Forming a Bond: Behind the Scenes of 'A Buffalo Story'

How the director and subjects of 'A Buffalo Story' took notes from the animal that inspired the documentary, finding strength in the environment and each other

By Taylar Stagner
Conservation
Sep 26, 2024

Sundance, as seen in “A Buffalo Story” with her mother in 2017, was the first nonlivestock calf born on Wind River Reservation in more than 130 years. She was named for the Shoshone Sun Dance ceremony that coincided with her birth. (Photo by Colin Ruggiero)

AS CREDITS ROLL ON “A BUFFALO STORY” and a round of applause ripples through the crowd, all eyes shift to the front of the Roxy Theater in Missoula, Montana, where the 2024 International Wildlife Film Festival is underway. Director Colin Ruggiero sits onstage with two key figures from the documentary: Jason Baldes, who is Eastern Shoshone, and Patti Harris, who is Northern Arapaho. Together, the three friends wait to take questions.

Maybe you’ve been to a Q&A where it’s more Q than A, where audience members are especially eager to convey their own thoughts. At the end of one particularly long-winded question, Ruggiero, Baldes and Harris share a barely perceptible smile before Harris takes the microphone.

“It’s more about relationships,” she says. “That’s part of what the buffalo teaches us.”

In the full-length documentary—written and directed by Ruggiero, produced by Ruggiero and the National Wildlife Federation, and currently making the rounds of the festival circuit (learn more)—Baldes and Harris share intimate details of their relationship as a couple, as well as their goals for the future of buffalo on Wind River Reservation, where they live and work. In shooting the film, Ruggiero captured hundreds of hours of footage. As the narrative developed, so did a genuine friendship, with the trio working through tough but necessary questions about what it means to tell someone else’s story. Fortunately, they had the film’s other star as a touchstone to direct them: the buffalo.

An image of a buffalo in a dramatic landscape.

In a still image from the film (above), a bull enters higher ground on Wind River Reservation after waiting out a storm. Colin Ruggiero (below) shoots during the documentary’s early stages. Jason Baldes (second photo below) feeds his horses near Buffalo Camp, headquarters of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. Patti Harris (third photo below) talks on camera near newly acquired land that has expanded Wind River’s buffalo pasture.

The afternoon before the screening, Baldes and Harris plop down comfortably on the leather couch in Ruggiero’s Missoula living room, about 500 miles northeast of Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. It’s early April, and the air is cool and sharp, but the atmosphere is comfortable inside the house. Ruggiero is a self-described hermit, but you’d never know it by how he greets Baldes and Harris.

“Can I have one of your world-famous cups of coffee?” Baldes asks Ruggiero. Conversation flows easily, even on difficult subjects, as the friends talk about a recent funeral, new filmmaking projects and an upcoming camping trip they’re planning together on Wind River.

An image of Colin Ruggiero filming at the CSKT Bison Range.

It’s gratifying to see this easy side of Baldes, a local hero on the reservation, where I’m also from. He shares his time and knowledge generously with anyone who wants to learn about buffalo, making him exceptionally—maybe even overwhelmingly—accessible, on top of a long list of professional obligations: director of the Tribal Buffalo Program for the National Wildlife Federation; executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative; a member of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, the board of the Conservation Lands Foundation and the environmental commission of the Congress of Nations and States; an educator on Wind River and a collaborator with researchers from the University of Wyoming, where he sometimes teaches. In June, he was named a National Geographic Explorer, elevating his profile further.

All of this fuels a straightforward goal: Baldes wants buffalo to be treated as wildlife, not as cattle, with room to roam, benefiting the wildlife as well as the land, including human, animal and plant inhabitants and the greater ecosystem.

Baldes and Ruggiero met in 2016, a big year for buffalo restoration on Wind River. That year the Eastern Shoshone Tribe acquired their first 10 buffalo from the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa. More soon followed from other locales, and in 2017 the first wild calf was born on the reservation since the late 1800s, according to Baldes. In 2019 the Northern Arapaho Tribe, who share Wind River with the Eastern Shoshone, gained 10 buffalo for their own herd. As of this summer, the Eastern Shoshone herd numbers 120 and the Northern Arapaho 97.

An image of Jason feeding and watering his horses.

Back in 2016, Ruggiero had been hired by Garrit Voggesser—senior director of Tribal partnerships and policy for NWF, whose unwavering support Ruggiero calls absolutely critical to the documentary getting made—to start working on a short film called “Boy-zshan Bi-den”: Shoshone for “buffalo return.” Over the next eight years, as the short developed into the feature-length “A Buffalo Story,” Baldes and Harris became accustomed to seeing Ruggiero around. He would stay at their house on the reservation, ask probing questions across countless interviews and even had keys to the buffalo pasture to go out and film at will.

The result is a documentary that offers an up-close and complex view of buffalo conservation on Wind River. For those of us who live here, the buffalo’s return to the reservation is ecologically and emotionally dense—much more so than you’d glean from narratives that leave Tribes relegated to the past. Take “The American Buffalo,” the Ken Burns film for PBS that came out last year. Baldes says he liked it, but “A Buffalo Story” presents a different piece of the big picture.

“People need to see [‘The American Buffalo’] to understand why we are doing what we are doing, but it was more of a historical context, not a contemporary one,” Baldes says. “[‘A Buffalo Story’] fills a niche that other buffalo films don’t, and it’s because of that human component and sticking our necks out a bit.”

