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(wind whistling)
- We've been doing this for millennia.
When I say millennia, that means more than one.
No Western concept of conservation is that old.
(soft music)
People like Muir and these other conservationists,
Leopold, they just thought nobody lived out here,
a wilderness as a wilderness.
That's not true.
We've been in this part of the country
for thousands of thousands of years.
We know how to manage natural resources,
and we need to talk about it.
We need the true history of America.
(soft orchestral music)
- If we look at the quandary that we find ourselves in today
throughout the West, we have ever increasing
size and scale and intensity of wildfire.
Humans have excluded fire from this natural system
and have created unnatural conditions as a result.
Fire is our relation, and we need to work with fire.
- Indigenous people of this country
for a very long time, they've been managing the land,
using cultural indicators, using cultural knowledge,
using traditional stories, doing prescribed fire,
using what they know is good for their places.
(soft orchestral music)
(bird whistling)
- Part of what's wrong with America
is that people don't understand that these forests
that they aspire to pre-European
were really a result of Native Americans...
understanding the natural cycles that occur out there.
(soft orchestral music)
(buffalo herd rumbling)
- As far as Indian people, buffalo in all their history,
they were our economy, they were our food, our clothing.
Then killed to near extinction.
So bringing these animals back, not only are they healthy
for eating but also for our spirituality
and a big part of our culture, just making us whole again.
It's a healing in that way also.
(soft orchestral music)
- Part of what they didn't understand,
the original English expeditions,
was that what they were looking at was in nature.
It's nature in relationship with humans over 1,000 years.
- [Leaf] The fact that we're still here today in any form...
is a testament to adaptation and resilience.
(crickets chirping)
- My name is Michael Kotutwa Johnson.
I'm a member of the Hopi tribe.
We're located up in Northern Arizona
about 90 miles northeast of Flagstaff.
We live in what they call a semi-arid climate.
It's right in the middle of a big drought period,
what they call extreme drought.
After my grandfather passed away, I started getting seeds
from different people out here, and I started planting.
Then what I did was I opened up more fields,
because I wanted to plant more
and increase the supply of corn that we had.
And you can see...
some of our beans that I had planted...
are doing pretty good down here.
They're starting to come up pretty good.
These are called hatico. They're brown lima beans.
So they're doing pretty good.
They look pretty strong,
'cause there's so much moisture in the ground.
No irrigation, folks.
(soft instrumental music)
And you can see in certain spots
the corn is starting to come up from about a foot depth.
So in about a week, these will really be showing
really good here.
You know what I mean? Really good.
It's a good day today,
because you can see from these little ones,
they've got little dew drops on them right here.
These are our children.
In the Hopi way these are our children.
So today it's a good day, because I'm a daddy. (laughing)
(soft instrumental music)
(birds chirps)
(metal clinking)
I've had my own problems in my life like everybody else.
Alcohol was my Achilles heel for the longest time,
and I found a way to...
dispose of that.
But I found a way out here to deal with that.
When I was little boy, being dropped off out here
spending some summers out here with my grandfather,
I learned a lot.
But as I got older and I went through all my lifecycle
and all my drinking and stuff,
I was able to come out of that.
And only came out of that because I got back into
what I really love and enjoy.
And I feel like a lot of people out here,
if they would get back into farming and learn from this,
they wouldn't have near as big of a problem out here.
(soft instrumental music)
- Tradition tells us that we must have corn.
So corn has been the main staple for the Hopi people.
You have to have three years' supply of corn.
Three years' supply of corn,
because usually a drought lasts about three years
And we've had some droughts out here.
The tradition was that their father was a farmer,
and he would make the kids grow up farming.
Start them hoeing, planting with a planting stick.
And every kid grew up on the farm.
Today, no kid grows up on a farm,
because their parents stopped farming.
If you don't farm and grow your food,
you lose your independence.
But if you're farming and growing your own food,
you don't need the government.
So you're independent.
- The Hopi farming, to me, the destruction,
in just looking back at our history,
was just the introduction of cattle.
The federal government came in,
and they thought that we could use these cattle
and as a way to...
do better.
What it started to do
by bringing in these livestock animals,
it started bringing in the concept
of what they call privatization.
So people felt like they owned it.
It wasn't shared as readily as you would a crop,
and therefore you had a concept of privatization,
which, in my mind, broke down a lot of our society,
a lot of our community bonds with each other.
In a drought year like we've had the last two years,
there's no way they can survive,
so you wind up just drastically cutting back their herds,
people selling their cattle.
I'm out here just trying to not change the system,
but I'm trying to hold on to the system
That's been existing for over 2,000 years
and to encourage people to keep farming.
(crickets chirping)
So these are just some of the varieties that we raise.
I would have to say this is probably America's
original sweet corn variety here,
because this type of seed is what they would find
in some of these prehistoric dwellings.
This is a red variety.
And this is a purple, like a violet variety.
These are just our blue corn varieties here.
We create about 42 different types of dishes from Hopi corn,
everything from puddings to soups.
This is our blood in a lot of ways. This is who we are.
When I was at Cornell University,
when I talked about my corn,
they said that I needed 33 inches of annual rainfall a year.
