(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...