Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

THIS TIME, ON COLORES!

JOIN PRODUCERS JULIE DUNFEY AND JULIANNA BRANNUM AS THEY EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN BUFFALO, UNCOVERING PROFOUND REVELATIONS ABOUT THE NATION ITSELF.

THE INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS "MAKING HISTORY" SERIES CONTINUES WITH OGLALA LAKOTA POET, ACTIVIST AND ARTIST LAYLI LONGSOLDIER.

INTENSE, INCISIVE, HER LATEST WORK, THE AWARD-WINNING COLLECTION OF POETRY WHEREAS, EXPLORES THE CULTURAL ERASURE OF NATIVE COMMUNITIES AND THE 2009 US CONGRESSIONAL APOLOGY TO NATIVE PEOPLES.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

THE AMERICAN BUFFALO [Music] >> Old Lady Horse: Everything the Kiowa's had came from the Buffalo.

their tipis were made of buffalo hide.

So, were their clothes and moccasins.

They ate buffalo meat.

Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion.

The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.

The buffalo were the life of the Kiowas.

Old Lady Horse >> Narrator: They are the national mammal of the United States.

The largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere.

A species that scientists call bison bison.

Nourished by one of the world's greatest grasslands they proliferated into herds of uncountable numbers and in turn, by their grazing, nurtured the prairie that sustained them.

For more than 10,000 years they evolved alongside indigenous people who relied on them for food and shelter.

And in exchange for killing them, revered them.

>> Faith Perez: So, why was it important for each of you to tell this story of The American Buffalo?

>> Julie Dunfey: This story was important to me because I understood immediately that it was not just the biography of the most magnificent species, in my opinion, in North America, it was a way of looking at American history, and particularly indigenous history, and the long relationship that indigenous people in North America had with the buffalo, Plains Indians in particular, but then it gave a lens onto westward expansion, capitalism, the global economy, the market that drove the terrible tragedy in the 19th century.

So, yes, it's about an animal but yes, it's a way of looking at our history in a different way.

>> Julianna Brannum: And I think for me, it was really important that we share a really intimate look at the relationship that many of the tribes had including my own, the Comanche Nation, that we had with the buffalo and really kind of put that into context.

I think it helps viewers to really kind of understand us as a people and as a culture a lot better, but also you know, it connects everybody with the full picture, the full story and I don't think that full story has ever really been told on this level.

So, it was really important for me to kind of share the indigenous perspectives you'll see in the series that we should have a lot of incredible indigenous talent and scholars and people who work in conservation and people who know that relationship well with the Buffalo and so it was really important that we share that.

>> Gerald Baker: The first thing I was told about buffalo was not really the hunting part of it.

First thing I was told about them was a spirituality part of it.

About how they were created by our Creator.

How they were put on this Earth to help us survive, not only with clothing, with warmth with food, with tools, but with the essential, which was the spirit of the buffalo, and how the spirit was part of us and we were part of them.

>> Faith Perez: Can you tell me about the spiritual and karmic relationship that existed between the American buffalo and the Native American tribes?

Cuz, I found that really interesting, especially the karmic relationship, where if they were hunted incorrectly or over hunted, the buffalo would disappear.

>> Julianna Brannum: Well, many tribes were intimately connected to this animal.

A lot of our spiritual practices were based on that.

A lot a lot of ceremonies were centered on the buffalo.

We have one interview subject that actually talks about how they would make themselves available to us when we were in need but if we did something, possibly you know, incorrectly, if we had some sort of bad behavior while we were hunting then perhaps they would hide themselves and make work harder to be found.

I love that thought of that relationship, you know, being sort of almost like a real life, you know, human interaction because I think for a lot of the tribes, it was so centered spiritually and it did teach them ways to behave in this natural world and how to interact with that and that's one of the themes I think I most appreciate about this film, that we get across is that it helps to give a better understanding of how native people chose to behave and I think that's a lesson that we can take away today.

>> Faith Perez: Yeah, and I think what was interesting for me, maybe the lesson I took away from that was that, you know, they didn't place themselves above the buffalo.

>> Julianna Brannum: That's right, we considered, a lot of the tribes considered them to be our relatives and equal to man and I think a lot of native tribes always saw that relationship with the animal world and in the natural world in all forms as being equal.

Man is not superior to an animal and, you know, again I think those are things, those are lessons that we might be able to take away today.

>> Faith Perez: Yeah, especially today.

>> N.Scott Momaday: It gives itself to the people as a sacrifice.

Here I am.

You can make use of me.

I can help you.

We can be related on a spiritual plane.

>> Narrator: Whenever the buffalo periodically disappeared, special ceremonies were required to call them back.

>> N.Scott Momaday: So, when they did something wrong, the buffalo might well react and withhold their affection.

No, I will not make myself available to you for hunting.

I will hide.

You will have to find me and it will not be easy.

