PBS Glorifies Nature, Forgets Who Eradicated It
Axios reports on a new PBS documentary narrated by Lily Gladstone, focusing on the Blackfeet Nation's decades-long fight to restore buffalo to their ancestral lands. It’s presented as a story of reclaiming identity and sovereignty, acknowledging that buffalo were 'once exterminated by white settlers as a method to remove Indigenous people.' A nice narrative arc, right? Except media outlets like
Axios and institutions like PBS often present these historical facts as settled, distant tragedies—almost like natural disasters—rather than direct, policy-driven campaigns of ethnic cleansing. The systematic slaughter of buffalo, initiated by figures like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, wasn't just a regrettable side-effect; it was a deliberate military strategy to starve and
displace Native populations, explicitly designed to break their will and force them onto reservations. Presenting the 'restoration' as a modern-day battle against 'ranchers' for 'land use' (as Axios does) whitewashes the foundational violence that created the problem in the first place. One might wonder if PBS will also air a documentary on the return of Palestinian families to their ancestral
lands, after they too were "exterminated by settlers as a method to remove" them.