Okay? They're planting depths were an inch.
Our planting depths, because of the way our corn is,
because that's where the moisture is at,
can go anywhere from two feet all the way up.
Over time, they've adapted.
They have what they call a growing region
called an epicotyl.
It's the initial growing point comes out,
and it's elongated.
It has an elongated epicotyl, so it comes up from that.
Whereas in hybrid corn, it's only about
probably about an inch growing region.
Ours is about two feet. It can probably go longer.
I would imagine if I put it down four feet,
it would still come up.
(beans rattling)
(soft instrumental music)
Dry land farming means that basically
you don't use irrigation.
We don't believe in irrigation.
That's why these varieties are so drought-tolerant,
because we don't irrigate.
This is where I have my beans.
You can see some of the beans
that are starting to pop up out here.
These white lima beans.
(digging)
Were clearing it down to where it gets moisture
Five Lima bean seeds in there or so.
These are like super seeds, you know? They've very tough.
They're like us, and so, because they're like us,
they survive like us.
Limited amount of water,
a lot of nurturing, a lot of caring,
a lot of community building.
This is about a foot.
Conventional agriculture goes to about right here.
That's what your planter is designed to go down an inch.
That's it.
(digging)
Our early corn, we put in early
to coincide with our home dances.
That'd be sweet corn, yellow corn, different varieties.
We don't get any rains here
all the way from usually from April
all the way till the monsoon,
which is the last week in July.
For us to grow things with only six to 10 inches
of annual precipitation is amazing.
(soft music)
This year I put in about six different varieties of corn.
You've got to grow them out every year.
You try to go at least one row out every year,
because the climate changes,
and so, unless you do that, these plants won't adapt,
they won't change.
And when we're going through climate change
throughout the globe, we need to have that biodiversity,
because biodiversity can react and can adapt,
just like we should, but they know how to do that.
Those little seedlings know how to do that.
We as human beings are forgetting how to do that.
These are the new generation.
These have been geared to adapt
to what they call climate change.
(soft instrumental music)
(river babbling)
(speaking in Karuk language)
- This right here is our country.
This is where we were born and raised,
just like our long ago people were.
Our religion is survival in this place.
Living in this place for countless generations,
thousand of years.
It's hard to say it's a religion.
It's really management practices
that have evolved in this place to survive.
And fire, in our creation stories,
there's always a recognition that fire has always been here,
it's always been a part of us.
(soft instrumental music)
- The Karuk people have lived here for thousands of years.
And acorns for native people here
were a staple of their life...
of their diet, that was deer meat
and all of these plants that are around us
that yield different edible resources throughout the year.
So in order to have those resources at a predictable time,
in a predictable quantity, in a predictable area,
you needed to have a handle on manipulating that vegetation
to inhibit the plants you didn't want there
and to encourage and basically fertilize
the plants that you did want there.
A lot of the burning had been done by women
from a two mile radius around the village site.
And that was to produce a fine grain mosaic
being oak woodlands and grasslands.
- They put fire on the ground, underneath the trees
to burn up old acorns and leaves and duff
to make it easier to pick the acorns when they fall.
Also that smoke, putting that smoke up into the canopy...
suppresses the bugs.
What those women essentially were doing
besides enhancing food sources, basketry resources,
all the things that you needed to survive,
at the same time, they were eliminating the risk
of wildfire to their communities.
Fires don't burn in the black, where fire has already been.
That's how you put out fires with backfires.
When a wild fire hits it, it goes out,
because it runs out of fuel.
When you have this constant, regular, low intensity fire
being put on the landscape at this community scale,
not a firefighting force,
not anybody going out there to fight fire.
Nobody was fighting anything.
They were working with fire
to enhance resources and protect their community.
(somber music)
- Fire suppression and exclusion with first colonization,
diseases that decimated native populations,
that limited severely there number of ignitions
and the complexity of their stewardship
and agroforestry systems around fire use.
And then you had settlement,
whether there was direct displacement,
native people being removed out of their villages,
put on reservations and other rancherias.
Then you had the destruction of that cultural fire regime.
And then following that initial period of colonization,
then there was a very strong emphasis
on suppressing all fires.
Whether they were lightning or they were arson
or un-permitted ignitions,
they were to be suppressed in the interest
of timber resources and protection of communities.
(somber music)
- [Leaf] Suppressing wildfire or any fire
was a really a policy mandate
of those early first rangers here.
They arrested people, put people in jail.
So those ceremonial practices, the ritual fire
that was part of our annual world renewal ceremony
was outlawed and people were put in jail for it.
(spirited music)
- [Narrator] Wood for war!
The Navy needs wood.
They Air Forces need wood for troop-carrying gliders.
We all need our forests,
but the forest have a vicious public enemy number one!
Fire, ruthless, devastating forest fire
wiping out home, destroying critical war materials,
taking its annual toll of lives!
- [Leaf] We have 100 years of scaring people
about the evil effects of fire and how fire is evil.
Smokey Bear, one of the most effective propaganda campaigns
that the world has ever known,
has done such a good job of instilling fear of fire
in the general populace.
