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)