mean that
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: there were not a lot of non combatant dot.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: Right people who didn't he carry a rifle at that moment,
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: are tird and feathered because they're a loyalist. I mean,
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: we just made a film on Franklin, and Franklin's own son,
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: William was the royal governor of New Jersey, deposed, imprisoned,
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: eventually released, presumed to go to England and get out
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: of the thing. Instead, he starts a terrorist organization dedicated
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: to murdering patriots. Because, by the way, there are lots
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: of patriot organizations dedicated to murdering loyalists. And that means
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: it's right within your own community, and it's from New
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: Hampshire down to Georgia. Georgia's more more loyalists, at least
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: you know in the beginning than say New Hampshire and
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: the New England states are, particularly in Massachusetts. But this changes.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: They start a southern strategy, beginning with Savannah and then
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: moving to Charleston because they presume that this loyalist population
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: will help them pacify. As a word from Vietnam, pacify
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: the countryside never happens, and so they kind of shrugged
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: their shoulders and said, well, maybe we should just go
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: up to Virginia, which is the death knell of the
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: British attempt to keep these rebellious calmnists, none of whom
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: really know much about the other. The Carolinas do, but
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: everybody else is pretty much an independent vassal state. Plus
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: to the west there's forty or fifty other nations.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think we learned in doing Franklin. At
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: least it was driven home to me, not just because
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Franklin and his son, but in the Revolutionary Wars the
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Civil War. Also because there is no state, there's probably
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: no town in the thirteen Colonies that itself wasn't didn't
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: have people on different sides.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Oh I see, yeah, you know.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: And I remember when we were working on the West
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: and writing about bleeding Kansas and Missouri, and at that
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: time the wars in Bosnian you know what used to
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: be hungry. We're going on with the bloody just murders
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: of your neighbors, and I thought, well, that is a
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: civil war. Yeah, you know, in the classic sense that
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: people who are neighbors and collected together or you know,
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: in a location are fighting each other.
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: And this applies to everybody.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: So the oldest functioning democracy on the continent is the
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: Hodna Shone, often referred to as the Iroquois Confederation, made
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: up of six first five and then six nations. And
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: what the revolution does is it splits them. Some are thinking,
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: maybe we'll get a better deal with the Americans, but
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: most of them know that they should. They know the
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: British from history, and they're super worried, correctly that the
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: whole impulse of the colonists is to move westward and
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: take their land. In fact, our whole series begins with
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: we know you know how valuable our lands are. We
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: know you want to take that. Oh well, because that's
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: what this is about.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: You refer to the reward system. Well, there were like participants.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Well in the participates on the American side were often
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: rewarded land.
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: That often, if you if you signed up for the duration,
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: you got twenty bucks. If you got signed up for
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: three years, you got ten bucks. But the twenty buck
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: folks were also palm promised Indian But the revolution happens
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: for really interesting reasons. One is when the British win
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: the French and Indian War, which the rest of the
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: world calls the Seven Years War. They got a huge
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: empire and they can't pay for it. They're bankrupt from
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: the war. And so they see the settlers streaming people, English, Irish,
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: German settlers streaming over the Appalachians in the Indian territory,
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: and the Indians are fighting back and saying, no, you
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: can't take our land. So they do a demarcation line
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: and say you can't go over the Appalachians. Like, go, what,
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: I have an opportunity to own land for the first
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: time in one thousand and fifteen hundred years in my
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: family's history. What are you going to do that? And oh,
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: by the way, we're so broke, we're going to begin
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: to acts. The least tax people on earth, the American colonists,
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: And so this is what it is. But there's always
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: that pressure to move across the Appalachian and a great
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: deal of the killing of the American Revolution takes place
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: not just from Lexington conquered in Boston, down you know,
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: to here, or up to Quebec or Taykwon de Rog.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: It's all there, and we detail it to Yorktown down
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: to Charleston and Savannah and even into a mobile. But
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: it's in upstate New York with Native people being killed
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: and having their villages. These are not plains Indians nomadic people.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: These are people with cities and towns and farms and orchards,
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: having scorched earth policy. You know. Washington was called by
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: many of the Iroquois Confederation tribes the town destroyer, and
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: they refer to the revolution as the Whirlwind. It also
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: happened in the Southeast, and it all so happened in
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: the Midwest, particularly with George Rogers Clark, who's just he's
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: out to he's the Attila, the hunt of the story.
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: He's out to just kill as many Indians as he can,
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: to destroy as many villages to make that area which
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: will later become the Northwest Territories, you know, suitable for settling.
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: So it's a super complicated story, and yet it engages
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: some of the most noble aspirations of humankind periods. So
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: that when someone came up to me and said, our
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: last film that was broadcast was called The US and
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: the Holocaust, I said, do you think after the birth
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: of Christ, the most important event in world history is
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: the Holocaust? I said, no, it's the birth of the
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: United States.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: That's great. I can't wait to see that one. How
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: long will that one be?
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: That'll be twelve hours without a single photograph, right, that's
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: the big challenge that we practiced in Franklin. I don't
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: mean to suggest that it was easy. And Lewis and Clark,
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: which is how you tell a story in which it's
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: pre photographic, no photographs, no newsreel, no combat footage, no
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: combat footed Whenever I travel and I give a species
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: and if anybody's got a photograph from their relations, please
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: there giving my address, please send it in. But what
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: happens is that necessity is a mother of invention, And
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: so we begin to find new strategies like going out
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: and filming yourself graveyard gravestones and and and trees and
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: atmospherics what Emily Dickinson called the far theatricals of day sunrises,
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: sunrit sets, and and try to find new ways to
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: do it. And it's beginning to work. We're knock on wood,
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: you know, we've been editing now for several months, and
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: and have you know, we're beginning to feel like we
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: can exhale a little bit.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, uh, I also want to do a better job
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: of introducing Dayton Duncan after our preamble about the forthcoming
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: revolutionary film American Revolution. Dayton Duncan has written and produced
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: many films with Ken Burns country Music. You can help
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: me fill in the list Country Music, Lewis and Clark,
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Mark Twain, The West, Dustball, dust Bowl, National Parks, National Parks.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: Ratios, Drive, Ratio's Drive about the first car trip across
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: the United States in nineteen oh three.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: The West, The West, but also worked on Civil War,
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: you know, lots of different projects.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would, because we're friends. As I was writing books,
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: Ken would read the books that I was working on
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: in progress, and he'd asked me to sit in and
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: look at films in progress, not as an expert on
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: the topic, but it's just somebody who shares his passion
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: for narrative storytelling. And I'd say, well, this is really working.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: And I was confused, here, this is dragging here. I was,
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: you know that do more of this and a little
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: less of this and that kind of thing. So I
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: fiddled around on the ones I didn't produce and write,
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: but was dedicated and lucky to work with him on
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: ones that were particul clear passion or interest to me.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: How'd you guys meet that's good story. Did you meet
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: through Dayton's books or yep?
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: I I you know, when I decided to become a
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: documentary filmmaker. Strike one on PBS, Strike two in American History,
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: Strike three, Ye're out. I moved from New York City
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: to Walpole, New Hampshire, to the house i'm living in now,
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: to the bedroom I still sleep in forty four years ago.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: But before that, in order to survive, we would take
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: day jobs from the BBC, who didn't want to send
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: a union crew from New York City all the way
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: up and incur all these expenses. And we just said
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: we won't charge per deems. We'll just get where you
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: need to be in New England, which was, you know,
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: waking up at one am to go be ready to
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: shoot at six am, to finish at midnight, to drive
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: another six hours ago on what kind of project like
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: one day shoot. So one day the BBC was interviewing
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: the Governor of New Hampshire, who was active in sort
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: of the adapt active reuse of some of the old
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: abandoned mills, the Amiskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. That
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: governor was named Hugh Gallen and his chief of staff
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: was Dayton Duncan. So the first time I met Golrok
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: is when.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: We wanted to talk to Hugh Gallan. They had to
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: go through Mate, yes.
