“I do feel it would be nice to help arm people with a sense of what’s taking place so that they can address for themselves what role they may or may not want to take in the next step, the third act, which would be: do we have the courage and the will to create places big enough to have an ecosystem where the buffalo can be run without fences?”

Please Support the American Prairie Reserve in Montana

“My last film was on the US and the Holocaust,” documentarian Ken Burns told an audience in Washington recently. “I didn’t think the next film would be about eugenics too.”

That next film is The American Buffalo, a two-part, four-hour series exploring how the national mammal helped sustain Native Americans on the Great Plains for millennia – only to be nearly wiped out by white settlers in little more than a decade.

‘The American Buffalo’ traces fall and rise of a ‘sacred relationship’

Dayton Duncan on Tragedy, Hope and Duality in New PBS Doc ‘The American Buffalo’

With ‘The American Buffalo,’ Ken Burns Tells a Story of Destruction and Hope