- [Leaf] And now you have a condition where
we essentially haven't had fire,
and then with increasing climatic conditions
of temperatures, densification and build up a fuels,
drought stressed, high fuel load, very dry forest,
We see many conditions in the West
and particularly in California and Southwest Oregon
that now we're saying we're having catastrophic fires
or fires that are larger in extent and severity,
more extensive and more damaging
than has ever been in recorded history.
But it's all built around fighting.
Fighting fire, it's not a fight you can win,
and it's not something that people
should be trying to fight.
How can we engage with fire?
How can we embrace fire as a partner?
Because that's what it is. It's the best partner we have.
(clunking)
(chattering)
- My grandfather, he would kind of know,
"Oh, I feel like I'm gonna burn today. It feels right."
I remember as a kid growing up
and being like, "Is today a good burn day?"
And he'd be like, "No, it's too wet,"
or like, "No, not yet."
And then he'd start feeling like you could just...
He'd go out and he'd be like,
"I think today's a good burn day."
And he'd go out and he'd light a fire.
And then sometimes it wouldn't go how he wanted,
so he'd stop.
And then he'd go back in a few more days,
maybe he tried again, and maybe it was good,
so he'd go for it.
(light instrumental music)
This is the Panamnik Tishawnik village area.
We swim here. We fish here.
We...
We gather here ceremonially
for the deerskin dances, for all the other dances
that we've all kind of come to our whole lives.
And this is all on your mind
when you're standing just in this one spot. (laughing)
(fire crackling)
Traditionally, this place would have been burned...
for many reasons, for gathering,
for basket weaving materials, cultural reasons.
In the larger picture of the country today,
with a lot of these larger wildfires happening,
you can use cultural knowledge
to drive a lot of these management practices
that tie directly into protection and wildfire instances.
There's a lot of history in these places,
and there's a lot of history in places
for my family as well.
My sister lives here at the end of the road
on the same residence where my grandma was raised
and her parents lived.
I know that people on this lane, especially,
are really excited for the burning to happen,
because they did experience the Dance Fire back in 2013.
I was at my sister's house when the fire started.
We were cracking acorns in her living room.
And as soon as I walked out on the porch,
there was just like this wall of flames across the street.
And it was already in the canopies
of all the Doug firs across the street.
(somber music)
- It was such a terrible year.
We had like hardly any rain, no snow big time before.
So it just took off. It came straight at our house.
This little bitty bit of cleared land right here
is what stopped the fire from taking all these other houses.
A lot of people were like, "Dang,
if you guys hadn't cleared your property out before the fire
it probably would've lost the whole neighborhood.
And so we were like we were really lucky
because the tribe helped us do that at the time too,
otherwise we wouldn't have been able to do it by ourselves,
because I was like nine months pregnant
when we bought the property. (chuckles)
I wasn't much help to anybody at the time.
So it's really good to see controlled burns.
And then, yeah, one crew can take care of a whole area,
versus having an army of firefighters coming,
fighting a fire.
I mean, when it gets to that point,
yes, we gotta do,
but you don't need to let it get to that point.
(fire crackling)
Personally, I'm a clinical social worker,
and a lot of what I deal with with a lot of native people,
we have a lot of trauma.
We have really high rates of suicide and depression,
and a lot of that has to do with the disruption
of our culture and our religions and our way of living.
And a lot of our problems that we have
with the weather and climate change and everything
is because of the same disruption,
the same disruption of trying to make something fit
a certain kind of box.
And I think that's how a lot of Western cultures
have been with non-Western cultures,
and I think that's how they've kind of been with nature.
And so I think it's time to to learn from each other
and meld better and bow to each other's knowledge
in certain areas.
(river babbling)
- We use fire for a lot of things in ceremony,
creating a ripple that calls the salmon up the river.
The top of Black Mountain that would burn off,
it drains into the Camp Creek watershed.
And so at that time of year,
you're kind of at one of the warmest periods
for the river temperatures,
and so when you burn off the understory
and the small plants,
you no longer have things using that surface water,
so you have more cold water groundwater inputs
into your streams.
The smoke in the air reduces the heat,
the radiant heat from the sun on the water,
and so that contributes to colder temperatures
in the river as well.
And so just these little minute changes
that happened based on the human activity
in this ceremony of lighting that mountain
actually has scientifically valid connections
to calling the fish up the river.
(soft music)
- Our religion we practice is Pic-ya-wish,
translated as "world renewal".
So the Karuk people were fix-the-world people.
Today, we're gonna go down and we're gonna fish
in Ishi Pishi Falls.
It's very...
It's very romantic in some people's eyes,
very frustrating and others'.
I'm both of those.
I love it, that's my way of life,
but the health of the river
runs parallel with the health of the people.
We need to put to action,
the physical actions on the landscape.
We've got to start cleaning the sacred trails.
We've got to start igniting
and cleaning the forest once again.
Everything we do in our world the salmon benefits from.
(soft orchestral music)
- So in our tribal ceremony is to fix the world.
It's not just to fixed this creek
or fix our family or fix our river.
We want to fix the whole world,
because if things are wrong here,
they're wrong on the other side of the world too.
That's just the way the world works on the balance.
