- [Director] Audio rolling, action.

(bright music) - [Woman 1] MAPS Media Institute presents Stories from Montana's Future.

Award winning films produced by the talented young students from across Big Sky Country.

(slow music) - You can't compare what it was like when I grew up.

I grew up at the agency.

There were maybe five families living there.

There were no homes, there were no houses, all of that was just country.

There was more family interaction.

Family stay together, they helped one another.

There was so few of us.

Every single family on this reservation is a good family.

They're strong.

They survived the Holocaust.

Every family has that strength within that family and we need to recognize that and empower that.

(slow music) This whole problem started from the boarding school, and it's filtered down to now where in our community, it's the best kept secret.

We don't talk about it.

We don't deal with it.

We don't teach about it, but it's the biggest problem that we have and then underneath that are all those other problems.

Drugs, alcohol, suicide, all these other things.

To me, they're under that umbrella of sexual abuse.

- Something has to be done here in the school, but in the homes as well.

People aren't taking the time to learn about culture.

We examined that word culture in all its components, because for us here Fort Belknap, you say Indian culture right away they think Powell, they think sweat lodge, sun dance, and that's it.

But culture is so much more.

It's like all these little components that make up that word culture.

The way we dress, our dwellings in our traditional dwellings or traditional food, music, dance.

- And I dunno if I'd resolved them but one way would be to get our younger people interested in our cultures, our ceremonies, the ways that we used to have a long time ago.

- I'm working on a piece of quillwork.

It's an earring.

Only one side's done.

All these little things are a little quills from porcupines.

Not many people around here know how to do it anymore.

The thing that they basically do is most the time is beating and there's only a couple people that know how to do quillwork or even tack quillwork.

- [Interviewer] Can you tell me about your dresses?

- Yeah, me and my mom made 'em.

We just make them right at home and we have two sewing machines and we take turns just sewing.

You have to sketch them out before everything.

(relaxing music) (scraping sounds) - So this is a buffalo hide.

What we're doing is we're scraping the hair off so we could prepare it for like a drum.

Well, when we're done scraping it, we take it off this rack so we can place it onto a drum.

(scraping continues) (drum music) (man singing) - One of the components of culture is games.

Stick games, most of the tribes have their own way of playing stick games.

So then I learn about the Cheyenne style stick game, Crow style stick game, Flathead style, Blackfeet style, Miami style, to all these different tribes and their ways of playing stick game.

(students laughing) It helps us to further understand our own way of playing stick game and as well as the ceremonial game called Hand game here in Fort Belknap.

Should students ever wanna go on participate in the hand game ceremony or the stick game tournament, they'll have an understanding.

- It's our traditional ceremonial hand game.

When they sponsor a hand game, whoever sponsors a hand game is because somebody's usually sick in their family or like take for example if they got some young person going into the service, they put a hand game on for them so that they'll stay out of harm's way and return home.

(drum sounds) (exasperated sighs) (indistinct conversations) (man singing) (drum sounds) We weren't plagued with drugs.

We didn't have TVs, certainly didn't have cell phones.

As a result of that, we went to visit your family, we went to visit somebody else's family.

And a lot of our culture was through that, the stories that went with our culture, with our religion, where now that's the last thing anybody wants to talk about.

They wanna sit and watch TV or on a cell phone, even if they got company.

At that time, we listened to our elders.

- I struggled for a long time with what extent we should allow technology within our culture, our young people know this technology really well.

I think it's definitely a way to preserve parts of our culture, but there's a lot of our culture that can't be preserved within technology.

One thing that we really work on this classroom here all year long is relearning how to listen, that listening can become a way of learning for us as it once was a long time ago.

- I went to a boarding school when I was 14 years old for four years and we had 500 students there.

And we had all different types, we had Sioux, we had Omaha from Nebraska, Sac and Fox, all different kinds of tribes.

So there was no one particular language but yet it all, we all came together as Indians.

We didn't come as a Crow one.

We didn't come as the Seneca.

And we didn't come as a Sioux.

We came together as Indian people and that made it strong for us.

We don't have that today, that togetherness.

- [Jill] These are our children in the school.

We need to be teaching what we're talking about here today that needs to be a part of what we're doing is empowering our children to be proud of themselves, to like what they're doing.