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: And he had a reputation already is kind of this tough.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: So we did a shoot and we sort of noticed
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: each other, and I think he thought, oh, this child
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: is making a film, what is he doing? But it
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: turned out all right, And then later we'd bump into
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: each other at sort of political events in the state.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: It's a small state and intimate. And then when I
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: was getting married, I had crossed every t and dotted
• 24:41
  Speaker 3: every eye except the very important marriage license, and I
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: needed to cut through red tape in about a day
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: and a half. So I called my buddy. Eventually our
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: wives and then my children and his children became the
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: dayon moved here, and so.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: He gave me.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: One of the books he did give me was Out West,
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: which is this magnificent story of Lewis and Clark, but
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: it's also the story of his story engaging the Lewis
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: and Clark trail. And I went to date and I
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: said man, this is a really great film. We're not
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: going to tell your story, but let's tell Lewis and Clark.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: And so we had some stuff in the way, like
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: the Civil War and baseball in the West. But you know,
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: one of the most satisfying parts of my professional experience
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: has been working with Dayton, particularly on Lewis and Clark,
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: particularly out on the road in Montana, driving from one
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: town to another and looking and making jokes about, well, well,
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: it looks like Winnifred is way up there, and what
• 25:44
  Speaker 3: you know. Dayton would say, what are you going to
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: get when do we get into town? I said, well,
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: I think I'll start with a cold vs. Swas and
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: then I'm going to move to a salad of odive
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: with a vinaigrette dressing, and then I will have probably
• 25:59
  Speaker 3: either the Chateau Brion or the Dover Soul, and then
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: I hope to follow it off with a beautiful crem breulat.
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: And then there would be a beat and he'd say,
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: what do you want on your cheeseburger? And so we
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: would go into town and we go to the cafe
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: and we get a delicious cheeseburger, and then I'd repeat
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: it the other way I would. I would say to Dayton, well,
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: you know, we're coming up on it. Where do you
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: what do you think we should get? And he would
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: elaborate thing and then I would go, what do you
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: want on your cheeseburger? So that's it was. It was
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: our routine. But in that time we got we've you know,
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: Dayton had already known the West, but I fell in
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: love with it, and and he was the guide and
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: we'd be drinking fresca.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one of the joys of my life.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: was with you the first time that you were ever
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: in South Dakota. In North Dakota, yes, and maybe Montana.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: And the first time you ever saw any buffalo for
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: some that wasn't.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw a buffalo when I was a little boy.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: And it's either Philadelphia or Baltimore. I don't remember what zoo.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: And I'd already's been animated as an anthropologist, sons by
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: native people and buffaloes and stuff like that. But I
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: saw a buffalo.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: At the ranch where years later The Dances with Wolves
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: was shot. Oh, the ranch north of Pier that was
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: the Halk Ranch at that time, I've had a triple
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: U I think was the name of the ranch. They
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: had one of the largest herds in America at the time,
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: and I had met the guy that the rancher when
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: I was doing my book out West and interviewed him.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: But then so we filmed there. But that was what
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: I was going to say. One of the joys of
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: my life was on those moments with Ken, even though
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: you know we're doing ridiculous hours to get up and
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: shoot at dawn and then drive and find the place
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: we're going to shoot next and go tell sunset in
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: the northern plains and the middle of the summer, so
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: you're talking about sunrise at four o'clock and sunset at ten.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: But of just seeing his was important to me when
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: we were making that film, of seeing his eyes so
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: wide at the landscape, encountering the landscape of the Great Plains,
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: and it reminded me that we needed to make sure
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: in our film that we somehow because we can't show
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: the faces of Lewis and Clark and the members of
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: the Core of Discovery. We were standing with them looking
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: at it and using their quotes from their journals, but
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: to make sure we got across the sense of wonder
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: that they had because they know they came from this
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: part of the country up in New England and the
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: East where basically you have vertical views through gaps and
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: trees and stuff. And now you're in this horizontal world
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: and you're encountering animals that, as they would write in
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: their journals, not known back in the United States. I
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: mean they're writing that when they're in Nebraska and South Dakota.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: They're talking about back in the States, you don't have
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: these things that barking dogs and piet sheens and prairie
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: dogs as John Ordway called them, and that's what they became.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: And antelope and you know, jack rabbits and the and
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: bison they knew about, but because they used to be
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: in the East Coast, but not in those numbers and
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: the astonishing numbers grizzly bears living on the plains elk
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: elk one was a plain's animal at one time, and
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: just this wonderland of landscape and wildlife that they encountered
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: as the first US citizens to ever go that far west,
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: and as the first US citizens, white citizens to see.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: In that.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: You know, paradise of wonderland of wildlife and landscape, and
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: for me that's the marker, you know, that was what
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: the West was after the United States had claimed it
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: through the Louisiana Purchase but didn't control it. But it
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: was a view of a land and a people and
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: animals that in the next eighty years would be irrevocably changed.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: And so they were the first in one respect, and
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: they were the last in another respect to encounter that
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: place that had been evolving for me ten thousand years
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: before the United States as officially was entering into it.
• 30:55
  Speaker 2: And my book Out West was about the difference between
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: what they saw and what I saw, and to tell
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: the history of the West in between those they saw.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: They saw Buffalo everywhere.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: It'd be like going to Kenya, right and not seeing
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: all the things you can see in Kenya anymore. Right,
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: that there's a kind of silence and a kind of
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: mono culture now to the prairies when it was, as
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: they say, are serengetti. And that's I think I think
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: we tried. I think we accomplished in Lewis and Clark,
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: and I think again in the Buffalo film, to get
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: a sense of just how filled the planes were with
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: species of both both flora as well as fauna, and
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: how what it would be like to imagine or now
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: reimagine the possibilities that there were elk, there were grizzlies,
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: there were wolves and so now and in a variety
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: of plant life that is just a spectacular eden as
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: as as day and says Is as people talked about it,
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: you know, this was this was our new the new
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: territory we were acquiring, and it was just full. And
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: then very shortly afterwards it's not full. The rounds have disappeared.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Lewis and Clark, I say, we just saw them.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: And just talking about buffalo. They saw them everywhere. Once
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: they reached what's now South Dakota and the plains that
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: I crossed in the early eighties, retracing their route, it
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: was a wildlife desert now, uh. And to find to
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: see buffalo out on a range took a lot of work.
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: I mean I had as a reporter, had to you know,
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: dig down to find out work. And I go see
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: some you know, and talk and learn a little bit
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: about them. And so South Dakota and then my friend
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: became my friend through that Gerard Baker who's in our
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: in our Lewis and Clark film, and also in our
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: National Parks film, and also in the West Colman, and
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: also in this Buffalo of Them Who's a Mandanadatsa the
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: tribes that sheltered Lewis and Clark in the winter of
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: eighteen o four eighteen o five. I got to know
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: him very well. But at one point he became the
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: district ranger of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the North Unit,
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: and one of his jobs was sort of managing.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Their buffalo herd.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: So through him I got not only introduced, you know,
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: personally to buffalo, but more importantly, and we hope that
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: our film gets this across, the importance that they had
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: both for sustenance physical sustenance, but also for spiritual sustenance
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: for Native people who had been living with them for
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: ten thousand years. And he really got that across to me.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: And that's what another thing we hope in this film
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: that we make perfectly clear. You know, you can say it, well,
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: they've been living them for ten thousand years and everything,
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: and then they were gone and that was really devastating.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: That just doesn't touch it, you know, about how how intricate, intricate,
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: it intocreate in whatever how closely thank you they were.
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: Their lives were intertwined and the meaning that they had
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: for people beyond you know, the food or the hides
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: or the bones that they would use for different different things.
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: It was part of existence and it was part of
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: a web of.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: Being.
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: That is, you can you can talk about it, but
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: having people like Gerard and other people that we interviewed
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: in our film describe it because they're talking about their people.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: Bones are out there too, talking about how deep it
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: was and therefore how devastating it was, and therefore how
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: important it is now to try to restore some more
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: buffalo two reservations to the land, their own ancestral lands,
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: the buffaloes and the ancestral lands that are laughed at
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: least on reservations for tribes to revive that sacred connection
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: that they had and also to provide them with food
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: sovereignty as well.
