woman: we really try to focus in on deep traditions. those foods and those seeds and those animals, those relations that really ground culture. given we've been moved off of so many of our traditional lands, one of our values is to make natural areas accessible and nave again. man: we have certain native ways of taking care of the land and we want to exhibit those practices here so people will come here and they'll see this lush parade. woman: we have a tendency in the west to commodify something, to view it as a thing. even seeds. what the native people know is that it's not just a thing, and what native people

have done is formed relationships. second woman: our native seed library does the really important work of reconnecting our community members who are in diaspora with their seeds, who are equally in diaspora. third woman: and so, the work of the cultural conservancy is really about the relationship of people and land and recognize that you are a part of the ecosystem, not a member of it, not above it, not outside of it, echoing within it. announcer: this program was made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy. woman: oh, look, there's some wild rose hips there. very important medicine food. often just eaten raw at this time of

year or mixed with other foods, and they're kind of sweet. lots of coyote brush. a very dominant native plant with willow. ah, this lupine did really--really well. you can see all the seeds here. lupine is really important because it's a nitrogen fixer, so, it's always helping to replenish the soil. oop! pop--the seed popped right out, as they do. oh, and a lovely, little oak tree here. let's see--i don't see--ah, here's a few acorns. beautiful. we are at el polin springs in the presidio national park at the headwaters of the tennessee hollow watershed. so, it looks small and kind of insignificant, but this is such a rare, important site. it's the last freshwater spring in san francisco. san francisco used to be filled with springs and creeks and little watersheds. 99% of that

has been destroyed. this place would've bn a paradise for the ohlone ancestors here thousands of years ago. you have fresh water. you have food plants. you have medicine plants. and then all of the wildlife that is attracted to this area. so, this is directly linked to food sovereignty, that the ohlone people at one point probably ate a lot from this hillside and would probably like to do it again if they were allowed access and an active, tending relationip with these native plants again. when i first started coming to this place, it was still under the army's jurisdiction. access was opening up to the public as the conversion to a national park was opening up. and yet, there was no protection of it. there was no fence. there was a lot of eucalyptus. it was just a bare trickle. and there was a lot of garbage here. fortunately, the national park service and the cultural conservancy and a number of other urbarestoratnists

started working on this site in the mid-nineties to educate everyone that this is a very sacred cultural site and needs to be protected and preserved and interpreted in a better way. so, this is just a beginning but it's a very good beginning. an example of what a return to nature in an urban context would look like. here in the presidio, we consider this to be our headquarters, and one of the reasons 's in an urban context is that we have this opportunity to demonstrate, even symbolically, the promise of biocultural restoration with california indian people in an urban context. the cultural conservancy is an intertribal ganization. so, in our mission and vision and values of to serve indigenous peoples, given there are, you know, 300 million indigenous peoples around the world, over 500 nations in the u.s., over 100 tribes here in

california. so, we really try to fos in on deep traditions and those foods and those seeds and those animals, those relations that really ground culture. but we have a particular focus on sovereignty, ich is being self-determining with our land and our culture and our governance and our peoples, and so, food sovereignty is the ability to feed ourselves, to honor our traditional foods, and we want to pragmatically do this, so, we grow food. woman: we are at the indian valley organic farm and garden in novato, california. it is on the campus of the college of marin. this farm is special and unique because it's currently a collaboration of 3 organizations--the cultural conservancy, the college of marin, and marin master gardeners. the cultural conservancy focuses on

revitalizing native heirloom vegetables and medicines and basketry and other material plants. woman: we celebrate the tradition of indigenous agriculture and the true, you know, ingenuity that comes with thousands of generations of development of these particular growing techniques. so, every year, we grow a three sisters plot in a traditional mounding, planting sequence. the three sisters is ingenious because we have the beans feeding nitrogen to the corn and the corn providing a stand for the beans and the squash covering the ground and mulching and keeping weeds down and moisture in, and in order to harvest all of this, like, you really gotta get down and dirty. there's no machine that can be developed in order to harvest this. we don't want the straight rows where there's just one monocrop where you can go and with the same movement harvest and kind of do that mindlessly.

