Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo
- Aug 16, 2024
- 2 min read
★★★★★
Based on the documentary, The American Buffalo, by Ken Burns which I, admittedly, have yet to see, Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Ressurection of the American Buffalo is no mere film novelization. While it may owe a debt, or at least its existence, to Burns’s two-part series, Dayton Duncan’s extraordinary work stands firmly on its own. Rare is the book that brings tears in both halves of the story: the first half, in which Euro-Americans bring the bison, who had roamed North America for more than 10,000 years, to near-extinction in less than a century, and the second half, in which, improbably, a variety of characters with varied and frequently less-than-noble motivations, bring the bison back from the brink.
The bison looms large in the American psyche, I think, because it represents the best and worst of our ideals. To a country that had scarcely ventured west of the Mississippi River, the bison was the American West: powerful, intelligent, swift, interconnected, expansive, untamed, free. But the West was also ripe for the plucking, and between unfettered capitalism and unbridled greed on the one hand and the intentional decimation of land, resources, and way of life for American Indians on the other, the bison (and other species) didn’t stand a chance. As we did to the bison, to the indigenous peoples, and to the land, so we did to ourselves. We see what we want and we take it—without forethought, without consideration, and, seemingly, without consequence.
In many ways, little has changed since the 1890s. America’s general point of view is one of resource extraction, of commodification, of capitalizing on what we can, as much as we can, now, and leave tomorrow to worry about tomorrow. We are slow to learn. Is it because we’re stupid? Lazy? Afraid? Yes to all those, and more, but we can, and are, learning. The ongoing restoration of the bison, of the prairie, of native communities, and of their inextricable interconnectedness, is demonstrable proof that we can learn from our mistakes. That we can, however haltingly, however painfully, however improbably, find our way to doing the right thing, not just for other beings, other land, or other people, but for ourselves, and that in doing the right thing we actually find our way back to ourselves.
I have stood amidst herds of American buffalo, in Custer State Park in South Dakota, and at Dunn Ranch Prairie in northern Missouri. It is an awesome sight and one I hope to experience many more times. They are an incomparable animal; there is nothing quite like them. There is nothing quite like America either (and I am not referring to oft-touted claims of exceptionalism), and it seems the story of one is the story of the other. The future for both are uncertain. What kind of future will they have? One of liberty or one of confinement? Will bison again realize the days when they can truly roam free, without fences? Will we?
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