>> Julie Dunfey: For me it was fascinating to learn about Native beliefs.

That buffalo had their own families and their own kinship rituals and the title of the first episode is 'Blood Memory' and Scott Momaday, who's from New Mexico, speaks about what that means, that the Buffalo is his brother and that, you know, that that goes back thousands of years in his blood memory and that that was just absolutely fascinating to me and I hope one of the things people learn from that is is understanding that at a more profound level what that actually meant to people who co-evolved, so to speak, with this animal for 10 or 12 thousand years before the appearance of the Europeans.

>> N.Scott Momaday: So much of my blood memory has to do with buffalo.

We have regard for each other and we are friends.

We are brothers.

We are related.

So, I, you know, think of them in a particular way and it's always with with reverence.

>> Narrator: Newcomers to the continent found them fascinating at first but in time came to consider them a hindrance and then a source of profit for a growing nation.

>> Faith Perez: Can you tell me more about like, how New Mexico factors into the story of The American Buffalo?

>> Julie Dunfey: Well, New Mexico factors in a couple of ways.

Of course, we tell about the arrival of the Spanish coming up from and into what we now call New Mexico and that's an incredibly important story because the horse was reintroduced in that period, you know, the Spanish wound up many moving south but the horses were left behind and the Plains Indians wound up adopting the horse which made hunting buffalo a very different proposition and when we think of the kind of iconic Plains Indian mounted on horseback, I mean they became the best equestrians in the world.

That culture developed after that moment, you know, which came up through New Mexico.

So, that's one aspect of the story just setting up the background and it allowed tribes to go further into the Great Plains.

It was a huge difference and it allowed all sorts of trade with other tribes, maybe at the edge of the Plains and so, it changed a lot of things.

>> Julianna Brannum: And during, you know, the hide hunting era we had Ciboleros coming out from Mexico into New Mexico as part of that hide hunter time period.

So, we saw a lot of that and also the Plains tribes that were trading with the Pueblos here including my tribe the Comanche, we were here often supplying those tribes with buffalo meat in exchange for their corn and their squash and the other things that they were farming.

We were not a farming tribe so there was a big trade system going on with buffalo and it was flourishing actually.

It was doing very well but it was, you know, Plains Indians were always very careful not to overtake what we didn't need and so I think that's the big difference when the settlers and the hide hunters and everybody were coming across and making this more of a capitalistic gain that's when the trouble started.

>> Frank Meyer: The whole western country went buffalo wild.

It was like a gold rush.

Men left jobs, businesses, wives and children.

There were uncounted millions of the beasts.

They didn't belong to anybody.

If you could kill them, what they brought was yours.

They were like walking gold pieces.

Frank Mayor.

>> Faith Perez: What surprising discoveries did you make during the process of creating this documentary?

>> Julie Dunfey: For me, it's the very, you know, fun facts that I now have in my head about an animal that's can be 1,800 or 2,000 lbs, can hit a speed of 35 mph.

That a bison calf, when it's born, can stand at one to two minutes, and run with the herd at seven minutes.

I mean, my head is full of fun facts like that on a very granular level.

Some of the things I learned about, once European Americans started, whether it was the French coming down from Canada, the Spanish coming up, European Americans and Americans coming across, you know, the Plains Indians really got caught up in a global market and began supplying things for that global market and that was, you know.

So, on a very broad level that was fascinating to me of, you know, how that happened and it was rapid and it was devastating ultimately.

For all sorts of reasons.

>> Julianna Brannum: Yeah, I think that's like the most interesting thing to me about the whole story is how fast this all happened and it was so quick and so devastating and so relentless and swift and it's frightening to think how we as humans are capable of such quick mass destruction and it could happen again at any time.

So, there's like lots of lessons to be learned.

So, when you look at that timeline, how quick, you know?

Native people had this relationship for thousands of years and then just like that it was all gone.

>> Julie Dunfey: What happened in the American West in the 19th century was the largest destruction of wildlife, not just bison, buffalo in known human history.

In a couple of generations, the largest destruction, ever.

I mean, so, as a broad theme that was a surprise to me.

>> Pretty Shield: Nobody believed, even them, that the white man could kill all the buffalo.

Even when he did not want the meat.

Not believing their own eyes, our hunters rode very far looking for buffalo.

So far away, that even if they found a herd, we could not have reached it in half a moon.

Nothing, we found nothing, they told us and then, hungry, they stared at the empty plains, as though dreaming.

Pretty Shield >> Narrator: A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell.

Sitting Bull said, "a death wind for my people."

>> Gerard Baker: It was devastating for us, that would have been the most heartbreaking thing.

I couldn't imagine it.

I couldn't imagine the people, what they, what they went through, especially a father, saying I got to, I got to take care of my children.

I got to take care of my clan.

I got to take care of my society and I can't do it.

>> Faith Perez: Why is it important to share this history of the American buffalo?