So in our tribe, we knew that in fix the world ceremony,
Pic-ya-wish, even a small group of people with great energy,
great focus and pure thought
can actually trigger the world, the earth,
and put it back on its balance.
(fire crackling)
(wind whistling)
(chanting in foreign language) (steady drumming)
(crowd cheering)
(calm music)
(wind billowing)
- So we've brought buffalo back here at Blackfeet.
I think in 1974, we started to restore animals back to here.
And there wasn't a real big...
Interest, and I guess because buffalo had been gone
from our culture for so long,
being almost hunted to near extinction.
So the biggest part of why our people...
have never seen them.
So after they were killed to near extinction,
making way for cattle for this country, things were lost.
Our language, our way of religion...
losing land.
These animals here are my passion,
bringing these animals back
and returning that part of our culture.
My name is Ervin Carlson,
and I'm a member of the Blackfeet Nation
and President of the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
I'm here today to respectfully urge passage of H.R. 5153,
the Indian Buffalo Management Act,
to create a permanent tribal buffalo
restoration and management program
within the Department of the Interior.
Buffalo are sacred to American Indians.
Historical records indicate that American Indians
relied heavily on buffalo for survival.
Buffalo provided us food, shelter,
clothing and essential tools.
In the early 1800s, the buffalo population
in North America exceeded 30 million,
and the American Indian population was near seven million.
The military systematically eliminated buffalo
to eliminate the Indians.
In addition, westward expansion
and the greed of non-Indian buffalo hunters
reduced the buffalo population to 500
and the Indian population to 250,000
by the turn of the century.
With confinement of Indians to reservation lands,
Indians had lost their primary food source,
lifestyle and independence.
In 1991, a handful of Indian tribes
organized the InterTribal Bison Cooperative
to begin restoration of buffalo to Indian tribes.
Today, the ITBC is comprised of 69 tribes
across 19 States with 55 buffalo herds,
collectively the largest herd in the United States.
The buffalo are very good stewards of the land.
They're a naturally migrating animal.
They don't just to stay in one area and overgraze.
They're naturally migrating.
If they get enough room to roam,
they'll move from area to area.
The cattle and the other animals, they'll overgraze
if you keep them only in one area too long.
So you don't have to take care of them.
They take care of themselves. They're very hardy animals.
And we just had a real severe winter this past year.
A lot of cattle were lost.
But we didn't lose any buffalo to that weather.
They just maintain, and they'll just turn their heads
into the storm and go to it, and they don't...
turn away and turn their tails into the storm
like domestic animals will.
- You think about the buffalo
being the biggest climate change adapter
as an animal in the world, and I mean for centuries
and thousands and thousands of years.
Now we're in an age that they're gonna have to adapt to this
and they can easily adapt because of their hair.
Their hair is so different than a cow hide, right?
It's four times more thick,
but they also grow more hair for the winter.
Then they shed it for the summer.
And so it's just a natural insulator both ways.
If you look at it economically, how many cattle do you lose?
How much more feed do you have to feed the cow
compared to a buffalo?
And then the water situation too.
A buffalo can go two and a half days without drinking.
So they're just so much more resilient.
(soft music)
- Today we're gonna move them animals
to the north side of the pasture.
(buffalo herd rumbling)
Like I say, them being gone so long, it was a real...
reeducating our own people...
to the animal.
And it never really, really took off until, I would say,
in the past eight years we started the...
Iinnii Project.
Iinnii is the Blackfeet word for buffalo.
And we started having dialogues,
meeting with elders, meeting with our young people,
and just talking about the return of buffalo.
(children shouting and laughing)
(soft music)
(speaking in Blackfeet)
- I really learned in my life
that if we were to teach our young anything,
it had to be hands-on, it couldn't be from a book,
and it couldn't be from lecture.
They had to participate in actively.
You could prepare them,
but they had to actually participate in it.
So the students...
in the grades from kindergarten to the 12th grade,
there was many needs that the students had,
and their tribal identity
was one of the most strongest need there was.
(chattering)
And they...
just took to it like a duck to water.
They wanted to know everything.
(laughing and chattering)
- Our sister tribes is Kainai and Siksika.
And so none of them have a buffalo herd.
So I started asking some of that elder ladies,
who I thought would probably have known
how to butcher a buffalo.
And I said, "Have you guys ever been to a buffalo harvest?"
And they're like, "No, this is our first one."
And that was kinda heartbreaking to me,
that that was their first one,
and they're like 80 years old.
So that whole generations of not been able
to even be part of that buffalo.
(delicate music)
(children shouting)
- We have these songs with us yet.
We may not have the ceremonies...
but the songs are still with us.
And we need people know these songs.
Because we're not going to be around all the time.
I'm 90 years old,
and I don't expect to be here another year.
Of our creator we ask to be with us today.
Our ancestors, our people in the past
have left us some things to follow.
(shouting)
We asked that you will direct us.
(chanting)
[Ervin] These animals took care of us in our beginning,
in the old way.
And now, in a new way, they're also taking care of us.
And so we take care of them.
(Singing in Blackfeet)
(bids chirping)
- We're on the University of Arizona campus.