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: It's been broken for you know, five six generations. That's
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: a big break, because if you think about it, it's
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: six hundred generations of experience up to that point and
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: then all of a sudden, you know, we have in
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: filmmaking a phrase called POV, which means point of view,
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: and we tend to realize that we are susceptible to
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: one po and while it might be generous enough to
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: encompass other points of view, it does so in the
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: kind of sometimes patronizing kind of no bless obleiche. We well,
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: yes there are other views of this, but you really,
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: in the case of this question, have to yield to
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: those people who have six hundred generations of experience and
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: not just four or five or six generations of experience
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: with regard to this animal. I think for us the
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: ability later in our professional lives to be able to
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: seed to views not in just some sort of kind liberal,
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: bleeding heart way, but in a real full we just
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: give it over and challenge lots of things, presumptions about
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: ownership of land, presumptions about superiority as a species, presumptions
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: about how you act in concert with this. Because if
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: you're just killing a buffalo and taking the tongue, which
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: is the first thing, you can imagine what the effect
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: is on a culture that is using everything, as Dayton
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: is suggesting, from the tail to the snout and as
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: Girard says in our film, and also the snort, because
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: the buffalo sounds get worked into rituals, so it isn't
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: just using every last thing. And Dayton wrote a beautiful
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: thing of you know, from the moment you're born into
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: a warm buffalo blanket and the time you die in
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: a shroud of buffalo skin, all the ways in which
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: the buffalo is used from tail to snout, and then having,
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: as Dayton has said so well, this spiritual dimension. And
• 37:46
  Speaker 3: so we need to actually look at the story that
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: takes place from a variety of povs and actually seed
• 37:54
  Speaker 3: something even as filmmakers tightly in control of the narrative,
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: is that we not we may not always be right
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: or see it in a way. And how can we
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: in developing this narrative see things from what is in
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: many cases with regard to say, ownership of the land
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: or kinship with other species, entirely different point.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: Of the kinship question. I think is handled really well
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: in the film. And again the film releases in October. Yes, yeah,
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: called the American Buffalo.
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: I think that we're sixteenth and seventeenth.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: October sixteen and seventeenes a thing that does very convincingly,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: and I'd like red references of it and pondered it before.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: But you guys, capturedly. Well, well, is this idea of
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: between the planes, tribes and the animals, that there's a
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: spiritual dimension in otherwise there's like this this real equal footing,
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: meaning it was even that at one in some belief systems,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: it was even at once upon a time the buffalo
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: were dominant over humans, but through various circumstances, the humans
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: became dominant over buffalo. But if humans did sort of
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: moral infractions against the animals, the animals would deprive themselves
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: and you had to to in writing about the film
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: later I wrote a thing for Outside magazine about the film,
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: and writing about it would be that bad hunting could
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: be more than bad luck, like bad hunting could could
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: be a sign of some moral transgression, meaning you needed
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: to make things right.
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: Religious karma idea right that that that there was you
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: had a kind of responsibility. There's a reciprocity and in
• 39:59
  Speaker 3: quality between all of creation, and you needed to be
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: in balance with that. And this is not just every tribe.
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: It's specific tribes have specific myths about the creation and
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: when man became dominant, But that dominance required a kind
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: of humility in the face of what the buffalo then
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: provided and pre horse. This is going to be a
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: very big deal. This is the survival of your band,
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: your tribe might be on the success of one hunt
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: that would provide you with enough meat for a month
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: if you got to buffalo and if you didn't, what
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: were you doing if they were not there? Had had
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: you done something wrong? And it's really a wonderful ones
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: And it's different from the steamroller effect.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's about respect. I mean, the cosmology is
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: so different a world view of human beings in their
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: relationship to the natural world than what was brought to
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: the Americas in fourteen ninety two and following, which was
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: we're all part of this web and we're all in
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: essence on an equal basis everything and it all comes
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: from the Sun and that great unknown that uh that
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: the Lakotas are called the walk on Tonka, the you know,
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: the great incomprehensibility. They understood that the sun was the
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: source of all life and the represent the biggest representation
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: of the Sun.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: Was the buffalo.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: The buffalo ate the grass that the Sun made possible
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: and then turned that into meat that they then relied
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: upon for their you know, for their food, but also
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: everybody part for for something else, and that the that
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: relationship was one in which a number of the people
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: we interviewed say in our film, the buffalo give themselves
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: to us. That's part of how this works. And yeah,
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: and if if we don't uh, through our ceremonies and
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: our practices respect that, then they might withhold that and
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: they would go back to where they came from a
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: lot of times in sacred places to them, the Wichita
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: Mountains in Oklahoma to the Black Hills in the Northern
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: Plains for the Lakota and Cheyenne, they might go go
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: back there, and then special ceremonies and maybe the intervention
• 42:32
  Speaker 2: of a culture hero were required to convince them, Okay,
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: we've learned our lesson where you know, we will start
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: a fish are we'll reset, and we'll we promise you
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: know that we won't. We'll try our best not to
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: do whatever that violation was that caused you to disappear,
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: and to a certain extent in our film. Remarkably, when
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: the first national preserve for bison back on the Plains
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: is created in the early nineteen hundreds through Theodore Roosevelt,
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: it was in the Wichita Mountains where, according to the
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: Kai was they would go they had first emerged, and
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: it's where they would go when they hadn't been respected.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: And according to a legend told by a woman named
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: Old Lady Horse, whose words we use in the film.
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: She describes a girl watching the last buffalo heard after
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: the buffalo had been slaughtered by the hide hunters disappearing
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: that into what's called now Mount Scott and the Wichita
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: Mountains and said it opened up and inside was a
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: world of fresh beauty, and the rivers ran clear, and
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: the grass was green. And that's where they went. And
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: when they came back for the Kias and Comanches, was
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: at the Wichita Mountains where the preserve was founded. That
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: you know, Theodore Roosevelt believed me wasn't doing it because
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: he knew the legend of that Old Lady Horse had told.
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: It was just a good place. The federal government had
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: taken some of the land from the Comanche Reservation during allotment,
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: and it made sense.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: To do it.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: But there were people there, Guana Parker and others who
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: understood that deeper thing and were and who had interacted
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: with the animals as young as young. There were still
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: some people alive that remember them the time when they
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: covered the plains, and they were also their children who
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: hadn't seen a buffalo. I mean, that's how dramatic that.
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: And the irony is that the buffalo that are going
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: to seed the Wichita Mountains refuge from the Bronx, come
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: from the Bronx zoo and they're loaded on this you know,
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: in the busiest city, the biggest city in the Western Hemisphere.
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: They're going to be loaded on these box cards and
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: make the reverse trip out to their you know, as
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: we said, new old home. And that I think is
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: part of trying to understand the undertow of this story.
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: Look, we have a very good interview in that in
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: our film described Steve somebody.
• 45:28
  Speaker 4: Helps us, helps us get that from the beginning.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: Rather promising middle aged man.
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: So so the thing to remember is that human nature
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: never changes. It's the same for all, right, villains and
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: heroes and all that stuff that we superficially apply. So
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: there are lots of ways of thinking and lots of
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: ways of behaving and whatever. But you know, native peoples
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: are warring with one another and committing atrocities. But I
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: think for us to be able to look and see
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: that many of our own ancestors participated in a kind
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: of thoughtless which is maybe the most charitable thing, you
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: could say, thoughtless slaughter that reached a kind of industrial
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: pitch in the last half of the nineteenth century. That
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: took an animal that numbered in perhaps thirty million at
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: the beginning of the eighteenth century down to basically nobody.
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: Could find the beginning of the eighteen hundreds, eighteenth century.
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: The beginning of the nineteenth century, there are at least
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: thirty million. There By the end of the eighteen eighties,
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: you can't find one outside of a zoo or private collections.
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: There's some in Yellowstone there under tremendous threats from poachers
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: and things like that. So how did this happen? And
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: then why are we sitting here today not so worried
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: about the buffalo?
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah? You know, well I want to touch on that,
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: and I want to touch on the slaughter, But I
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: want to back up a little bit to ask to
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: ask an earlier question. Guys, in your work, you touch on, uh,
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: you touch on the buffalo and the dust bowl early
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: on and establishing you know, the the come up and
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: for tilling the great planes, and and you have this
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: thin you know, layer of grass that has a root
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: structure that goes buffalo grass, yeah, five feet subsurface, right,
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: and has this tiny reflection on the surface and that ecosystem,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: and you touch on the animal there, you touch on
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: the animal Lewis and Clark in the West of course,
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: the National Parks. But at what point, in the back
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: of your heads, in the front of your head or whatever,
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: at what point did you think we let's just go
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: at some point, let's just tackle the animal in its
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: own free standing project.
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: We've been talking about that for more than three decades.
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: We found a proposal from the nineties that was like
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: really fully developed and we really you know, we're about
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: to do it, and we.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: Generated the proposal Dane probly were all.
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: But we talked about it from the early nineties, you know,
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: about this would be a great film in and of itself.
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: And what's so good is that this?
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: You know, and this.
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: Happened some projects. You know, you say this country music boom,
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: you're suddenly in it. Other stuff same same way, and
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: others you know, sit.
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: There, I mean, I mean the process from from from
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: from conception.
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: So the first articulation of it, you know, front of mine,
• 48:32
  Speaker 3: back of mine. So you say something and all of
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: a sudden you're racing towards it and you're working. Country
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: music was like yeah, Cut was like that, and national park,
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: national parks like that. Many of the projects of Vietnam
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: like that. You know, when you we're going to do it.
