Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

We've been doing this for millennia. When I say millennia, I mean more than one. No Western concept of conservation is that old. People like Muir and these other conservationists, Leopold, they just thought nobody lived out here, a wilderness is a wilderness. That's not true, we've been in this part of the country for thousands and thousands of years. We know how to manage natural resources. And we need to talk about it. We need the true history of America.

Leaf Hillman:

If we look 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.

Vikki Preston:

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.

Marshall Pecore:

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.

Ervin Carlson:

As far as Indian people, buffalo, in all our 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 of just making us whole again. It's a healing in that way also.

Rev. Kalani:

Part of what they didn't understand, the original English expeditions was that what they were looking at wasn't nature. It's nature in relationship with humans over 1000 years.

Speaker 7:

The fact that we're still here today in any form is a testament to adaptation and resilience.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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 a, what they call a semi-arid climate. It's right in the middle of a big drought period, what they call extreme drought.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

After my grandfather passed away, I started getting seeds from different people out here, and I started planting. And 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 [foreign language 00:04:44], they're brown lima beans. So they're doing pretty good. They look pretty strong. There's so much moisture in the ground, no irrigation folks.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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 a 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 life cycle and all my drinking and stuff, I was able to come out of that. And I only came out of that because I got back into what I really loved 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.

Col. Caleb Johnson:

Tradition tells us that we must have corn. So corn has been the remains staples 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 grow your own food, you don't need the government, you're independent.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

Well, the Hopi farming to me, the disruption, and 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 as a way to do better. What it started to do by bringing these livestock animals, it started bringing the concept of what they call privatization. So people felt like they owned 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 onto the system that's been existing for over 2000 years and to encourage people to keep farming.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

And so these are just some of the varieties that we raise. I'd 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 violent variety. These are just our blue corn varieties here. As 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.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

When I was at Cornell University, when I talked about my corn, they said that I needed 33 inches of annual rainfall a year. Their planting depths were an inch, our plant depths, because the way our corn is, because where the moisture's that 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, has elongated epicotyl so it comes up from that. Whereas in hybrid corn, it's only probably about an inch growing region. Ours is about two feet, you can probably go longer. I would imagine if I put it down four feet, it would still come up

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

Dry, that 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. For clearing it down to where it gets moisture, put five lima bean seeds in there so. These are like super seeds, they're 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 planner is designed to go down an inch. That's it. Our early corn, we put in early to coincide with our home dances. It'd be sweet, corn, yellow, corn, different varieties. We don't get rains here usually from April all the way till monsoon, which is the last week in July. That's for us to grow things with only six to 10 inches of annual precipitation is amazing.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

This year I put in about six different varieties of corn. You got to grow them out every year. You try to grow 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

Leaf Hillman:

[foreign language 00:12:36] This right here is our country. This is where we're born and raised just like a long ago people were. Our religion is survival in this place, living in this place for countless generations, 1000 years. It's hard to say 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.

Kathy  McCovey:

The group people have lived here for thousands of years and acorns for native people here were a staple of their life, of their diet. That with 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 plant 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.

Leaf Hillman:

They fire on the ground, underneath the trees to burn up old acorns and leaves and duck to make it easier to pick the acorns when they fall. Also that smoke, putting that smoke up into the canopy suppresses the buds. What those women essentially were doing besides enhancing food sources, basketry resources, all the things that we need 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 the wildfire hits it, it goes out of fuel. When you have this constant, regular low intensity fire being put on the landscape at this community scale, not had 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.

Frank Lake:

Fire suppression and exclusion with first colonization diseases that decimated native populations, that limited severely their number of ignitions and the complexity of their stewardship and agri-forestry systems around fire use. And then you had settlement where there was direct displacement, native people being removed out their villages, put on reservations and other rancherías. Then you have the disruption of that cultural fire regime. And then following that initial period of colonization, then there was a very strong emphasis on suppressing off fires. Whether they were lightning or they were the arson or unpermitted ignitions, they were to be suppressed in the interest of timber resources and protection of communities.

Leaf Hillman:

Suppressing wildfire or any fire was really the 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.

Speaker 21:

Wood for war. The Navy needs wood, the Air Forces need wood for troop carrying gliders. We all need our forests, but the forests have a vicious public enemy number one, fire. Ruthless, devastating forest fire, wiping our homes, destroying critical raw materials, taking its annual [inaudible 00:17:08].

Leaf Hillman:

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 and the general populism.

Frank Lake:

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 the 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 to severity, more extensive and more damaging than has ever been in recorded history.

Leaf Hillman:

But it's all built around fighting, fighting fire is not a fight you can win. And it's not a 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.