I'll be doing my PhD defense tomorrow
to get to be a doctor in philosophy in natural resources.
(soft music)
I've been over here a little over 12 years now,
and it's been a long road for a number of reasons,
most of them personal.
But what motivated me to get here
was I was wondering why we weren't able
to use our own conservation techniques.
I'm a 200 generation farmer. 200 generation farmer.
You know?
And so alls I'm doing here is I'm learning a new language.
I'm learning how to speak
in the language that I've been taught here
so that I'm able to have the people
on this side of the fence understand where I'm coming from
and at the same time take some of the goodness
that I see in science and bring it back home too.
It's a tough transition for me,
and it's a tough transition for a lot of Native Americans
who wish to go into the sciences, because there's this...
constant tensions that exist within yourself.
You want to help, but at the same time
you do not want to exploit your culture.
And so it's a balancing act.
Is that on there?
Let me see. Come on up.
It's not coming up.
(chattering)
I wanted to start off this presentation
by first giving you some-
Ask you to take some seeds off of this corn right here.
What you're holding here is not just corn, but it's life.
This is the roadmap that we're gonna follow.
And this particular map right here
is called Hopi Prophecy Rock.
This is the world that we currently live in.
And you'll a bunch of people going this way
up this path right here, and you can see where it ends.
And what this is telling us, on a real short brief,
is that a lot of us are gonna move away
from our traditional values and our traditional system.
And you'll see down here, there's this old gentlemen
with his planting stick and his plant,
and his plants through here,
and this line continues to go on.
And so what this is telling us down here
is that if we if we believe in our traditional practice
and we pass it on to the next generation,
we'll be able to continue on into the next world.
The main reason why we're having all these barriers
is that Indians have the right to occupancy,
but they do not have the title to their own land.
People don't know that, but we don't.
We're trustees of the federal government.
And what is this whole ruling based upon, this big ruling?
It's based upon the doctrine of discovery.
That means that you were discovered.
That's our land now.
You can live there, but we still own it.
So what is indigenous agricultural knowledge?
What we're saying here is that it's applied knowledge
for raising food and other agricultural products
that is grounded in indigenous belief systems and practices
which have been time-tested over millennia.
I removed the word "a" out of there
because I'm not just talking just 1,000 years.
I'm talking millennia.
So I'm talking to the plural for of that,
over 2,000, 10,000 years.
So this is contour farming.
This is what it looks like.
This is keeping soil erosion from happening
by planting perpendicular.
We've been doing the same thing.
But unfortunately, these are scientifically validated.
These practices are not, so we don't get funded for that.
Makes no sense, right?
And I ask myself, well, who came up with the method first?
(audience laughing)
You know?
2,000 versus 75 years. I wonder about that.
There's a great guy out there named Leopold,
and he says that he's the father of conservation
or someone calling him that.
I said, "Well, that's your opinion."
A lot of our knowledge has already been drafted
and assumed a different type of name.
"No till agriculture". We've been doing that forever.
There's a new one called "regenerative agriculture".
We've been doing that forever. (laughing)
Look the pictures right here.
1901, 2015.
Look at the continuity.
It hasn't changed.
You don't see a $100,000 John Deere
14 row planter out there.
You see little Hopis out there
with their John Deere hats and a planting stick.
(group laughing)
That's all you need, right?
So this is what my whole presentation is really about.
It's about our survival. It's about survival.
It's about moving on into the next generation
so little kids can hold corn like this 100 years from now.
With that, I want to thank you.
(audience applauding)
(chattering)
It was a very good experience for me,
but it was a very grueling process at times.
It was almost as though I had to prove
that our techniques were valid,
that our ancient conservation techniques worked.
So part of my thing and part of that whole process
was just bringing the recognition back
to the people who originally founded it.
(birds whistling)
- We don't have perfect knowledge,
we don't have perfect science,
but we've always been adaptive.
I think Menominee's history has been adaptive
to resource management, political ideas
and learning how to deal with them,
but also staying true to cultural identity.
And that's the secret of this place.
This is an ancestral map, before European settlement.
And this represents about 15 million acres here.
Between 1817 and 1856, through land secessions...
15 million acres shrank to 234,000 acres.
Of the 234,000, just about all of it is managed.
- The federal government,
they felt that the best way for Menominees to assimilate
into the rest of society was to become farmers.
But overall, the interest really wasn't there.
(soft music)
The Menominees, being woodland people,
their real desire was to keep their land forested.
And with that being said,
they petitioned with the federal government
to allow some harvesting
of some of the live trees on the forest.
(birds whistling)
- Back in 1908, the Menominee Tribal Enterprises
was established in Neopit here.
And basically it was put here
to supply jobs for the Menominee people.
Before the saw mill,
there wasn't very much opportunities for employment.
All the lumber that's produced here
comes from the Menominee forest.
Menominee forest is operated
on a sustained yield management system
actually advised by Chief Oshkosh.
He advised that if you start with the rising sun
and you cut to the setting sun
and take only the sick, dying, and the mature trees,
and when you reach the end of the reservation
you turn back and cut back,
if you do that, the trees would last forever.