like, we want you to go in here and duck and swoop and find, because that's the way you build relationship, that's the way you start to understand who you're giving lifto and who, in return, is giving life to you. harjo: the three sisters growing technique is one of the most well-known indigenous growing techniques, and for good reason. it's really about interconnection and interreliance on each other. so, we don't just call them sisters to be cute. we call them sisters because they are relatives and because we are born of the same matter. like, we come from the same place and the three sisters, like, is a story in a lot of creation stories because we share origin. woman: we have a tendency in the west to commodify something, to view it as a thing. but what native people know is that it's

not just a thing, and what native people have done is form relationships. their language, their practices, and their food systems, their spirituality, their art, all of what they do arises from their relationship to that place. what's happened in the western perspective is this commodification. the colonization. the idea of ownership. harjo: most vegebles that you get a supermarket or most seeds you get from seed catalogs, they've never been handled by humans. they've been handled by machines. they've been planted by machines. they've been harvested by machines. they've been packed by machines. and to think about what is lost in that broken relationship? what are we not only depriving the seed of when we deprive them of that relationship but what are we depriving ourselves of when we don't have that relationship? cummings: if you take the culture out of agriculture,

all you have left is agribusiness. and a lot of my work is trying to get the culture back into it and recognizing the contributions that these relationships have to our food systems. nelson: our food has been commodified, our seeds have been commodified, commercialized, hybridized. they've been so adulterated with chemicals and pesticides. that's not really a food way for us. that's the industrialization of our sacred relatives. cummings: farmers are no longer producers. they've been turned into consumers. they have to buy their seeds, they have to buy their chemicals, they have to buy every aspect of the production cycle. below that is is sense that we have a mechanistic idea of the universe. we know how life works. it's a machine. we can take it apart. we can do with it what we want. it's about power and control and then eventually profit. nelson: and then genetic

modification is, like, the ultimate insult that many of our spiritual teachers say is one of the most profound forms of desecration, to genetically modify our sacred seeds. cummings: we have this food system where most of agriculture now in the u.s. is animal food. so, almost 90% of corn, 92%, i believe, is gmo, and it mostly goes to animal feed. very little of what's grown iseople food anymor when you genetically engineer someing, anyiving beg, you cut f its sty. you'r basicallalteringts evolution. you're saying, "i know what this thing should do." nelson: we almost call it like racism against seeds. colonialism has elevated some seeds and then really denigrated other seeds. we used to have thousands of varieties of corn but western agribusiness wante one sweet corn, 'cause we like sugar. cummings: there's only 3 crops

that form most of the basis of world food systems--ce, wheat, and cor and each of them has a unique story. and that story is based in the people who developed it. so, when we talk about decolonizing knowledge, we're also talking about finally coming to terms with the fact that modern agriculture has stolen this germ plasm from these native peoples and taken, used it for their own purposes and profit, but it's still theirs and it's still ive and we can still, you know, we can still honor those systems. woman: ok, now we pick them up and look through the pods that we missed. second woman: yeah, no, you can come through and make sure you've got all the beans out of the pod. harjo: most seeds that you find in seed catalogs are hybrid seeds, which mns that you plant a hybrid corn seed and then save seed from the corn

that you grow with that, the first generation is a clone. the second genation is completely unpredictable. and that's one of the ways that seed companies keep you reliant on them, because you have to keep going back in order to get that perfect first generation of all uniform-loing plants. alternatively, open-pollinated seeds are seeds that you can continue to save over and over again with generations because they include the wide diversity that every plant population should have. open pollination supports the diversity of genetics and it produces seeds that more beautifully represent the large diversy of what that plant can look like. nelson: so, teosinte is the original grass seed that all corn comes from, and it's just

an extraordinary example of native science over decades and centuries of selective breeding coming up with all of the varieties of corn. woman: and you'll see, too, the little silk goes along for the ride and is acally a part of the dispersant methodology, because this little silk can catch in the wind, it can catch in the fur, in birds. nelson: one grain of pollen travels down each silk to germinate the kernels. it's like having an elder around, ancestor. all of its wisdom in that original genetics strengthens the [indistinct] or any other domestic corn that grows near it. harjo: that cross-pollination and that sisterhood that happens within the air and on their tassels and in their flowers, that's the beauty of the seed saving we do.