Speaker 8:

[inaudible 00:18:54] (indistinct chatter)

Speaker 9:

Roads on the north, we're standing on one of the-

Vikki Preston:

My grandfather, he would kind of know like, oh, I feel like I'm going to 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 few days, maybe he'd try it again. And maybe it was good, so he'd go for it. This is the [inaudible 00:19:32] village area. We swim here, we fish here. We gather here ceremonially for the deer skin dances, for all the other dances that we've all like kind of come to our whole lives. And this is all kind of on your mind when you're standing just in this one spot.

Vikki Preston:

Traditionally this place would've been burned for many reasons, the 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 for these places for my family as well. My sister lived 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 down the porch, there was just this wall of flames across the street. And it was already in the canopies of all the Doug firs across the street.

Maymi Preston:

And it was such just a terrible year. We had no, 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 fire picking 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. First, I was nine months pregnant, we bought the property. I wasn't much of help to anybody at the time so really good to see controlled burns. And then one crew can take care of a whole area versus having an army of firefighters coming fighting a fire.

Maymi Preston:

And I mean, when it gets to that point, it's what you got to do, but you don't need to let it get to that point. 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, 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. I think that's how a lot of Western cultures have been with non-Western cultures. And I think that's how they've been with nature. And so I think it's time to learn from each other and meld better and bow to each other's knowledge in certain areas,

Bill Tripp:

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 is 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 under story and the small plants, you no longer have things using that surface water. So you have more cold water, ground water 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 happen based on the human activity in this ceremony of lighting that mountain actually has scientifically valid connections to calling the fish up the river.

Ron Reed:

Our religion we practice is Pic-Ya-Wish, translated that's world renewal. So the Karuk people, the "fix the world" people. Today, we're going to go down and we're going to fish in this fishy falls. It's very romantic in some people's eyes, very frustrating to others. I'm both of those. I love it, that's my way of life. But the health of the river runs parallel to the health of people. We need to put the action, the physical actions on the landscape. We got to start cleaning the sacred trails, we got to start igniting and cleaning the forest once again. Everything we do in our world, the salmon benefits from.

Kenneth Brink:

So in our tribal ceremonies, "fix the world," it's not just to fix this Creek or fix our family or fix our river. I mean, we 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 try, we knew that "fix the world" ceremony, Pic-Ya-Wish that even a small group of people with great energy, great focus and pure thought, it actually triggered the world the earth and put it back on its balance.

Kenneth Brink:

(crowd chanting and dancing)

Ervin Carlson:

So we brought buffalo back here at Blackfeet, I think in 1974, we started to restore animals back here. And there wasn't a real big interest. And I guess because buffalo had been gone from our culture for so long of being almost hunted to near extinction. So the biggest part of our people 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, now bringing these animals back and returning that part of our culture.

Ervin Carlson:

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 - 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 American Indian population was near 7 million.

Ervin Carlson:

The military systematically eliminated buffalo to eliminate 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 primary food source, lifestyle and independence. In 1991, a handful of Indian tribes organized the InterTribal Bison Cooperative to begin restoration 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.

Ervin Carlson:

The buffalo are very good tours of the land that are naturally migrating animal. They don't just 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 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, 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.

Teri Dahle:

You think about the buffalo being the biggest climate change adapter as a animal in the world. And I mean, for centuries in thousands and thousands of years. Now we're in an age that they're going to have to adapt to this and they can easily adapt because of their hair. Their hair is so different than a cow hide, it's four times more thick, but they also grow more hair for the winter than 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 there's just so much more resilient.

Ervin Carlson:

Today we're going to move them animals to the north side of the pasture. Like I say, them being gone so long in some real reeducating our own people to the animal. And it never really took off until, I would say in the past eight years we started the iinii project, iinii 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.

Speaker 10:

[foreign language 00:33:15]

Betty Cooper:

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. It had to be, they had to participate and actively you could prepare them, but they had to actually participate in it. So the students and 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. And they just took to it like a duck to water, they wanted to know everything.

Teri Dahle:

Our sister tribe is Kainai and Siksika, and so none of them have a buffalo hurt. So I started asking some of the 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 their first one. And that was kind of heartbreaking to me that that was their first one and they're like 80 years old. So that whole generations of not being able to even be part of that buffalo,

Chief Earl:

We have these songs with us yet. We may not have the ceremonies, but the songs are still with us. And we need people to 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 would be another year. Our creator, we ask them to be with us today. Our ancestors, our people in the past have left us things to fall. We asked that [inaudible 00:35:36] [foreign language 00:35:49]

Ervin Carlson:

These animals took care of us in our beginning, in the old way. And now in a new they're also taking care of us, and so we take care of them.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

We're on the University of Arizona Campus. I'll be doing my PhD defense tomorrow to get to be a doctor in philosophy and natural resources. 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.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

I'm a 200th generation farmer, 200th generation farmer. And so also 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.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

I wanted to start off this presentation by first, ask you to take some seeds off of this corn right here. So what you're holding here is not just corn, but at its life. This is the roadmap that we're going to follow. And this particular map right here is called Hopi Prophecy Rock. This is the world that we currently live in, and you'll see 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 going to move away from our traditional values and our traditional system. And you'll see down here, there's the old gentleman with his planting stick and his plants through here and this line continues to go on.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

So what this is telling us down here is that, 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. 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.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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 remove the word a out of there because I'm not just talking just 1000 years, I'm talking millennia. So I'm talking the plural form of that, over 2000, 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?

