Publishers Weekly
★ 09/18/2023
Producer Duncan and documentary filmmaker Burns (The Dust Bowl) present an elegiac complement to their PBS series, The American Buffalo. The authors highlight how Indigenous people lived with, revered, and used buffalo for food and shelter for thousands of years before the establishment of the first British colonies in North America: “It became a relationship so immediate and personal, I think, that they had to formulate an idea of the buffalo being equal to them in many ways,” says Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday. Duncan and Burns argue that U.S. government officials looked approvingly on the carnage wrought by buffalo hunters in the second half of the 19th century because they believed that it would force Native Americans to remain on reservations and take up farming. Conservation efforts brought the species back from the brink of extinction (a Smithsonian taxidermist estimated that by 1889, only 541 buffalo remained in the U.S.), the authors write, noting the InterTribal Buffalo Council has since 1991 relocated buffalo herds from Yellowstone to 80 tribes across the U.S. The enlightening interviews place a welcome emphasis on Native American perspectives, and the lavish photography demonstrates both the buffalo’s majesty and the horrific scale of their slaughter. This will bring readers to tears, then fill them with hope. Photos. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"Duncan and...Burns present an elegiac complement to their PBS series, The American Buffalo...This will bring readers to tears, then fill them with hope."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Duncan and Burns use firsthand accounts, interviews and marvelous visual images to carry readers briskly from the rise of the bison in the species’ ideal ecosystem, through their crucial role in Native American culture, their swift destruction by white Euro-Americans and their current modest recovery."
—Anne Bartlett, BookPage
"[A] panoramic volume rich in images, insights, and extended interviews and history...Writing with his signature lucidity and particular passion, Duncan illuminates the wondrous nature of the bison and details the species' complex role in Native American lives, then turns inexorably to the arrival of whites and the catastrophic slaughter of millions of buffalo in a frenzy of indiscriminate killing industrialized by new high powered guns and the railroads....Fortunately, this tale of conquest, bloodshed, and environmental disaster is also a story of resilience and resistance."
—Booklist American Library Association
"A fitting tribute to the buffalo, telling a compelling story from the time of the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the animal's near-extinction and almost-impossible recovery."
—Leslie Gaines, Outside Bozeman
Kirkus Reviews
2023-07-26
Dutiful companion to the soon-to-air Burns documentary series on the fate of the American bison.
American bison, “the largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere,” are no strangers to extinction: The present species represents the fortunate survivors of an earlier extinction event that wiped out kin that were larger still. The prolific grasslands of the North American plains nurtured the species to keystone status, so that by the time Europeans arrived, herds were uncountably huge and seemingly inexhaustible, as well as uncommonly trusting. In his overland journal, Meriwether Lewis recorded that his men had to chase curious animals away with sticks and stones. For many reasons, as Duncan writes in his latest collaboration with Burns, subsequent Euro-American arrivals to the plains were bent on destroying the bison, and just about every central player in the history of the 19th-century West had some part in that destruction: Duncan brings Daniel Boone, Philip Sheridan, George Armstrong Custer, and assorted European noblemen into his account. Duncan borrows a long-standing trope that links the fate of the bison to that of the Native American peoples who once hunted them and whose descendants are now preserving them. As he notes, the National Bison Range is now under Native management, and, after a Lakota woman suggested to a founder of an intertribal council, “it’s best you ask the buffalo if they want to come back,” more than 80 tribes host herds that graze on more than 1 million acres of tribal land. This book is a useful survey, although any number of earlier titles, such as Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo and Dan O’Brien’s Wild Idea, tell the story of near-extermination and recovery more vividly. Duncan draws on their insights along with many secondary sources, as well as the work of cutting-edge historians such as Pekka Hämäläinen and Dan Flores.
A sturdy, reliable narrative that sometimes reads like a data dump of research.