so, this is some of our native seed library. it is very much a livg seed library, , that means we try to grow a lot of the varieties very often so that we're not just dealing witheeds that have been saved for a long time, but we're dealing with living generations of seeds. so, they're not just in a museum. nelson: there's this movement to go to old museums and libraries and archives and collections and seed banks and return these ancient seeds that have been preserved to the land and to their first people. seed banks are great ideas and yet they've been turned into very western forms of banks and that you need to hold them and protect them, and so, seed banks ultimately need to have a bit more of that fluid openness

so that those seeds are being actively grown out and used. otherwise, the genetics get kind of stale. we're calling ours a seed library because it's much more a public space where people can come and receive a seed, grow it out, maybe even grow another generation of seed in a particular habitat, and then share back seeds with us. so, again, it's more of a reciprocal dynamic relationship. harjo: and a lot of folks like me, we're away from our ancestral lands and so, our native seed library, i think, does the really important work of reconnecting our community members who are in diaspora with their seed who are equally in diaspora. there's that reconnection of ancestral memory between them. heirloom seeds are the result of intentional seed-saving from our ancestors and from generations long ago. because heirloom seeds

have that deep generational connection, they're the seeds that are stronger. woman: i think about what it meant for our ancestors who were being relocated, who were facing an unknown future. they didn't just take what they could grab. they took the seeds. they tucked them in their pockets and wove see in their hair knowing that that seed cod be the revitalization of a people. a seed is immense, and it's an immense system of knowledge. and within that system of knowledge is our capacity to connect, to learn, to flourish, to grow, to shift, to adapt, and to feed ourselves. the seed sovereignty, to me, starts with self. it starts with

the relationship with land and place. seeds tell stories of our history and our landscape and our ecosystem. and so, the work of the cultural conservancy is really about the relationship of people and land, and as such, recognize that you are a part of the ecosystem, not a member of it, not above it, not outside of it, echoing within it. even though we are growing a lot of native heirloom seeds in an agricultural setting, we recognize that we are in california and that we honor the pruning and the cultivation and the tilling and all of these methods that native californians have in order to, like, tend this abundance, so, ed here is gonna kind of take over now

and talk about the willow and the juncus here and we'll get a little work done. [sawing] man: so, willow does this particular thing. if you coppice it, and coppicing is when you cut a plant all the way down to the ground. what will happen with a willow if you do that? a bunch of shoots will come up. in these processes where we're taking care of the land, there always has to be communication. like the basket weavers might want us to do one thing with this piece of land, and then maybe the people who are cooking the meals, they say, "no, no, we--we need to do this other thing to that, for the food that we have in this spot." so, we have to think about other things, too, like, what animals are using it. birds--birds like willow trees. we don't want to coppice the whole thing, and then won't be the birds here, 'cause we want the birds come, 'cause then the birds come and pollinate here in--in our garden. so, we should be thinking about when we're working on this place, treating the willow in a good way, saying hi to it and "sorry. we're gonna

cut this. but you're gonna be better, you know. things are gonna be better when we cut this." you know, just approach things like that. nelson: we love to work in the cultivated area but we also know that our ancestors and especially here with the california first peoples gathered in the wild, you know. it makes us have to deconstruct the word "wild," though, right? so, we always want to work at the edges of what's, quote, wild, meaning, humans have not had a strong hand there, and then the cultivated earth, because nature knows better than we do. native people have always mimicked nature and learned how to really get involved with ecosystem processes rather than trying to arrest them, stop them, end them, which western colonization has tried to do with damming rivers and clear-cutting forests and these extreme changes. yes, we cut tre, but we don't clear-cut. we selectively cut trees. it's being part of nature

by harmonizing with those simple disturbances, whether it's a lightning fire, whether it's a windstorm, whether it's a mudslide, and so, in that small-scale disturbance, it actually increases biodiversity. it doesn't decrease biodiversity. mother earth is really trying to wake us up right now with climate change to remind us of our humility and that we are not the masters of life and that we need to honor biodiversity and all o the ecosystem processes that give us abundance. from a spiritual perspective, we're at a crossroad in our culture and in the world right now, and there's many prophecies that speak about this crossroads. one path is the scorched-earth path. it's this global warming, it's this heating, it's this greed and commodificatioto the point of almost, like, caibalism of the earth and of humanife, but there is also an equal path we can go down, which is a green