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

And I ask myself, well, who came up with the method first? 2000 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 coin him that. And I said, well, that's your opinion. A lot of our knowledge has already been drafted and assumes a different type of name. [No hotel agriculture 00:40:38], we've been doing that forever. There's a new one called regenerative agriculture, we've been doing that forever.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

Look at the pictures right here, 1901, 2015. Look at the continuity, it hasn't changed. You don't see $100,000. John Deere, 14 roll plant out there. You see a little Hopis out there with the John Deere hats and a planting stick. That's all you need. So this is what my whole presentation's 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.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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.

Marshall Pecore:

We don't have perfect knowledge. We don't have perfect science, but we've always been adaptive. I think anomalous history has been adaptive to resource management, political ideas, and learning how to deal with them, but also saying true to cultural identity. And that's the secret of this place. This is an ancestral map kind of before European settlement. And this represents about 15 million acres here. Between 1817 and 1856 through land sanctions, 15 million acres shrank to 234,000 acres. Of the 234,000, just about all of it is managed.

Tony Waupochick:

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. 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.

Pershing Frechette:

Back in 1908, the Menominee Tribal Enterprises was established in Milwaukee here. And basically it was put here to supply jobs for the Menominee people. Before the saw-mill there wasn't very much opportunity 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 dine in the mature trees, when you reach end of reservation, you turn back and cut back. And if you do that, the trees would last forever.

Speaker 11:

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 be forest. If you do it in a sustainable way, the forest can replace itself and you're not causing harm. What we're doing in this section is a red oak salvage. We've had some problems with oak wilt fungus disease. If there's a damage to some of the limbs on a tree, the fungus gets in there, it 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.

Speaker 11:

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. 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 beach trees and other species, aspen is in here. So it's all a combination of trees growing.

Speaker 11:

A lot of what you see in industrial forest, they usually are more concerned with value of timber, whether it be one species, for example, red plantations in Wisconsin, but you're putting all your emphasis on one species. This far as a long term health management strategy is not a good idea. Having a diverse stand of force like we do on Menominees is your best defense against any outside problems like that.

Marshall Pecore:

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 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.

Laurie Reiter:

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 the 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 and 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 going to turn it over and turn it into money. We can't operate like the capitalistic society does, it was always the land first.

Speaker 12:

The mill pond'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. This is pretty much where the process starts right here for breaking down a log into lumber. A lot of people take it for granted that we have such a lush of beautiful forest. And at the same time they don't understand why MTE has these struggles. And we need to take what the forest gives us, and we need to make that work. We're going to be here for another seven generations, the next seven generations. That's that's the goal is to leave something for our children and our children. And it's proven over time. I think if you look at a satellite image, you can see the boundaries, the reservation, just because the lush forest makes it stand out. And years ago, the areas all around us were wiped out by lumber bears, just clear, cutting, wiping it out.

Jeff Grignon:

Knocking open each one, 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 a 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 [Egg fields 00:52:00], which picks up a lot of accumulation of different types of chemicals, different types of runoff both natural and man-made. The benefits of this forest is that don't get recognized is 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.

Speaker 13:

[foreign language 00:53:01]

Rev. Kalani:

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. [foreign language 00:53:54]. It means the island moku is a canoe va'a,' the va'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. 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 [inaudible 00:54:34] which means agroforest.

Rev. Kalani:

Archibald Menzies, the botanists and biologists with George Vancouver and 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 he 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 sugar cane, mono crop production, as well as pineapple mono crop production. Wherein they totally decimate in the land and organizations like Monsanto that got a foothold in Hawaii in the 1950s. These indigenous practices, this regarded by the Americans from 1898 to the present day have led to the environmental degradation of Hawaii.

Rev. Kalani:

We still have the memory and we are working on trying to reestablish those food systems. Food forests are designed to capture water and hold water. Food forest survive in droughts. Food forest survive impacts during the great storm where agricultural fields and two dimensional lines do not. 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 manmade or a natural disaster. When you look out over the central plane, the Northern central plane of the island, these planes were once covered with food forests and forests with timber trees as is 100 feet. These uplands were turned over to some English men who brought in Scottish cattlemen. They simply brought degradation to these lands and they called this success.