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: You know. It took us a long time to do
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: the war because after the Civil War we said no
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: more wars, and then we had to decide that we
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: are going to jump into that. But what was so
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: great is that a lot of things have over the
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: years kept kind of on the back burner or have
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: just been there. Of course, the buffalo, it falls off lists,
• 49:05
  Speaker 3: it comes back onto lists. You make a ten year
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: plan and it's not there, but then maybe there's a
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: hole and it comes. And I'm so happy that we
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: waited these decades to do this, because I don't think
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: we had that ability to do what I was trying
• 49:20
  Speaker 3: to describe earlier about respecting without patronizing, without some sort
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: of inherent paternalism other points of view, just to literally
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: permit them to obtain doesn't fit with your belief system, okay,
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: but that's the way the whole world works well, across
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: thousands of cultures and eons of time, and so to
• 49:46
  Speaker 3: be able to have this little moment of daylight that
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: we could say, okay, so after Franklin, we should be
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: doing this, and this particular team with Dayton and with
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: Julie and and and and said well, we'll fit the
• 50:01
  Speaker 3: Buffalo in here. It was just the right time. And
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: it feels so fortuitous in the same way that we
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: celebrate country music for the impulse of just saying I mean,
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: a friend suggested it to me in Dallas. I was
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: kind of nervous because Dayton and I were thinking about
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: something else. I went back to Dayton, we don't have
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: to forget that idea but country, and he's like, we
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: forgot that idea, Like we still we don't remember what
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: it is anymore.
• 50:22
  Speaker 4: And so and suddenly.
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: We were just pressing forward on that and that's okay.
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: You know, some things, some things are developed over time,
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: and this one, like a fine wine, just needed that age.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: And I think by by dealing with it in bits
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: and pieces on those other films. You know, even before
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: we did some of those other films, we talked about
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: one just on on the Buffalo, but we just kept saying,
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: this is such a it's such a portal to telling
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: a story that's not this is a by It's like
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: in our biography series. Yeah, this is a biography of
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: the American buffalo in one respect, but it's not just
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: about the buffalo, because it never was just about the buffalo.
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: And what my friend Gerard and other people made clear
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: to us is that if you tell the story of
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: the American buffalo, you're also telling the story of Native people,
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: particularly on the planes. You're also telling the story that's
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: even larger than that, which is a collision of two
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: worldviews of how we interact with the the natural world,
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: which reached its most dramatic crescendo on the Great Plains
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: in the latter part of the nineteenth century. And you're
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: also just talking about lots of different things, you know,
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: the importance of you know, what does the railroad mean?
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: What is manifest doest destiny mean? You know, what does
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: conservation mean?
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: Who are the people that.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: Step forward in there for their own individual private reasons,
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: sort of do it yourself? Buffalo salvation projects? You know,
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: you know twenty head here and twenty over here in
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: New England of all places, and and someone were doing
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: it because and on two reservations where they're being preserved
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: and ingrown for the more traditional reasons. But ranchers. Charlie Goodnight,
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: the legendary cattleman in the Pandema, Texas, you know, hated
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: buffalo and he really didn't like Indians much. And by
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: the end of the film you find out that he's
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: been raising he starts raising buffalo. He becomes very attached him,
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: and he becomes very attached to providing buffalo to Indian
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: tribes near him for their ceremonial reasons. And you know,
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: George bird Grenella, who was a character in our film
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: on the National Park, plays a critical role in their salvation.
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: And some very you know, a couple people who aren't
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: particularly likable in modern times. Rightfully, so William T. Hornaday,
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: who becomes just you know, a crusader for saving them
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: from the commercial destruction and who hates Indians and thinks
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: that they're and and a lot of other non white
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: people and believes in the pseudoscience of eugenics. But he
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: still is a person who played a crucial, crucial role.
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: You can't overlook it, Yeah, yeah, you can. You can't
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: overlook either of them. I mean, you know, if we're
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: talking about buffal We can't just sort of say, well,
• 53:49
  Speaker 2: but we're not going to talk about this other part.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: You know, as Ken mentioned, our films deal with human
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: beings who are their own amalgam of different impulses.
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: And you have to be honest, uh, with your portrayal
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: of it and with you know, without saying, well, we
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: can't talk about him.
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: Because he had this.
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: Deplorable belief that there was this hierarchy of genetically driven
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: purity of the human species. At the same time he was,
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: you know, doing everything he could to to keep this
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: magnificent beast from disappearing forever.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: It's you know, there's a good the the complexities of
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: the people involved. Uh. You explore a handful of them.
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: There was a story in there that I hadn't that
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: wasn't familiar with. So Palo Duro Canyon. If if listener,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: if you're imagining the Texas Panhandle, there's a thing called
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: the landscape feature called the yano estacado, the staked planes
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: and coming off of this bench or these like deeply
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: incised canyons, and the Commanchi and others had long hunted
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: these canyons. I had never heard this story that after
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: the animals were mostly disappeared that I can't remember. You'll
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: have to help me fill this in. Yeah, the Quanta
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: Parker and the Comanche went to Palo Duro Canyon from
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: They're like, if there's one place we'll find them, it's there.
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: And they get there and it's being ranched by Charlie Goodnight,
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: by Charlie Goodnight, and.
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: He says, you're not going to find any but I
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: know you're not going to believe me. Go take a
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: look and anywhere. Detell them. Every two days.
• 55:56
  Speaker 2: You're can have a couple of miccounts.
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: You can kill every whatever days and kills some number
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: of my cows to feed on.
• 56:02
  Speaker 3: This is the beginning.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: It's please satisfy your curiosity that they're gone.
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: We really love the simplistic binary idea of villains, and
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: Horned Day fits a villain because he starts off doing
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: one thing and he and he and he does an
• 56:15
  Speaker 3: admirable thing, but he does it for all the wrong reasons.
• 56:20
  Speaker 4: But then you have these other things.
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: That are the Charlie Goodnight stories, in which you have
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: a human being who's an Indian hater and Indian fighter
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: and is a buffalo hater and a buffalo killer. He
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: wants to raise his cattle in Palladero Canyon. He's got
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: the first ranch there, and his evolution ends up embracing,
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: as Dayton said, not only the buffalo on an accident.
• 56:42
  Speaker 3: His wife's lonely and she wants to raise a few
• 56:44
  Speaker 3: buffalo calves, and so they end up with a herd
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: that's not insignificant in the story of all these isolated
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: herds that need to in some ways, if not coalesce,
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: contribute to a coalescing in various places that will protect
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: the buffalo from the measures of real extinction. But he
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: also then is shedding the animosity towards native people and
• 57:10
  Speaker 3: embracing them, and he and them he in a hugely
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: important way. And it's those stories that punctuate all of history,
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: regardless of subject matter, that you are drawn to as
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: easily as you do. We have in our editing room
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: neon signed that says it's complicated. There's not a filmmaker,
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: there's not a filmmaker on earth that when the scene
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: is working, you just want to just don't touch it,
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: don't touch it. But we always are finding out new
• 57:37
  Speaker 3: and contradictory information about something undertow that threatens to sort
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: of derail what was effective about that particular scene. But
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: we always will move towards that and lean into it,
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: because you end up realizing, as Dayton said, you know
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: that nobody I mean, we always lament they're no heroes now.
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: But heroism is not about the Greeks tell us about perfection.
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: It's about strength and weaknesses. And so you want to
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: calibrate and calculate what those strengths. Achilles Head is Hubris
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: and his heel to go along with all of his
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: great strengths. So it's really not perfection. It's the negotiation
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: between strengths and weaknesses and what happens in that. And
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: so Hornaday remains an important person to tell you don't
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: wash him out, you don't cut him out of this.
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: He's not disappeared or canceled. He's an important, really important person.
• 58:29
  Speaker 3: But he represents a kind of heroism that is not
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: you know, doesn't reach Charlie Goodnight. You know, you cancel
• 58:37
  Speaker 3: him for the early years and then all of a
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: sudden embrace. So the idea of even cancelation in good
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: history becomes kind of beside the point. You're going to
• 58:47
  Speaker 3: try to include as much as you can and treat
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: everybody with that kind of perspective that allows you to
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: understand even the motivation of the high hunters, even the
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: motivation of this. So you're you're you're not excusing. It
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: isn't some big, you know, Kumbaya moment. This this is tragedy.
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: This is violence, this is hatred, this is race animosity,
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: this is generosity and love and purpose. There are people
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: from all over the country who band together, and we
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: now have buffalo not skinned in some museum, as Hornaday
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: initially was doing, not on a damn nickel, But there's
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands of them that are alive, and we
• 59:32
  Speaker 3: can take our kids and our grandkids to see them.