(birds whistling)
- Right now, currently there's more standing volume
of timber on the forest now than there was back in 1854.
So it is possible to have an economic harvest to deforest.
If you do it in a sustainable way,
the forest can replace itself and you're not causing harm.
(chainsaw buzzing)
(tree falling)
(chainsaw buzzing)
(tree falling)
What we're doing in this section is a red oak salvage.
We've had some problems with the oak wilt fungus disease.
If there's a damage to some of the limbs on a tree
the fungus gets in there
and basically kills the tree within one season.
If you're taking out your low-quality trees,
your better quality trees are remaining.
So we have trees on the forest that are 150, 200,
some even up to 300 years old, and they're still healthy,
so we don't consider them for removal.
As far as climate change,
one of the things that we do here
is we have intensive forest management,
forest protection strategy in place.
What we try to do is curb any outside threats and diseases
such as oak wilt disease.
(soft music)
One of the ways to do that is to have a diverse forest
with all the pieces there.
On Menominee we have over 33 different tree species,
and we want to maintain that.
Examples would be our red maple trees.
We have hickory in here.
Nice basswood.
And we have some of the beech trees
and other species of aspen is in here.
So it's all a combination of trees growing.
A lot of what you see in an industrial forest,
they usually are more concerned with the value of timber,
whether it be one species,
like for example red pine plantations in Wisconsin.
You're putting all your emphasis on one species.
As far as a long-term health management strategy
it's not a good idea.
Having a diverse stand of forest like we do on Menominee
is your best defense against any outside problems like that.
- It's more than just timber on the forest.
It's more than just the dollar amount that you get.
The trees offer a whole bunch of other things
that they don't put value on.
And someday they'll put a value on what that tree is worth
as far as carbon sequestration, clean air, clean water,
erosion control, and all the rest that has no dollar value.
I think Menominees understood that a long time ago,
because the operations were created not just to make money
but to create jobs and to maintain a community.
And you maintain a healthy community
with all of these other values into consideration.
(laughing and shouting)
(phone ringing)
- Most companies will always have a certain tree farm
or something that they have
and that they grow certain species,
and then they look at the markets,
and when the market's hot on this species or that species,
that's what they'll harvest out of there,
and then they'll put it out.
We don't have that choice.
We operate for the ecology, for the ecosystems.
So whatever they have planned for regenerating the forest
is what we get here.
So that's what's really the unique part
about how this lumber company operates.
What we do here is we don't get to choose what's coming in.
The stuff is brought to us.
We have to know how to use it,
and we have to be very creative
as to how we're gonna turn it over and turn it into money.
We can't operate like the capitalistic society does.
It was always the land first
(soft music)
- Yeah, the millpond's been here forever.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid
swimming across the river and climbing up on the banks.
We used to jump off of the log piles years ago
when we were kids.
Obviously we don't allow that now. (chuckles)
This is pretty much where the process starts right here
for breaking down a log into lumber.
(machinery whirring)
A lot of people...
take it for granted that...
we have such a lush, beautiful forest.
And at the same time they don't understand
why MTE has these struggles.
We need to take what the forest gives us,
and we need to make that work.
(machinery whirring)
We're gonna be here for another...
seven generations, the next seven generations.
That's the goal is to leave something
for our children and their children.
And it's proven over time, I think.
If you look at a satellite image,
you can see the boundaries of the reservation
just because the lush forest makes it stand out.
And years ago, the areas all around us
were wiped out by lumber barons,
just clear-cutting, wiping it out.
- "Napanoh pemecwan".
That means "flows repeatedly".
It's a description of everything that's going on
within the environment around us, the natural environment.
The lifeblood of the forest is the river we have here.
Everything revolves around this body of water.
The bad thing is that it flows in from the north
off of the ag fields, which picks up a lot of accumulation
of different types of chemicals, different types of runoff,
both natural and manmade.
The benefits of this forest that don't get recognized
is this water, this hydrology is cleaned by the forest.
These benefits spread to all the counties around us
because of the river systems.
The clean water that they enjoy
is a result of this forest here,
these complete intact elder communities.
(waves lapping)
(singing in Hawaiian)
- This is the eastern point of the Big Island of Hawaii.
So we come here for our sunrise celebrations.
And to honor the creation.
But this would all be considered part
of religious ceremonies of the Hawaiians.
And of course, all of these practices were outlawed,
outlawed and made criminal here in Hawaii
by the missionaries until 1978.
"He moku he wa'a, he wa'a he moku."
It means "the island", "moku",
"is a canoe", "wa'a", "the wa'a is an island".
We think of it as a canoe.
We're in the middle of the Pacific.
You got to learn to get along.
And everybody's got to pull for the canoe.
(gentle music)
Agroforestry, contrary to popular belief,
is far from a new idea; it's actually the old idea.
People used to live off tree foods, forest plants.
In Hawaii the system was called (speaking Hawaiian)
which means "agroforest".
Archibald Menzies, the botanist and biologist
with George Vancouver in the original English expeditions,
first recorded in his logs to the Royal London Society
the fact that he'd seen agriculture in Hawaii
like he'd never seen anywhere else before
and that these systems were more abundant,
more productive than anything they had ever experienced
around the world.