Shirley Kauhaihao:

Basically, we're trying to revive many of the practices on hold and getting people to realize that not everything is instantaneous, like going to the supermarket and getting your food, it takes to time. Right now, we have a group harvesting kalo, which is taro. Food forestry for me, would be integrating different crops in the 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 had the kalo, the breadfruit. We also had bananas different several varieties of bananas, a little bit of everything. 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 a 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. So you can see the diverse planting. We've got the wauke, the Paper mulberry. Right here, we've got tea, the tea plants, and we've got the breadfruit, bananas.

Shirley Kauhaihao:

We had what was known as the breadfruit belt, which ran for a good 20 miles. And 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 mono cropping is you 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 as a coffee borough 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 and that's the only thing that's growing on your property, it's going to go from one street to the next, to the next. And pretty soon the entire field could be infiltrated with. Whereas with the old systems where you had more diverse crops in between your major, say like the bread fruit, it's supporting each other. So you've got other crops coming in at different times of the year.

Rev. Kalani:

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 honor to what it's been responsible for. And to honor the ways of the people who are on the land before you, and incorporate those ways into our everyday living.

Gregory Arteche:

Is that saw back here still?

Vikki Preston:

Rodney put it on one of the trucks.

Gregory Arteche:

Probably got it in mine.[crosstalk 01:00:03:33].

Vikki Preston:

In California in a lot of places, there's a lot of fear around fire, prescribed fire, even fire in general and rightfully so. And 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 kind of the more you know about it, the less fear that you have.

Gregory Arteche:

The forest service is starting to hear the land streaming back into everything's burning up and 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, because it's going to mess everything up. So we're going to fix the world people, we have ceremonies for that. So we as K-1 Firefighters have this role to... When we come out on a 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 that hazels come back good or any basket making materials, any issues after we do with safety and where you're living at. It's all has to be revolving around your family, and that's how our perspective are.

Speaker 14:

Wind speed zero to two from the South-Southeastern variable.

Speaker 15:

These trees are all fire adapted trees. Burning from the beginning of time, they become a fire adapted forest. Most of our gathering materials, our medicines, the redwoods and some of the pines and stuff require fire to go through them in order to open up, deposit their seeds. You can start to see the difference in the trees. And as we start going through here, we're going to get these indicator species that tell us what we're doing right. The giant salamander, I've seen the species that I never seen on the river before, except in our burn units after we burn them, it's pretty cool. Come up.

Speaker 16:

That's desire to fix 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, it's 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 these areas and we can defend that.

Speaker 16:

It's opened up like this. Elders can still come in here and collect those resources right there. And 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.

Alice Lincoln:

Following the smoke started out as, it started with the crew 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. Because the harvesting from those particular materials was a lot stronger for us. Grow stronger, grow straighter and we use them for different baby baskets for the hazel sticks. So it has to be something strong that we're going to keep our baby in.

Speaker 17:

Put these sticks in your longest 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 peel 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 stick so that they're laid.

Alice Lincoln:

The fire for the bear grass is also comes back a lot stronger. If we go pick the year after their 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 work with that. It's also really important while we pick and burn that we're doing it culturally, that we're doing 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.

Speaker 18:

Whatever, yeah, it serves a purpose. [inaudible 01:09:47]

Stormy Polmateer:

It was probably maybe since I was a baby that I ate them. I just always remember loving acorns. We eat the tans, they're the sweetest out of all of the acorns. Push it, push the pad to get in the rocks. Long, long, long, long, long time ago, very beginning of us, we didn't have pots and pans like this or the propane cooked stoves. So we had to figure out how we were going to cook our food, and this is how we cook it. And there's nutrients that come from the rocks, it's acorn soup.

Leaf Hillman:

So really world renewal ceremonies, we don't really look at it as religion, we look at our survival. Well, what are you doing to survive on this landscape over time? You're managing it.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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 another week or so I'll be at a harvest season, take them home and eat these ones. But that's a healthy plant right there. This is about 160 days without having any rain. 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 with. They don't have the traditional crops needed to put on the table.

Speaker 19:

Filling everything out, and we had our line assignment, everything already. So the next day we took it to housing, we were the third ones that got approved. We have a whole house renovated pick everything apart. But they were real careful because my sister wanted to-

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

It 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 you're farming and being a true steward, you lose it, your sense of balance. It's almost like all these plants out here they 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 any more.

Michael Kotutwa Johnson:

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 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. Whereas if you were to use this traditional system, 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.

Leaf Hillman:

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 going to be imperative, and it is imperative that these people and 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.

Speaker 20:

[foreign language 01:15:16] (singing and chanting)