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: And that's one hell of a great story.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: I was heartened by the bold choice to use the
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: word buffalo.
• 59:45
  Speaker 4: And the title, and I'll let Dayton address.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: I had dinner with Date and last night and we
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: were talking. I was talking about a question I had
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: asked of Well, I'll point this out. So there's a
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: number of people. There's a couple of people that are
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: in this new Kemberton's documentary, the American Buffalo, who have
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: appeared on this podcast before. So we've had Dan Floory's
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: on a couple of times. Michael Punk's been on a
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: couple times. I recently interviewed Dan Floy's about his new book,
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: While New World, and one of the questions I asked
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: him was there we were talking about there are certain
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: things that historians and writers when they talk about them,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: they feel like they have to explain the evolution of
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: the thought, the peopling of the Americas. No one ever
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: is comfortable saying here's what happened. They'll say, well, for
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: a while, we thought this, then for a while we
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: thought that, and currently we think this. And there's certain
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: subjects that every people have like they feel like I
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: can't just say what the current thinking is. I have
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: to say how we got to the current thinking. And
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: we're talking about like when you when you use the
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: word if you describe the animal's buffalo, it usually comes
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: with you feel this need to go hear me out
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: right and explain the whole thing. And just to end
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: the film, they spare all that it's not there to
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: say scientists whatever.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 4: And he said, scientists call it bison.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: Known to scientists to say bison bison, right.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: And that allows us to use it interchangeably and not
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: entymology of our argument, because it is buffalo New York,
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 3: not bison New York. It's the buffalo nickel, not the
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: bison nickel. It's now been changed from.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 4: A bison reserves to go bufalo. It's buffalo bill.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, you've got all these examples, so what you're acknowledging,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: And though Dayton.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 4: Can I can press a button, I'm going to steal
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 4: that from you.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: The bison nickel, I.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: Mean, will you can You can hear the whole dynamics
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: of the argument.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 4: But it's quite simple.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: If that's what you're calling it, this is what we'll
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: call it, and we will early on acknowledge that scientifically
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 3: it is. It is bison bison. And if you want
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 3: to get into the fact that they're buffalo in Africa
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: and buffalo in Asia and nothing's really and this is
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: not really a buffalo, it doesn't matter. We say, this
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: is what the earliest settlers called it, or a variety
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: of things. There's lots of Native American names for it,
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: dozens and sometimes you know, one tribe will have dozens
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: of names for it, depending on its age and its size,
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: and its sex, and its health and where it is
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: and how much skin and you know how much for
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: it has and what firs lost.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 4: So you know, this is what we call it.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: And the rest becomes complicated semantics, which is designed to
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: put people to sleep if you have to in that
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: meta way sort of say, so, this is how we
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: all have to think about it. And I'm trying to
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: save Dayton from having to to do what he what
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: he does, which is it's it's you know, it's.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: He said, someone took him to task at a recent UNA.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 3: And you had to do it, and we were to
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: talk for ten We're going to talk for twenty minutes.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: And nineteen was his explanation of what it was.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: I just picture the guy raised his hand being like,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: but hold on a minute, yeah right, exactly right.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: So oh you're maybe you didn't know this, but they're
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: actually bison. You see, there are these other and I
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: want I.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 4: Want to do is to do that. You know, it's
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: like it's like rabbit.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: Please don't give me a lengthy explamanation of of Please
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: don't ask for a lengthy explanation of the bison buffalo conovers.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: And then he brought up another instant where or instance
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: where he toyed with one of the one of the things,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: which is that Lewis right Lewis's death, that Lewis killed
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: himself or was murdered. And he explained me the process
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: of do we get into it, how do we get
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: into it? And eventually it's just he killed himself.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: How much of dinner did that?
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: It was post dinner. But I really need to do this.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: I suppose I should do it.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: And I said, well, actually, the way we solved it
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 2: it was because I was one of the interviewees on
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: the Lewis and Clark film is that I tell the story.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: And so I said, so we can have the narrator
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 2: later say well, there are some people who claim he
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: was murdered and all that, but I'm the one that's
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 2: saying it. The narrator's not. And just give him my
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 2: address and my phone number, and I'd be happy to
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: talk to and I'll be happy to anybody wants to
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: chide us for naming this the American buffalo and said
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: the American Bison and using it interchangeably with bison to
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: save time for the broad podcast and to avoid if
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: they can contact me as long as in.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: Just think in sentences that comprise paragraphs that comprise blocks
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 3: of narration that are pages of talk that you can't
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: just see buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, or bison, bison, bison,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: So you're you're saying bison and then buffalo, and then
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: the animal and then bison. So it just helps relieve
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: the thing. But the point is they're buffalo, and that's
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: the name of our film, and we're sticking with it, right,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: you know.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: How did you guys?
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: Uh?
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: This is this is a version of asking how do
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: you find your subjects for your films? But I want
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: to focus on one that I found just I could
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: watch all day and listen to all day because of
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: just the artic relation the passion is George Horse captured Junior.
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know, I'll a date and tell the story.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: But I think when I was trying to talk about
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: what it might be like to seed the momentum, the
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: impetus of your own world views to someone Else's not
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: just in some kind of gracious after you elponse no
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: after you guests now, but in a real way it
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: occurs naturally because George does not see Junior, does not
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 3: see things the way we expect people to see things, and.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: So what it's disconcerted. It's disorienting almost.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 3: It is disorienting in the most for me emotion away.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 3: I have watched this film dozens and dozens of times.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: I have wept every time I get to his last remark,
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: which we will give away. And I have been watching
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 3: myself agitated, disconcerted, having being kind of elated that there
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 3: might be another way to see this grasshopper, you know,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's like suddenly there's another way to figure
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: out how to square the circle, and that makes me
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: curious about it. So you know, he is You could
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: listen to him about anything, because he is going to
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 3: come out out of it a way that just upends
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: your own kind of whatever it might be. There's nothing
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: wrong with wherever we come from is wherever we come from,
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: and what we bring is okay. But it's going to
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: be nice to have him there as like what do
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 3: we call it a disruptor? Right? It just literally but
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: in a real sense, in a spiritual way. It's like
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 3: upending conception. Like Dayton used to have this wrap. We'd
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: been on the road with the National Parks and he'd say,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: you know, people would look at a river and think, damn,
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: they would look at a stand of timber and think
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: board feet. They would look at a canyon and wonder
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: what minerals could be extracted. But couldn't you with a
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 3: national park idea let go of that and see things
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 3: in a different way. So the seeds of that impulse
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: are part of the six hundred generation's history of George
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: horse Capture Junior of a small, tiny tribe in north
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: central Montana, and out of his wisdom is not an argument,
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: not a fight, not a war, but the possibility that
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 3: if I sit where you're seeing, you know, is my
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: ancestor Robert Burn said, Oh, some power, the gift to
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: give us to see ourselves as others see us. George
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 3: just suddenly goes and there's just some new light. That's
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 3: that's that's possible. He's the beas needs to me.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: I met his father, George Horse Capture. He's George Horscaptor Junior,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 2: who was a very renowned anthropologist when we were working
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: on the West and spent some time with him.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah. When I tried to find George Horse Captured Junior online,
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: I read a lot about his father.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and so I knew about him. And then I
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 2: learned from friends that we have at American Prairie, the
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: nonprofit that's trying to reintroduce buffalo and restore part of
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: the prairie in Montana, which is not too far from
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 2: the Fort bell Knapp reservation that George horsecaptured. Junior was
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: doing a program at the reservation dealing with buffalo and
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 2: would sometimes come and talk to them at American Prairie
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: to you know, their their neighbors and they work together
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: now with you know, American Prairie giving some of their
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: buffalo for the Fort Belknapp heard, but that you know
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: that he would come and talk to people that were
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 2: visiting there, you know, about what it meant, what the
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: buffalo meant and still mean.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: To his his people.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: And so I said, well, I had never met him,
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: but I you know, this is part of our process,
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: you know, you want to give things a chance, right,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: And so we obviously went to people like yourself and
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: others Dan Flores and other people who were who had
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: written books about it, and also Dan O'Brien who is
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: a writer but also has a buffalo ranch in South Dakota,
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: and Rosslyn Lapierre who's a Blackfeet meti but who's an
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 2: ethno botanist and historian. You know, Michelle knew how Nighthouse,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: who's a writer about extinctions and stuff. You know, you
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: go through all the reading you do and you say, well,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: let's go talk to those people that might help us
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: tell our story. And some of those that turned out
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: to be really good and some of them don't. But
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 2: he also we wanted to talk to descendants of Quana Parker.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: We wonted acousa character in our film we won. We
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: learned about Marcia Pablo, whose great grandfather was Michelle Pablo,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 2: who had an important herd on the Flathead Reservation. And
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: then so I just said, well, let's, you know, spend
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 2: two hours with George and to see what he's got
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: to say, and interviewed him in Fort Benton, Montana. And
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: you know, right from the get go you knew this
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 2: guy was bringing something that was not necessarily narrative storytelling
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: of the historical story, but just a flat out point
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: of view.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: You know, he's got some.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 2: Incredible moments in the film, including the final but even
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: well before that, you know, when we're talking about the
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: technique of the buffalo jump.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: Before the horse debut in the film, and we.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 2: Have other people Rosin Lapierre and Sarah Dant, who's an
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 2: environmental history explaining how that worked, how a tribe you know,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 2: would work communally to try to maneuver a herd and
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: then get it moving toward what you couldn't see from
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: the ground is that there's a cliff on the other side,
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 2: and the buffalo jumps, as the Blackfeet would call him,
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: and they tell that story and it's just comes alive.
