#285 The American Buffalo w/ Dayton Duncan
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the late 18th century, tens of millions of buffalo lived in North America. By the mid-1880s, they were on the brink of extinction. For the white settlers who sought to "conquer" the American west, and the Native people whose way of life depended on them, the plight of the American Buffalo was more than a story of one species of animal. As Dayton Duncan writes in the prologue of his new book Blood Memory, the buffalo has "emerged as an embodiment of the nation's contradictory relationship with the natural world: venerated and mercilessly destroyed, a symbol of both a romanticized frontier and the callous conquest of a continent." In this episode, Dayton joins us for a conversation about the Buffalo (aka American Bison) and how the story of one animal can tell us so much about American history.
Dayton Duncan is an Emmy award-winning writer whose most recent collaborations with filmmaker Ken Burns are the book Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023) and the new documentary The American Buffalo, which premieres on your local PBS station on Monday, October 16, 2023 (check your local listings).
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our previous conversation with Dayton Duncan in RTN #229 on Benjamin Franklin.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Bob Crawford. I'm Ben Sawyer. And this is the road to now. Yes, it is. And Bob, our roads converged for the last episode here in Nashville. And now about a week and a half later, we are back in our homesteads and traveling across the landscape, much like the American Buffalo. |
| 0:22.6 | Yes, we are honored to have author and writer Dayton Duncan as our guest today. |
| 0:29.7 | He most recently completed the book Blood Memory. |
| 0:34.2 | It's the tragic decline and improbable resurrection of the American Buffalo. That's a book he |
| 0:40.0 | worked on with Ken Burns. And if you'll recall, Dayton Duncan has a long history of collaborating |
| 0:48.2 | with Ken Burns as he wrote the Ben Franklin documentary and the country music documentary. |
| 0:56.2 | And Dayton, how many projects have you and Ken worked on together? |
| 1:00.6 | I think about nine in which I was a writer and often a producer as well that were topics |
| 1:08.4 | that I was particularly interested or passionate about. |
| 1:11.5 | And then on most of his other films, because we're friends, that's how it started. |
| 1:16.4 | We started his friends and then started working together. |
| 1:20.2 | I had been writing books, and he dragged me into, fortunately for me, into making films with him. |
| 1:27.5 | But I also sit in and been a consultant or a consulting producer on a number of his other films. |
| 1:33.9 | But nine, that they're sort of, you know, I was the writer, or in a couple instances, co-writer and the producer. |
| 1:43.2 | The book, Blood Memory, is a companion to the documentary, The American Buffalo. |
| 1:49.3 | They both come out in October. |
| 1:52.1 | Blood Memory, I believe the on-sale date is October 10th. |
| 1:56.1 | And the documentary premieres on the 16th. |
| 1:59.5 | Does that sound right? |
| 2:00.5 | Yes, that's right. |
| 2:01.4 | 16th and 17th. |
| 2:02.5 | It's a four-hour two-episode documentary, and it's a national premiere on PBS is the 16th for |
... |
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