Fatima Shbair/AP Photo
A Palestinian wounded in Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is brought to a hospital in Khan Yunis, November 6, 2023.
Ken Burns’s new four-hour documentary The American Buffalo, available on PBS since mid-October, is ostensibly about the majesty and near-extinction of the bison, which once roamed free in the Great Plains in herds numbering in the tens of millions. The collapse of the buffalo, we learn, was the largest wipeout of a large animal anywhere in the world.
By around 1880, there were no buffalo left, even south of the Arkansas River in what is now Oklahoma and what was then Indian territory. Bison were wiped out in Texas as well; and by 1900, there were only a couple of thousand remaining in North America. That bison survived at all is the result of the work of conservationists collaborating with Native Americans.
But the buffalo, though the visual centerpiece of the film, is not Burns’s real subject. The film is really about the white man’s effort to exterminate buffalo as part of the effort to exterminate Native Americans, for whom buffalo provided food, clothing, skins for teepees and warm blankets, tools made from bones, as well as traditions and freedom from dependence on whites.
White settlers at first massacred buffalo for sport and the carcasses were left to rot, desecrating the Plains. Then whites learned that the meat and the skins could be sold; even the skulls and bones could be sold for fertilizer. The building of the railroads turned buffalo slaughter into a kind of assembly line.
Burns might have titled his documentary “The Indian Genocide,” but it works better to build it around the extermination of the buffalo and let the viewer connect the dots. By destroying the buffalo, whites, both settlers and soldiers of fortune, with the complicity of the U.S. government, destroyed the Native population.
As whites moved further and further into territories that had been reserved for Natives in solemn treaties, the treaties were routinely broken. In the 1880s, as buffalo herds north of the Arkansas River had been wiped out, whites poured, illegally, into Oklahoma, and the Army did not stop them.
A few decades later, as Oklahoma became the site of an oil rush, a few dozen Osage Indians who happened to have struck oil were also exterminated, a story told in the newly released Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.
By a weird coincidence, these two films appeared in the same month as the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians in border kibbutzim and at a music festival, followed by Israel’s mass killings of Palestinian civilians as collateral damage in the campaign to wipe out Hamas as a military force.
The United States, in its attempts to be a kind of arbitrator in the Middle East while also being fiercely loyal to Israel, does not exactly have clean hands.
In the escalating rhetorical arguments about what counts as genocide, or war crimes, or atrocities, or ethnic cleansing, or apartheid, I could not help being drawn back to Ken Burns’s buffalo. By almost any measure, what white settlers did to Native Americans in the 19th century was genocide. The fact that some Indians survived was incidental and fortuitous, in the same way that it was fortuitous that some European Jews survived Hitler’s intended genocide.
So the United States, in its attempts to be a kind of arbitrator in the Middle East while also being fiercely loyal to Israel, does not exactly have clean hands. And yes, the Indian extermination happened more than a hundred years ago, but the arguments about who is entitled to Israel-Palestine date back thousands of years.
There are also arguments and some hair-splitting over whether Israel should be considered a “colonial” power, since Israeli settlers were mostly refugees coming to a land where their roots were biblical. That they displaced millions of Palestinian families who had lived there for centuries makes the distinction academic from the perspective of Palestinians.
And if Jews in Israel can make some legitimate claim to some of the Holy Land, either because of biblical roots or the Holocaust, the American settlers who displaced and then exterminated the original inhabitants can make no such claim. They had no religious or historical claim to this land. As part of our national mythology, we are taught that many pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution, but they made up only a fraction of settlers.
Slavery is said to be America’s original sin. It ranks right up there with the genocide of the Indians.
In recent years, several Serbian and Croatian leaders were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in their conduct of the Bosnian War of the 1990s. The parsing of exactly how to describe Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the West Bank may matter in some future war crimes case, but in human terms the argument is beside the point. It is brutal and illegal in the same way that the American government’s complicity in the invasion of Native lands that were reserved in treaties was brutal and illegal.
There is similar parsing of whether Israel’s incidental killing of thousands of Gazan civilians can be defended under the rules of war, following the Hamas massacre. Maybe so. To the Gazans, maimed or killed, it doesn’t make much difference.
And here is the United States sitting in judgment, with the dirtiest hands and the most sordid history of all.