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 2: And then George just comes.
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 3: On in the in the in the moment is going
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: uh is pretty uh. You know, it's a stampeding music,
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 3: and it just sort of ends and resolves as they
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 3: go over the cliff in your imagination and in a painting.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: And then you're looking up on a live shot, but
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 3: we see a live shot with quiet, and then you
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: hear this voice come on.
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: And he says, you go to a buffalo jump, you
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: know these days, and if it quiet, if people ain't
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: you know, ain't talking like magpies.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: So you think you're going to hear about the sorrow
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: of the buffalo that you can hear in a Native
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: American way, the sadness, the sorrow, the screams of the buffalo.
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: But he takes you in exactly the oppertuity.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and he says, but you you know, you get
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: the quiet and you think about that, and they're going
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 2: to eat now, they're going to be able to eat,
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: and that makes people happy.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: You know that My.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: Family, my tribe, we're going to be we're going to
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 2: have enough meat to last us, you know, weeks a
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: month into the winter, and then it's a good thing.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: And you know, it's just it's like holy smokes, you know,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: it's just like of course, you know they would celebrate.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: You know, you just got you know, we don't get
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: into it in the in the film, but in the
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 2: book I mentioned that there were certain among certain native
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 2: tribes if you didn't get all of them that went
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 2: over the cliff, because they wouldn't all necessarily die going up,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: and they had people at the bottom to finish them off.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: We say that, but part of the thought was you
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 2: needed to do that because otherwise the survivors would go
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: and tell and Warren and Warren.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: We still use that term day. It's called when they're educated. Yeah, right,
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: you don't want to educate the He has a line
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: that really stuck on me, and he uses it so fluidly,
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: and it's not rehearsed. But he's talking about his people,
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: his tribe or his collective people Native Americans, and he
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: says my people and their people. When he says their people,
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: he's talking about the buffalo. And when I and the
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: thing I wrote about your film and I touch on
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: being in the film, and I quote him, and I
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: wound up needing to when I quote him when I
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: say their people, it's so disorienting. Like I said, I
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: needed to put in parentheses so because the reader would
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: never understand when he says they're people, he means the animals.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 4: But there's no parentheses in his mind.
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: No, And that's the great thing about it, I wrote.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: And I'd look at it and be like, no, one's
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: gonna understand what he's talking about. You know, they're being
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: like but but George is.
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: Asking you to take the parentheses off and see things
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 3: in an entirely new way in which that that word
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 3: then is part of a of a reciprocal relationship between
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 3: all of creation and not just the dominant species and
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 3: everybody else.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: I couldn't make it like you. You can't make it
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: work in writing. No, you can't without a prent. You're
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: clarifying what what he's talking about by saying there people. Yeah.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: That's the thing with on the film and film when
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: he's talking and he'll say some things that you know, grammatically,
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 2: you know, are confusing or something like that, but there
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 2: is no confusion confusion watching him say it. It's it's
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 2: it's totally communicated.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 3: My ownership, my cattle, my land, my this he's asking
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 3: you to say, you know, there's a who's this.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: This is a response to good night, Noah?
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 3: This is this is this is the you know, the
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 3: early nineteenth century philosopher Prudom I think you said property
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 3: is theft and that was part of the developing revolutionary
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 3: and all the stuff that leads to. But he has
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: that not as an intellectual idea in opposition to anything.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: It's just like, what kind of theory is this?
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: What is my mean?
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: What does what does that mean to be? My? I mean,
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: where does this come from? This does not compute in
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 3: a way, And so he's by virtue of his clarity
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 3: and his certainty. You are then required to let go
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: for a second of your own sort of momentum, which
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 3: in this case is four or five generations, six generations old,
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: as opposed to his, which is six hundred generations old
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 3: on this continent and say, WHOA, Well, maybe he's got
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 3: a point here, right, And so I I love being uh,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: you know, not calcifying. I love the fact that that
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 3: that that he kind of wakes you up.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 2: He also has a great moment speaking of the bison nickel,
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: the buffalo nickel, in interaction with your comments about that
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 2: about there this animal that gets put on a on
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: on a nickel on the other side of an Indian head.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: By the way, but that, uh, the model for that
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 2: was from the black Black Diamond that you describe and that.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: But I went to the nast the last known location
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: of Black Diamond's head, which had become an Italian clothing boutique.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: Oh my god.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: And I went in and told the woman working there,
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: you know what used to be in here.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: But but but as you as you point out that,
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: so here's this here in nineteen thirteen, here's this symbol
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 2: on one side as a.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: Portrait of a.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: Of a Native American individual's portraits. I think so, and
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 2: I can't I can't remember saying well, at least I
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: know that there are theories of who it is. It
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: may not be known, but definitely Fraser said this, this
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 2: one was black black diamond is as you say. And
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 2: so what we're left with this what is it a
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 2: symbol of It's a you know, it's a wonderful thing.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: And that to us, it comes near the end of
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 2: the film, is what is the buffalo a symbol of
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: in American history? Is it a symbol of plenty? Is
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: it a symbol of destruction?
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: What is it?
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 2: And then George comes on, you know, and just gives
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: it the final things in my confusion, he says, I
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: was looking at thinking like he's looking at that nickel
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: right at that moment. It just makes me why did
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: they put that buffalo on there?
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: What is it?
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 2: Why is it that for some people that you want
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 2: to kill the thing you love?
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 3: This is it? Because that's Look, look what we have done.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 3: We are beginning now this is nineteen thirteen, to fetishize
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 3: and to romanticize the Native man and the buffalo, something
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 3: we have just spent the last century trying to exterminate,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: and now all of a sudden it's the symbol of us.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 3: What two symbols represent the newness of America, particularly the
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 3: West and the Native American and the buffalo, and so.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 4: We've done this to it.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 3: To me when he says that do you have to
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: kill the things you love? You just go, my God,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: that may be the story of mankind. I mean, there's
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: a moment one of the episodes in the Vietnam film,
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 3: the eighth I think of out of ten is something
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 3: in a marine said to us that we're just talking
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 3: about warfare in general, and he goes, well, that's the
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 3: history of the world, meaning warfare. So we just called
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: it the history of the world because this is what
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: human beings do. This is what we do.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 4: This is not the aspect that we like to say.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: We want to say, Oh no, we're the Mona Lisa
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 3: and we're the Tower of Pisa, and we're the this,
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: and then that we're also this.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: That's what I've tried that. No, I've tried to find parallels.
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are many parallels for that in minor
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: forms that you can look at our most populous state
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: right their state symbols the Grizzly Bear, of which they
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: don't have any right. So there are things like that.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: But it's so and one of the comments that one
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: of the comments that I have in the film is
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: how quickly. The nostalgia, yes, began because you guys do
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: a great job of Buffalo Bill Cody. Yeah, in the
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: Wild Wife show where they are it's it's like a
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: it's like he got on a train. I mean, it's
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: like he got on a train from participating in the
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: Final Slaughter to arrive on the East Coast to mythologize
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: the thing he'd tried to be passing. But this is
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: what it was like. It was like he he didn't
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: even look different.