These problems aren't gonna be solved in one generation.

If you start now, in 10 years you'll see the impact of that.

(relaxing music) (slow music) - [Student 1] When I go outside, I feel the wind blowing to the sky and the buffalo run through the valley.

- [Student 2] I hear bird singing, I hear a buffalo stand which makes it boom.

I hear whales, which make a song.

I hear crickets in the night.

I feel happy when I hear this creature singing.

I feel at peace when I hear them make us home.

And I feel inspired when I hear these beautiful creatures singing.

(slow music) - I want you to write unity in the middle with a circle around it.

Now we're gonna mind map just like we did before.

My man Earl Pearl, I know he doesn't mind me sharing, showing you his but this is what I expect.

Okay.

And yes, he did write about his crow girlfriend- - Come on.

(students laughs) - So I want everybody to get it out.

Get your mind mapped out.

Let's get working.

Where do you feel united the most?

What creates the most unity in your life?

How did the buffalo create unity amongst our people?

Community feeds, one of my favorite things to do.

Go to the field.

- Gathering.

- Gatherings.

Tristin, share one please.

- When one is down, we comfort them.

- When one is down, we comfort them.

That's great.

My name is Jacob Turcotte and I am the seventh grade English instructor, as well as the native American club advisor.

We, as a staff had sat down in the past and we decided that we needed to do something different here at Poplar.

We would ask students, what kind of Indian are you?

Who is your relation?

And the students couldn't answer those questions.

We're right here in the middle of the Fort Peck reservation and we have children that don't even know where they come from.

And we thought, what ways can we change that?

We had to do something different to reach them, to engage our students and the Buffalo Unity Project came about.

- You guys ever seen ledger art before?

This is a contemporary take on a historic type of art.

I try to strictly use our Dakota and Nakota designs in my artwork.

I think of it as contributing to preserving our heritage.

I brought a couple examples of some original ledger drawings.

This particular one here is a is a drawing of Sitting Bull.

How many of you know who Sitting Bull is?

Well, this is a ledger drawing that he did in the pictograph fashion.

So that's how you would have wrote his name because we didn't have a written language.

So that's why everything was done in pictograph form, and this one's actually a depiction of a buffalo hunt and then the celebration that goes along with it, a lot of the things that taught us how to be as native people, as Dakota came from observing and learning from the buffalo.

Even some of the dreams that we had kind of included the buffalo, and this is a kind of a pretty wild interpretation of a dream that somebody might've had.

- We're trying to think outside of the box and reach our students in a new way and we felt very important that culture was our vehicle.

We're trying to study the buffalo all all the way from PE class, shop, art, music, all throughout the core classes.

When we hunted the buffalo, would I be able to do that all by myself?

No, I needed the other members of the tribe to help me so that buffalo created unity Okay.

We had to work together to hunt it.

We had to work together to track the buffalo even just find where the buffalo were at.

That's where the message or the theme of unity kind of came into play as the buffalo created that for our people.

Our people have been through a lot, our children have been through a lot, and those buffalo have been through a lot.

People tried to wipe us off the face of this earth and we're still here.

And a lot of it has to do with that buffalo bringing it all together in unity will create that healing.

That's powerful.

That's powerful.

They need to know the importance of that animal.

(slow relaxing music) - buffalo, has always been the native Americans economy.

They provided everything you needed at one time.

They're our modern day Walmart.

And that's how the federal government by destroying the buffalo, they tried to destroy this reservation's culture.

- That connection that we have with that animal is very, very deep.

And when the buffalo went away from this area, we lost that connection.

And at times our people were just that lost because of it.

So when the buffalo were re-introduced to our reservation here, I think that connection was brought back.

And the only way to foster that connection or to rebuild that connection is to study.

Study why did they go away, why did they come back, and what can we do to keep them here?

(indistinct student chatter) - How did a 30-year absence, that buffalo was gone from our home here?

It caused a lot of confusion, a lot of lost souls, a lot of heartache for our people when the buffalo went away.

But now that we have reconnected with that animal maybe our connection to ourselves will become better.

Who we are.

- Don't be scared.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes.

I wasn't very confident when I was younger.

It was being scared to stand up in front of my peers and sing.

They all knew I sing.

Well, back when I was in school, being Indian wasn't cool.