He also added that the only thing left to do
is to make plantation workers out of these people.
The United States, through the illegal takeover
of Hawaii in 1893 to 1898,
undermined Hawaii's agricultural capacities.
Hawaii moved into this raging sugarcane
monocrop production,
as well as pineapple monocrop production,
wherein they totally decimated the land.
And organizations like Monsanto,
they got a foothold in Hawaiian in the 1950s.
These indigenous practices...
disregarded by the Americans from 1898 to the present day,
have led to the environmental degradation of Hawaii.
(sawing)
We still have the memory,
and we're working on trying to reestablish
those food systems.
Food forests are designed to capture water and hold water.
Food forests survive in droughts.
Food forests survive impacts during the great storm
where agricultural fields in two-dimensional lines do not.
(soft music)
The relational interactive component
of the biology of a forest is quite different
than a garden or an agricultural field.
It was important that we work with a residential zoning
so that any experimentation would be applicable
to a household in Honolulu,
in the larger, more metropolitan
or suburban areas of the state.
We're looking at trying to positively impact
single-family dwellings
around food security and food preparedness
in an emergency situation
for either a man-made or a natural disaster.
(soft music)
When you look out over the central plain,
the northern central plain of the island,
these plains were once covered with food forests
and forest with timber trees as high as 100 feet.
These uplands were turned over to some Englishmen
who brought in Scottish cattlemen.
They simply brought degradation to these lands,
and they called this success.
(drizzling)
(chattering)
(raining)
(faucet running)
- Basically, we're trying to revive
many of the practices of old
and getting people to realize that...
not everything is instantaneous
like going to the supermarket and getting your food.
It takes time.
Right now we have a group harvesting kalo, which is taro.
Food forestry for me would be integrating different crops
in...
family property,
so that you're not raising just the one item
that you would want for your family.
On our property with my grandparents,
we have the kalo, the breadfruit.
We also had bananas.
Several varieties of bananas.
A little bit of everything.
(soft music)
This right here,
this is 'olena.
To us it's 'olena, but that's turmeric.
Right here.
This one has a blossom and that's part of the ginger family.
So there's your breadfruit right there.
You can see some of the young fruits starting in on it.
And the uhi, or yam...
is that vine that's creeping up on the tree.
They're actually working with each other.
(birds chirping)
So you can see the diverse planting.
So you've got the wauke, the paper Mulberry.
Right here we've got tea, the tea plants.
And we've got the breadfruit.
Bananas.
We had what was known as the Breadfruit Belt,
which ran for a good 20 miles.
It was at least a half a mile wide.
But then with the coffee industry,
a lot of those trees were taken down.
I think the differences with monocropping
is you've just got this one crop for acres and acres.
When I was growing up
and my grandparents got into coffee,
there wasn't what we know now is a coffee borer bug.
You lose your crop or a good percentage.
And we believe that could possibly happen to other crops,
possibly breadfruit.
That once you get an infection in
and that's the only thing that's growing on your property,
it's gonna go from one street to the next to the next.
And pretty soon the entire field could be infiltrated.
Whereas with the old...
the old systems where you had...
more diverse crops in between your major,
say like the breadfruit.
It's supporting each other.
So you've got other crops coming in
at different times of the year.
(soft music)
- The American industrial complex spent 130 years
ruining the capacity of the Native Americans,
all in an attempt to create genocide on a group of people.
So it's time for the United States to own up
to what it's been responsible for
and to honor the ways of the people
who were on the land before you
and incorporate those ways into our everyday living.
(chattering)
(radio static crackling)
(chattering)
- Is that saw back here still?
- Oh, where did...
Rodney put it on one of the trucks.
- [Man] He's probably got it in mine.
- In California in a lot of places, there is this...
there's a lot of fear around fire, prescribed fire,
even fire in general, and rightfully so.
It's understandable.
In a lot of our teachings traditionally
you build an understanding around the world around you,
and you learn how to live with fire and work with fire.
And it helps you, the more you know about it,
the less fear that you have.
(soft music)
- The forest service is starting to hear the land
screaming back at you.
Everything's burning up. Hey, you got to do something.
You can't just control everything like that.
You can't just take it over and say nobody can touch this.
And you can't just tell us that we can't do
what we've been doing here for a long time.
'Cause it's gonna mess everything up.
So we're all fix the world people,
and we have ceremonies for that.
So we as K-1 firefighters have this role.
When we come out on the hill, we have a big job to do
as far as respecting the place that we're in.
So that acorn stands come back,
or so that hazels come back good,
or any basket making materials,
any issues that have to do with safety
and where you're living at.
It's all revolving around your family,
and that's our perspective on it.
(soft music)
- Wind speed zero to two
from the south southeast and variable.
(gentle music)
- These trees are all fire-adapted trees
burning from the beginning of time.
They become a fire adapted forest.
Most of our gathering materials are medicines.
The redwoods and some of the pines and stuff
require fire to go through them
in order to open up and deposit their seeds.
You can start to see the difference in the trees.
You see it as we start going through here,
we're gonna get these indicator species
to tell us what we're doing right.
The giant salamander.
