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.