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 3: No, he's still advertising the same stick. He's just now
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 3: flipped the coin right.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: And it's different.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 3: But look at that. We romanticize the revolution. We took
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: the Civil War and made it not about race. It
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: was brother coming together. You know, all of this sort
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 3: of stuff. We call the Second World War the Good War.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 3: It's the worst war ever, sixty million human lives were extinguished,
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 3: and it's the good war to us, right, So this
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 3: is always happening in our in our purview, and I
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 3: think what we've been dead cad to is to try
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: to take this the onus of a superficial treatment off
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 3: it and just say it is possible to tolerate complexity,
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 3: It is possible to give and take away. At the
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 3: same time, with an individual or a moment, it is
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 3: possible to sit in contradiction. It's complicated. As the sign
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 3: says in.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: The editing, you said to me one day on the phone. Uh,
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: you just said, nothing is binary.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, nothing's binary.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 4: If nothing is bindy. And that's all we want to do.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 3: We want to make something red state or blue state,
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 3: black or white, young or old, Richard, poor, male or female,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: gay or straight, whatever it may be. We want to
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 3: make sure that there's just an on off switch for it,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: so that we know where we stand with everything, and
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 3: everything is will resist that kind of on off switch.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 3: Because in Charlie Goodnight, you have all of this complication,
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 3: In William T. Hornday, all of this complication in Theodore Roosevelt,
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 3: the great conservation President, who in fact subscribes to many
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 3: of the abhorrent eugenics views of Hornaday, and those that
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 3: are spouting them, like Madison Grant, are also doing magnificent things.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 3: And so you know, Lincoln as late as eighteen sixty
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 3: one was thinking of colonizing black people to Mexico or
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 3: South America or back to Africa. In sixty one, that's
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 3: when the guns open up at Fort Sumter, right, I mean,
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: and yet he's the great emanticipator, which he is. He's
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 3: the visionary who saw who wrote the Gettysburg Address, which
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 3: is our two point oh operating Manual Declaration one point
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 3: oh oops.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 4: The guy who says all.
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 3: Men are created equal owns hundreds of human beings. We
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 3: will gloss that over. Don't pay no attention to that
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 3: man behind the plantation. So he says, no, we really
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 3: do mean it. But it's complicated. It's really really complicated.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: And I think we need to as Americans, particularly today,
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: rejoice in complication. And I think what I was trying
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 3: to say before is that maybe as we got older,
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 3: our chops get a little bit better, and that we
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 3: find a way to integrate it more to rejoice in
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 3: that complication.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 2: Was can I say, in terms of these you know,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: complications and other things. You do a great job helping
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: us in talking about how the people like Roosevelt avid hunters,
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: George Bird Grenell an avid hunter, you know, informing the
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 2: Boone and Crocket Club, you know, helped start a movement
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: in which hunters were at the forefront of conservation. So
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: you've got to you can't just have all this market hunting.
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 2: You can still have hunting there, but it needs to
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 2: be regulated and not just sort of wanting.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: Uh.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: And that's an important part of it. And Grennell is
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: a personal hero of mine in that respect, who also
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: saw conservation differently than some of the others of his age,
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: because he also had a deep connection with native people,
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: was actually interested in them as human beings and everything.
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 2: But you take Roosevelt who rushed west in eighteen eighty
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: three because he'd heard that the bison were about to
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: be gone forever. And so he first thing, he gets
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: on a train and rushes out to what's now North Dakota.
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 2: He wants to shoot one while there's still a chance
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: to do it, so he can hang a trophans. While
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 2: in the book he writes after he buys a ranch
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 2: also in that place and keeps coming back for several
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 2: summers about hunting adventures of a rancher, a ranch man.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: He talks about the buffalo and said, this is their
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: disappearance is a great tragedy. But on the other hand,
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: not only not only was it probably not only was
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: it necessary for the advance of what he called white civilization. Uh,
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: it was probably a blessing that it needed to be
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 2: done because of its impact on us, you know, controlling
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 2: Native people. So he just just said in a book
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 2: that he's written that the elimination of the bison was maybe.
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 4: A little bit sets disappearance, but it was, but it was,
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 4: but it was.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: A blessing and necessary. Who then at the then, with Grennell,
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: forms the Boon and Cocker Club, Who then, with Grennell
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 2: helps save and enact regulations in Yellowstone to save that
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 2: last remnant wild herd from being poached out of existence.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: Who then signs the the bill that creates with a
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 2: you know, executive order creating the first preserve for bison
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: in on the plains and also the one on the
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: Flathead Reservation in north west Montana. And as we say,
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: the greatest conservation president in our history, without question. But
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: he's all of those things. And there's nothing wrong with
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 2: saying it's all those things. You can't just say if
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 2: your tilt is, well, he said this about their extermination,
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: he's done or opposite if theseus said, he's just you know,
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 2: you know, there's only glory to be talked about with him.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: He was who he was.
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 2: He was a complete thing. And we try to portray
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 2: him in that way. He also spent can you imagine this?
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 2: He went out to Oklahoma to the Comanche Reservation after
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 2: he'd met after Kwanta Parker had appeared with some other
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 2: Native leaders in his inaugural parade in nineteen o five,
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 2: he then went out to hunt coyotes and and Kwana
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 2: invited him to come to his fairly elaborate house called
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 2: the Star House on the reservation. And can you imagine
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 2: the President of the United States going to a Indian reservation,
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: spending the night on the porch of one of the
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: Indian leaders, but then told him, you know, from what
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 2: you've told me and everything, I think this is a
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 2: good place for us to have the first Buffalo preserve.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's a journey. I mean, I don't think,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: I don't want overstated. I don't think Theodore Roosevelt's views
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 2: of you know, the pecking order of the races as
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: he would call them, changed that much in terms of
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: his opinion of Native people. But you know, he loved
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: to hunt, and he loved you know, Uh, they're too old.
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 2: There were two warriors who were you know, Quanta Parker
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: had his own journey.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: Oh No.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 2: One hated Texans more than he did. They they abducted
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 2: his mother and his little baby sister, uh and and
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: took them away from the command. She's back to the
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 2: White civilization because that's where they had been.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: Listeners want to get a listeners get a good sense
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: of this from from the film. But also I would
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: recommend as well empire the summer move absolutely.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 2: But anyway, Charlie Goodnight was one of the Texas Rangers
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 2: who abducted cynthiy Anne Parker from the commands she used
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: to bring her back to the Texas settlements. So Quanta
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: was uh a renowned warrior, you know, uh in fighting
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 2: particularly Texans but also the US military. But then when
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 2: he finally decided the buffalo are gone, there's we have
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: to you know, forge a new path, became, you know,
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: a leader of trying to help his people make that
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 2: adjustment without giving up his many of his traditional beliefs,
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: including multiple wives and long hair and in the use
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: of of peyote. But he became a good friend with
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 2: with Charlie Goodnight and gave him and good Night helped
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: Kuana get the remains of his mother and baby's sister
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 2: brought back from Texas and buried near the Wichita Mountains
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 2: where they, you know, which they had considered their home.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 2: And in thanks for that, Quana gave good night the lance,
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: the commandchee lance that he used to kill hide hunters
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 2: at the Battle of Adobe Walls. Okay, so I mean,
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 2: so that lance is now in my mind, that not
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 2: just a you know, it's what is it a symbol
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 2: of well, it's a symbol of existence, right, It's a
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 2: symbol of friendship and and possibly some you know, some redemption,
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: some yes, some measure of redemption and reconciliation. It's it
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 2: is something, you know, it has its own blood memory.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: One thing you guys did and dating I recognize that
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: this isn't one of the ones you wrote or produced,
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: but one of the you mentioned celebrating these personal evolutions
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: and the complexities. I thought one of the most beautiful
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: things and and any of your films was at the
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: End of the Vietnam War Ah, which is a very
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: very good telling of just the deep complexity of the
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: war and what it did to America, what it did
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: to Vietnam. But it ends on among end on the
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: wall the memorial and narrows in on an individual who
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: speaking of personal change, and an individual who initially refused.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: He was like, I was not going to go. Look.
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 3: He hated the idea of the wall, and it was
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 3: in that school, and it was very contentious that it
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: was this black gash, that it was celebrating defeat, that
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 3: it was the list of the dead, it was in
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 3: no way responsible for honoring what had particularly gone on
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 3: and had resisted, and was adamant about not going amongst
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 3: a group of people that have already gone and had
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 3: everything happened. And when he began to answer the question
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 3: about this, he started off with the defiance. By the
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 3: end of his sentence of story, he has gone to
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 3: see a friend and he breaks down on camera because
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 3: he the power of it and the memory. And he
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 3: would probably still say to you mentally, intellectually, I don't
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 3: agree that it's this. But he was himself, more than
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 3: any of the other people, proof of the power of
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 3: that great work off to transcend. I mean, Tolstoy said,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 3: art is the transfer of emotion from one person to
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 3: the other. We hope that our films do that. That
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 3: were emotional archaeologists, not just excavating dry dates and facts
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 3: and events, but something other what George Horse capture can
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 3: do it. But at that moment, you take someone who's
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 3: opposed and lead him in his own mind. He's just
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 3: narrating what he did in some living room, safely out
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 3: of the thing to the monument, and he loses it,
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 3: and it just tells you what the force of that
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 3: thing is and how spectacular, I mean, second only to
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 3: the Lincoln Memorial, which is the greatest thing ever in
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 3: our republic.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: I was, my family was gone. I was between houses.