I've seen species that I'd never seen
on the river before, except in our burn units
after we burned them.
It's pretty cool.
Add 'em up!
- [Men] Holding.
(chattering)
(fire crackling)
- That's the desired effects right here.
You see how it's all along the bed of the forest?
Consuming the leaf litter and the dead and down,
not affecting the trees too much right there.
Doing good work.
And the more prescribed fire we get on the ground
around our communities, the safer we are.
You take away the available fuel loading,
when wildfire comes around, there's not that fuel loading
to just feed it in a rip uncontrollably.
When it hits these areas that have been treated,
there's not enough fuel to feed that wildfire,
and it'll go out and these areas, and we can defend that.
(soft music)
When it's opened up like this, elders can still come in here
and collect those resources right there.
And if they can't get in there,
share that knowledge with the kids, it gets lost in time.
So when we can open stuff up,
they can get in here and teach the younger generations
the traditional practices, and they can get in there
and harvest those cultural and natural resources,
that knowledge never gets lost,
just keeps recycling and repeating itself,
and it's all good work.
(chattering)
(clapping)
- Forest service!
CIBA
Karuk Tribe
Parks, national parks.
(clapping)
- Following the Smoke started out,
it started with the group basket weavers.
And they joined together and were having issues
with getting better quality materials.
So Following the Smoke came from following the smoke
by where it was burnt.
So if you went following the areas of the burn,
you were following the smoke, and then we were able
to use those materials from there,
'cause the harvesting from those particular materials
is a lot stronger for us.
Grows stronger, grows straighter.
And we use 'em for different like baby baskets
for the hazel sticks,
so it has to be something strong
that we're gonna keep our baby in
(chattering)
- [Woman] Shorter sticks and your longer sticks,
and you'll go through this process that I'm doing right now
which is just peeling it back,
because what you want to do
is you want to match those peeled back ends together.
So if you look closely at this basket
you'll see that, down the center,
there's actually two sticks there,
and they're just kind of joined.
And I will purposefully try to maneuver the sticks
so that they're laid flat.
- The fire for the bear grass is also
comes back a lot stronger
If we go pick the year after a fire.
It's stronger for our baskets.
So any of the color in our baskets,
it'll come back quite a bit stronger,
and we can pull on it to make our baskets finer,
finer work with that.
It's really important while we pick and burn
that we're doing it culturally,
that we're doing it in our prayers
before we go out and pick.
And that medicine goes into when we leave it,
the medicine goes in it when we have our baby in it,
so it all serves a purpose.
(chattering)
(rocks tapping)
It was probably maybe since I was a baby that I ate them.
I just always remember loving acorns.
We eat the tan oak.
They're the sweetest out of all of the acorns
(gentle music)
(chattering)
Long, long, long, long, long time ago,
very beginning of us, we didn't have pots
and pans like this, or the propane cook stove.
So we had to figure out how we were gonna cook our food,
and this is how we cook it.
And there's nutrients that come from the rocks.
It's acorn soup.
(fire crackling)
(gentle music)
- So really world renewal ceremonies,
we don't really look at it as religion.
We look at our survival.
And what are you doing to survive
on this landscape over time?
You're managing it.
(crickets chirping)
Look at the ears on this one right here.
They're starting to really come out right here.
So this was planted in July,
and in another week or so I'll be at a harvest these
and take them home and eat these ones.
But that's a healthy plant right there.
This is about a 160 days without having any rain.
(soft music)
Our farming is deep into our spiritual beliefs.
When we don't farm,
you have the loss of the nutritional benefits
of all the crops we produce out here.
The fact of the matter is the women,
they don't have the stuff to make the piki in.
(bright guitar music)
They don't have the traditional crops needed
to put on the table.
(chattering)
There was a dissertation looking at
some of the feelings we have when we don't farm.
And a lot of it was psychological.
And when you're not out here working the land and your farm
and being a true steward, you lose your sense of balance.
It's almost like all these plants out here,
they've become like my counselor.
You know what I mean?
I'm able to talk to them and speak to them,
and they show me things.
And so I'm not dependent upon, like I used to be,
I used to drink a hell of a lot.
I don't do that no more.
Native people who have these substance abuse problems
is a direct result of being relocated,
losing their livelihood, forgetting who they are,
and they go in to find something to fill those voids
that would've otherwise been filled by hunting,
by raising things.
Now that they don't have that or they move away from that,
you have these big problems on reservations now,
whereas if you were to use these traditional systems,
you're able to plug all those voids in.
All that loss of identity that was taken away from you,
you're able to bring it back.
But we need to do it sooner rather than later,
because once we forget these things, then we forget them.
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - Change!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - Change!
- People today are all excited about climate change
and rightfully so.
People are rising up and panicking in a sense.
They recognize that this is not sustainable.
That's a good thing that that's happening, that reaction,
but it's gonna be imperative, and it is imperative,
that these people in these movements
that are beginning to grow...
look for and accept guidance from indigenous people
who know how to...
adapt and respond to a changing environment.
And we're still doing it today.
And we will continue to do it.
We say until the stars...
fall.
(moving instrumental music)
(passionate percussion music)
(singing in foreign language)