His own neck, in particular. Ruggiero delved into Baldes’ personal life, Baldes’ relationship with sobriety and how the buffalo’s return to the reservation ties into almost every aspect of Baldes’ existence, as well as that of Harris, the executive director of the Wind River Native Advocacy Center. Unlike Baldes, Harris was not originally part of the documentary. But as Ruggiero got to know the couple, her centrality to the story became clear. “I didn’t set out to do it,” Ruggiero says of incorporating Harris, “but it worked out organically. She was originally camera shy.”

Hearing Ruggiero, Harris takes a sip of her coffee. She explains that although she became a large part of the film’s final cut, she initially was uncomfortable with cameras. She’s also extremely protective of how the buffalo—and herself—are depicted.

There’s no shortage of media crews that drop into Indian Country, take what they need and then leave without concern for impact on their story’s subjects—if they care to look here at all. I became a professional journalist in part because I was so angry at all the bad and scarce coverage of Wind River from people who go on to win awards or otherwise further their careers on the backs of the personal narratives they extract. Especially when it involves Indigenous Peoples, this trend is heart-droppingly common—a reality to which Harris is particularly attuned.

“Having this relationship built between a nonnative and us, especially with a lens in between, it’s a big deal,” she says. “[The film] is a product of the relationship we built.” Although Ruggiero is white, the trio tells the story together, Harris says, emphasizing the necessity of Ruggiero having gained their trust. Even so, at one point Harris dropped out of the project—a decision Ruggiero supported. Harris wanted to step away for a lot of reasons, she says, but being given the respect to say no ultimately led to her return.

Building relationships makes more responsible humans; it makes for more authentic conversations with interview subjects; and it makes for more honest documentaries. Not every project gives you the time to develop such a bond, Ruggiero says, citing deadlines, financial constraints and the labor of fact-checking. That’s time documentarians and journalists often don’t feel they have.

Sitting in Ruggiero’s living room and seeing these people’s very real relationships to one another makes the documentary sing a little more.

An image of Kalen SunRhodes dancing the traditional prairie chicken dance.

In scenes from the documentary, an Eastern Shoshone dancer (above) pays ode to prairie-chickens; Harris and Baldes (below) tend the fire for a sweat lodge on the reservation; the first 10 buffalo returned to Wind River in 2016 (bottom) run onto their new home pasture.

In his nearly 20 years as a filmmaker, Ruggiero has repeatedly returned to the theme of barriers between people and nature. When it comes to buffalo, U.S. colonial history is directly responsible for the separation, with the documentary citing westward expansion, the dispossession of Indigenous Tribes and the government-sponsored slaughter of buffalo. The forced relocation of Indigenous People from their land, bolstered by U.S. Congress’ passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, goes hand and hand with the eradication of buffalo—dual processes so violent, their effects are still felt in Tribal communities today.

That includes Wind River, which came into being by treaty between the federal government and the Eastern Shoshone Nation in 1868. Seventy years later, the Northern Arapaho secured legal rights to the land—a reservation shared by historical rivals. Wind River, which represents a fraction of the two Tribes’ original territories, has been the site of the so-called Indian Wars, of children kidnapped and forced into boarding schools where assimilation took place alongside sexual abuse, of land stolen under the pretense of manifest destiny. Our cultural identity has been systematically severed, and with it, our connection to animals, to plants and to all of our relatives.

An image of Jason and Patti tending the fire for a sweat lodge.

In one of the documentary’s last scenes, Baldes recounts that even his parents thought there was no place for ceremony in contemporary Eastern Shoshone society. But as Baldes sees it, the buffalo’s return is the first step in revitalization. “Colonization worked,” he says, “but we’ve come to the realization that we can change that now.”

In summer 2023, Ruggiero made one more trip to Wind River to capture some final footage. While there, he met Eastern Shoshone dancers at the powwow grounds close to Fort Washakie. The subsequent scene—one young dancer in regalia joined by a dozen more—is interwoven with shots of the bird whose mating rituals the dancers are honoring: the lesser prairie-chicken, a charismatic, plains-dwelling member of the grouse family. Dressed in plumes, stomping the ground and dipping their heads, the dancers mimic the bird, a federally threatened species in the northern plains. Like the Eastern Shoshone, buffalo have a special relationship to the prairie-chicken. The ruminants’ grazing and fertilizing supports healthy native grasslands, which helps restore the birds’ mating and nesting habitat. The interconnection supports healing and reciprocity—with humans, too.

As the film cuts between prairie-chickens and dancers, the images begin to overlap and dissolve, blurring the line between people and animals, and underscoring how all beings can fit together in harmonious cohabitation.

An image of buffalo leaving the gate of their enclosure.

“All the animals are important,” Baldes says in the documentary. “We call them our relatives. We have songs and ceremonies. We dance, we sing. We have a relationship with all the creatures around us.”

A cultural and ecological linchpin, buffalo hold the position to impact our world for the better—important not only for wildlife “but for our history, our land, our future leaders,” Baldes says. “It could change everything.”

As I leave Missoula, I think about the buffalo’s impact, both within and far beyond its habitat. Years of hard work by Baldes and Harris inspired Ruggiero’s documentary and a friendship, and now I’m writing this story, which might inspire you. Maybe you’ll create connection instead of separation. You and the buffalo are relatives, after all.

NWF priority

The Power of the Buffalo

Since signing a partnership agreement with the InterTribal Buffalo Council in the 1990s, NWF has partnered with Tribes to bring buffalo back to their lands, communities and cultures. Buffalo bring people together, and together people bring the power to put buffalo restoration into action. With 250 buffalo among the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho herds on tens of thousands of acres today, partners envision more than 1,000 buffalo on hundreds of thousands of acres on Wind River—and more on Tribal lands across the country. Learn more about the film “A Buffalo Story.”

Read more about writer Taylar Stagner.