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: I was on the second floor of the Lewis and
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: Clark Hotel and the Bows in Montanne, looking over the
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: parking lot, watching the end of that movie. And I said,
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: my I thought something was wrong with me. I sat
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: in that room and wet wept, well, we wept, we all,
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: like to the point where I was beginning to be
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: concerned about myself. At the end of the Vietnam War.
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 2: We had, you know, we.
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 3: Because we are addicted to this notion of binary everything's
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 3: good or bad. We we build up within us reservoirs
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 3: of attention based on that false premise that it's all
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 3: just black and white. So catharsis is the ability, wherever
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 3: it occurs, to let that release go I know what
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: it means. There's not a listener listening right now that
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 3: doesn't know what it's like to just break down and cry.
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 3: And there's really not an answer, and there is really
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 3: what's why is it this little thing? I mean, I
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 3: wasn't in Vietnam, you know, I didn't do that. I'm
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 3: here in the Lewis and claud you know, but something
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 3: opens up and it just you just it spills out.
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 3: It's so healthy in the best sense of the word
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 3: to permit that, And you know we're the rap in
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 3: Florentine films is that we kill people really well. You know,
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 3: I was so happy at the end of this film.
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 3: In the Bubbalo, we didn't kill anybody. We save somebody,
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 3: a person. I mean, we think The Buffalo is a biography,
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 3: but we also permitted somebody like George horse Capture to
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 3: do something that for many of us, exactly the same
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 3: thing happens. All of the tensions of trying to maintain
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 3: the fraudulence of this binary, yes known thing which does
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 3: not exist in the universe. You get full expression there
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 3: and George just lets me just let go of a
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 3: whole bunch of baggage that I just perpetually carry put down.
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 3: Think I want not going to pick up again and
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 3: find out I'm still carrying the same stuff.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: Do you feel that you have to do something on
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: the war in Afghanistan?
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 3: I need twenty five years after an event to do it,
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 3: I mean.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: But I don't I think that I'd like to challenge that. Yeah,
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: I don't think you do.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 3: Well, we'll see what happens. We've got stuff through the
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 3: end of this decade, and after that. It may it
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 3: may in fact be and it would not. It might
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 3: be all the petroleum wars, you know, it might be Iraq,
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 3: first Iraq and second Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, and
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 3: try to understand them in that sort of postcolonial way
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 3: and in a global sense and also in the deeply
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 3: personal thing, particularly with Afghanistan relating to nine to eleven.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 3: So it's a wonderful story and it's very very complicated.
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: And deserve even the people that it's like, you know,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: for me to look at. You know, I was born
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: the last year of active engagement in Vietnam, but I
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: was raised around my buddy's dad's Are Vietnam bats, Yes,
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: But I think that there are plenty of people who
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: have lived through that twenty year war, who have really
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: lost sight of the evolution of mission, the evolution of
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: the thinking there, what it was in the first place,
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: what it became the withdrawal. I mean, you, guys, it
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: needs to be someone, It needs to be someone like
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: your team to do it. And I just don't know
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: that you need to wait a ton of time.
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we always like to, you know. Philip Graham,
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 3: who owned The Washington Post, said that journalism was the
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 3: first rough draft of history, which is a wonderful thing.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 3: But you also realize that nobody turns in a rough draft, right,
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 3: So what we like is the passage of time and
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 3: the perspective that will I'll give you a good but
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 3: not so quick, but pretty quick thing. If we'd done
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 3: the Vietnam film ten years after the false I Gone
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 3: right nineteen eighty five, America's in a bit of a recession.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 3: We're talking about the Pacific rim, but we don't mean us.
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 3: We meet Japan, which is ascended. Vietnam would represent the
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 3: symbol of our decline, the ball and chain that we
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 3: would forever carry around with us. If I'd waited twenty
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 3: years till nineteen ninety five, we are the sole superpower
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 3: in the middle of what was then the greatest peacetime
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 3: economic expansion in the history of our country. We had
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 3: won the First Gulf War with one arm tied behind
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 3: our back, with a coalition of dozens and dozens of
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 3: countries supporting us. The Beacon, the city on the Hill
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 3: Vietnam would have would be an important story to tell,
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 3: but it wouldn't be representative of any decline. You go
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 3: thirty years to twenty five and we're in both Iraq
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 3: and Afghanistan and were bogged down, and now people are
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 3: making Vietnam references. So once again you're going, well, maybe
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 3: Vietnam is more symbolic of that. So we know it
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 3: comes out in twenty seventeen, and so we are able
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 3: to look from you know, it's like the Bitterroot Mountains,
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 3: from a lot of different peaks and a lot of
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 3: different valleys to see.
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 4: A better, to.
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 3: Triangulate better what actually took place. And so I after Vietnam,
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 3: I was thrilled to realize when we were working, not
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 3: after it. I'm looking at a map of the Drang
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: Valley and play may this important? How more story? And
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 3: we're just doing this and We've got this kind of
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 3: three D map that we're threading through the Ya Drag
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 3: Valley on a graphic right, and I go, I can
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 3: do the Battle of Long Island right right. We're going
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 3: back to the revolution and people are like what what?
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 3: But now we're like years deep into it, so to me,
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 3: and we're still it's still contentious. The stuff we're arguing
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 3: about in the editing room among scholars about this thing
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 3: that happened it will be when this comes out. It
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty years ago is just magnificent.
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: So I'm I'm not saying no Toice that like somewhere
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: between thirty and two fifty.
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 3: Yes, well, yeah, as an American filmmaker, I mean we are,
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 3: you know, working on Leonardo, so we're two centuries before that.
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 3: I mean he's we say in two different places it
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 3: will have to be down to one in the Leonardo film.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 3: It would be another four hundred and fifty years before
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 3: anybody would be able to duplicate what you've done, right,
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 3: or his theories of this had benefited from. I mean,
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 3: he he had some theories of gravity that Isaac Newton
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 3: is still a century away, and Einstein is you know,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 3: four centuries away, and Newton and Einstein have calculus. He
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 3: does not, and he's got some stuff on gravity. He's
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 3: a painter, right, he's a painter. And it's at that
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 3: point you're going, you know, oh my god, So we're
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 3: the perspective is is pretty important to us just because
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 3: and I think it's one of the arguments and maybe
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 3: we've said it, of the Buffalo wait is to be
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 3: able to be in the age we're in now with
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 3: the kind of scholarship, including yours, that that helps us
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 3: understand and evolve the story that we were drawn to
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 3: and said, boy, we need to do a film on
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 3: just the Buffalo because it cut touches all the corners,
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 3: as Dayton says in the film, back in the early
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 3: nineties or even late eighties, Right, We've got to do that.
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 3: But the fact that we've waited as long as we
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 3: have nothing changed except the Inter Buffalo Tribal Council and
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 3: stuff like that, and you know, wolves released in Yellowstone,
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 3: and you know, whatever is back has happened in the
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 3: last But to be able to enjoy your and Dan
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 3: Floores and you know, so many other scholars that appear
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 3: in the film, Michael punk Michael punk For sure, you
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 3: begin to realize that we've got a richer, more dynamic,
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 3: less binary story to handle.
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: Well. Whatever whatever you guys make now and in the future, Uh,
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: I will watch it and I will be moved by it.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: I will think how I would have done parts different.
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: And I think our audience is really going to get
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: a lot out of out of the American Buffalo. I
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: think that you listeners when you watch it, parts are
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: gonna speak to you, parts are gonna challenge you. It's healthy,
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: it's good. You're gonna probably if you know the story, well,
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: you're gonna have parts you're like, well, yeah, what about right?
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: But that stuff's great, man, It's good for your brain,
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: so exactly. Yeah. I hope everyone watches it and really
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: want to thank you guys for coming on and giving
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: us the time you. Thank you, thank you, appreciate it all.
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 4: Seeal Grey shine like silver in the sun. M h ride.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: Ride, ride on alone, sweetheart.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 3: We're done beat this damp horse to death, taking a
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 3: new one and ride away. We're done beat this damn
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 3: horse today, So take a new one and ride on.