path of fertility and biodiversity, and enough youth are going to look to that and y, "we need to honor the sacredness of life and we need to look to the indigenous peoples to adopt those practices," and it's a resilient vision tt is not about tribe, it's about all people. it's about being human beings on this planet and living in more sustainable, resilient way. moncada: whadoes it mean to return iigenous land to indigenous hands? that's just a realm of possibility. a really exciting one. what we can do here seems almost limitless. and so, what we have started historically at indian valley organic fm and garden and that partnership there is the foundation upon which we can build the vision of what we can do here.

willie: a year ago, the cultural conservancy bought this piece of land here in order to turn it into a farm, cultural center, and native plant preserve. the site was owned by a person who had a vision that it should return back to native people. for so many years, this place was farmland. we're sitting here at the remnants of a walnut orchard. and there was a apple orchard. but despite all that, the native plants have survived here. there are a lot of native plants here. and then we have a lot of traditional native food forest plants that are already on site, like oak trees, and we have the native black walnut here. different edible and medicinal plants that are on site. and we also have a lot of native wildlife here. [bee buzzing] what i would suggest that we do here is that we don't have an attitude where we want to kill off different plants. what we want to do ihave balance here. some people talk about

invasives, but the way i would rather talk about it is that there's immigrants and there's natives, and there are natives that are invasive, and there are immigrants that are good and that are not invasive. our ideal goal would be to make this place open for diversity. man: we're not trying to take out everythg that's non-native and say we've decolonized. we're trying to rebuild a lascape and then see how a farm can integrate into that. and to think about how ingrained these apple trees are. just that level of root integration and just thinking about the ways that those apples can feed our people, you know, is just part of the process, you know. what i want this place to be is a place where people can see new ways to engage in land practices and embra the traditional la practices of this landscape and bring in with thought and intention the new ones that make sense and go from there.

we'll see. checkack in 5 years, you know. [whirring] willie: in order to be a good land manager, i have to know the land. i vision a lot about what it can be but i also need to figure out what it is. and i've been learning what's here, just seeing the changes that this land goes through, and i'd like to do this for the whole year. ha ha! to me, that would be the ideal thing for me is to just sit here for a year and see what happens, you know, through the seasons. and then start thinking about, you know, what are we gonna do? moncada: we dedicated our first year of being here to listening, and we held some gatherings. we've held a "listening to the land" event and we gathered our communities and we said, "what happens when you come here? what do you hear?" and as part of that listening, we came to our name,

and the name that we have come to for this place is heron shadow. it is a reflection of the magic that happens here and that has started to show itself. be remembered. willie: there's a lot to learn on how to take care of the land. you know, californians were really good at taking care of this land, but there's also a lot of knowledge that was lost. and one of our goals is to relearn a lot of that, and one of the ways you do that is just to get out there and do, you know. harjo: it's about reconnection to this knowledge that is in our ancestral memory and in our blood. it's not a new process, it's just a process that's being rewed. and so, we're rearning. and i think i'm also constantly unlearning the colonialism, and i think especially here, with the cultural conservancy, i get to just listen to the lessons of

plants and remember that this relationship is about reciprocity and about stewardship and honoring the circle of relations that you find yourself in. nelson: we all have a role in this and people see we are living out of balance, and it's really time we honor traditional ecological knowledge so that we can reharmonizwith tho cycles of nature again and tend nature in a way that is reciprocal and in balance. announcer: this program was made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy.ó■awcfvo

and now for something completely different. [laughter] as we all know, we are living in extremely unstable times. institutions, whose stability we took for granted, for better or worse, suddenly seem shaky. long established norms are breaking down, the global geo-political situation seems increasingly chaotic and dangerous, people in positions of power behave in hitherto unthinkable ways, etc. as a result, the news cycle keeps us in a constant hyper-excited state, and our attention lurches from crisis over here, to a new shocking wrinkle in this scandal over there,