My American Buffalo Story

Ken Burns's "complicated" documentary “The American Buffalo” helped me tell my own complicated American buffalo story.

An illustration from “Wild Beasts and Their Ways” (1890) by Sir Samuel W. Baker.

By Michael Judge

I recently watched the Ken Burns documentary “The American Buffalo” with my 87-year-old mother. It’s a complicated, horrifying, and hopeful story, told in two parts: The first, “Blood Memory” about the profit-driven annihilation of the North American bison in the 1870s and 1880s; and the second, “Into the Storm,” about the hard-won restoration and preservation of the species, in some cases by those who hunted them to near extinction, for future generations.

What’s clear in the documentary, which first aired on PBS last October, is that the eradication of the buffalo was part of a larger policy by the U.S. government to force Native American tribes from their land and onto reservations by destroying their way of life. As with all his documentary series—including “The Civil War” (1990), “Baseball” (1994), “Jazz” (2001), “The War” (2007), “The National Parks” (2009), “Prohibition” (2011), “The …