>> Julie Dunfey: I think it's important to share because, I'm, I assume, like me, most Americans have some dim knowledge of, oh yes, there were millions of buffalo but then they got wiped out and it kind of wiped out Plains Indians, but we don't, you know, it's not a story we really understand in its full context and I hope we provide some of that context with the film to make people think a little bit more about how that happened why it happened and I think it's a morality tale about our relationship to the natural world and it's a heartbreaking tragedy about the collision of two world views.

About how humans relate to the natural world and if we don't understand or try and learn that lesson, it's our peril at this moment in history I think.

>> Julianna Brannum: And I'll just echo that.

I think there's so much that we can take away from this today.

And how we go moving forward when we're talking about,ecological, environmental issues, I think it's something that could unite us as a people.

I don't think there's one person that would disagree with the lesson that is to be learned here.

It's not a divisive lesson.

It's something that we all should understand as human beings and how we can move forward in our world together for better.

>> Narrator: By the early 1880s, the buffalo that had once teamed across the Great Planes by the tens of millions had been reduced to fewer than a thousand.

Scattered in small isolated herds.

Victims of a decades long frenzy of slaughter that stripped them of their hides and left their carcasses to rot in the sun.

Most people believed the continent's most magnificent creature was about to disappear forever.

During the same time, Native Americans had been dispossessed of most of their homelands, confined to reservations and deprived of an animal that had fed their bodies and nourished their spirits for untold generations.

Some thought the Indians too, had become what they called a 'vanishing race.'

>> Faith Perez: What were some important lessons that you feel like stuck with you?

>> Julie Dunfey: My head understood from the beginning why this was important.

You know, all Ken's films explore, who are we as Americans?

This complicated, messy republic we live in, you know, we're always trying to come at it in different ways, whether it's through baseball or country music.

And I understood immediately why this would do that, and would allow Indigenous or, you know, Indigenous voices would be part, or even deeper history, before we were a republic.

So, my head understood that this was a great lens to explore American history but during an interview with George Horse Capture Jr, he said something and it made me understand that this was also about the future.

And it actually brought tears to my eyes because it was a statement of such generosity from a Native American on this topic and I'm not going to tell you exactly what it was I don't want to it's a spoiler alert but it ends the film and it was a moment when my head and my heart were united on this topic and I understood this is also about our future together and the conversations we need to have together.

About where, where are we going?

>> Julianna Brannum: I think it's really important that we not shy away from our history, no matter how painful it may be, and I think with this film, we were able to really, kind of, show all the complicated sides of the different characters and people, warts and all, and I think for us to really understand the lessons, understand the consequence that we have to understand all of these people all of these mistakes we've made I think it's really important that we don't shy away from from telling sort of the ugly parts of our history.

I think we need to be really open and honest with ourselves as to who we are as American people and, you know, perhaps that will help us to grow and become a better version of ourselves.

>> Wallace Stegner: We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet and every other species, even the Earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.

But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Wallace Stegner.

>> Cara Romero: I'm gonna be in the photo and they are going to be pressing the button and they're going to help us.

You guys come forward a little bit.

>> Layli Longsoldier: I commend this land.

And this land.

Honor this land.

I was also afraid to go to college.

I was sure there were like two types of people in the world: college type people and people like me.

I got to a place in life where I did want to pursue more.

I just felt like there was something else that I needed to do.

But I felt a kind of familiarity or as if I would be welcomed there and that is what gave me the courage to go to college, even though I was still afraid.

What was surprising - it surprised me - I actually did very well.

I excelled at IAIA.

For the first time in my life, I got good grades, and the faculty were really supportive.

So, I will be forever grateful that I went there.

I think a lot of us Native artists, there's a responsibility, an accountability, that we have to our communities or our families or what have you.

I always try to remember that I'm not speaking for all Lakota people, for example.

Right?

Who I am, my family, my history, is unique to me.

Right?

My life experiences, my perspectives, are unique to me.

So, I try to bring all of that into my work.

You know, as a writer, but once again in any medium that we would work in as artists, a lot of times we were making something, even if it was a poem, right, or a collection of poems.

To me it sometimes feels like a message in a bottle.

Like, I wrote Whereas, and it was thrown out there.

I had no idea how it would be received, if I would just have my mom read it and that's in.

I mean (laughs).

I had no idea how it would be received.

So, it was surprising.

But there is something really interesting and really beautiful that I think about, when I was sharing this work, you know, visiting different places.

So often there would be students, or people from the local communities, Native people.

And to me that's who I carried with me.

I was really amazed that, you know as Native people across the country, how strongly that spirit of generosity and connection still exists - for one another.

But my father went to IAIA and he actually went to school at the same time that Joy Harjo went to school as well.

So, they knew each other from way back in the 60's.

And I'm mentioning Joy Harjo because we have an event together tonight.

So, it's a real nice kind of history, to share that history together.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... .New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and viewers like you.