You guys, don't be scared to show that.

Don't be scared to show how you guys sing in front of people.

So, this says grandfather, help me.

This pipe is sacred.

I love this way of life because I want to live.

(speaker sings traditional song) (students sing traditional song) - What's the importance of the buffalo to the people?

- When my brother here, Perry and I, we had the chance to go into the reintegrated youth offenders.

That's a federal hold for adolescents.

It was sad but probably the most population was from Fort Peck at that time.

That means young people your age.

It was sad to see that many people from Fort Peck, because most of the people that enter, unresolved grief and loss.

And how does that affect us?

The buffalo.

The buffalo gives us strength, endurance, and perseverance.

Their DNA is a part of us now.

So through them, people that tried to kill our native people, genocide, were still here.

- How can the buffalo help heal our people now?

- By watching them and observing them.

When they went out for the buffalo hunt they shot a buffalo.

The other buffalo, he said... And these are grown men, it made them cry.

The buffaloes tried to help them up, to stand them up because one of the relatives were there laying down.

Our ways not to hurt each other are ways to help each other, like the buffalo nation does.

(indistinct student chatter) - Just a quick reminder.

Again, what we are about to do is something very special.

Not too many kids your age get to see something like this because you experienced something like this, we wanna remain respectful to the culture.

So in order to do that way, we have to do things a certain way.

One of the things that we have to do is this pipe ceremony.

If you've never done this and you've never been around this, remember this is part of who we are.

We're gonna kill a buffalo.

We're taking that life.

So when we smoke this pipe, we're offering good things for that spirit of that buffalo.

We're asking that when that buffalo goes across that they meet him in a good way because he's going to provide food for our people.

So one of the most honorable things these buffalo do for us, they teach us a lot of things.

If you watch a buffalo in a storm, a buffalo faces the storm.

It doesn't turn away from the storm.

And that's where we grow our teachings as we start to grow up and we start to understand our culture.

That's why I always pray to that buffalo because that buffalo teaches us how to be strong.

When we are faced with adversity, when we're faced with tough times, well I always think back to that buffalo.

And that's what gives me that strength to continue to push through.

I know you guys have lived, some of you have lived tough lives.

(slow music) - [Student 3] Hey guys, look.

There's buffalo way over there.

(slow music) (gun fires) - [Student 4] What does it mean to be strong?

- [Student 3] The buffalo remind me a friend.

If one is down, they protect each other.

Feeling free as can be.

They stay together when one is hurt, reminds me of a flock of birds always staying together.

- [Student 5] buffaloes teach us to go through storms.

- [Student 6] The buffalo helps us show our true colors.

- [Student 7] We will feel the pain, The same pain our ancestors felt.

- As I'm writing this, I could feel the cries and lost souls of the ancestors before me.

- They tried to make us feel ashamed about who we are.

Seeing my people prove them wrong.

We are still here in this together, we are one.

(indistinct chatter) - Robbie's going to step in now.

He's gonna show us a few things about the buffalo.

We're gonna get the buffalo.

And while he's doing that, he will explain some things that he's doing.

(indistinct student chatter) - [Student 8] Aren't your hands cold?

- No, not now.

This buffalo is warm inside.

This is a heart.

buffalo's heart.

It way way bigger.

- May I hold it?

Oh, my God.

- These are kidneys.

- I don't wanna touch that.

(indistinct) ...and you make your corn ball and it's perfect when you mix this with pulverized beet and berries and that preserves your meat.

So usually when a hunter would make his first kill- - Frances said he's take a bite.

- ...he'd take a bite at the liver.

Take a bite at the liver.

- Buffalo Unity Project coming to a close guys.

(students applaude) - Pass it around.

- Pass it around.

(students exclaims) - I'd say it's not that bad.

- [Jacob] I'm going to go around the room and we're going to go clockwise.

And we are going to share one thing that we liked.

- It felt weird to see the buffalo dying because I never seen one in front of me.

- So just mixed emotions.

You didn't know what to feel.

You're taking a life.

Even if it is an animal, that's a living thing.

That's part of us.

That's part of our people.

So yeah, I can totally relate to that mixed emotion and not knowing what to feel.

Jane Doug, what do you think, partner?

- The buffalo was extreme.

- The Buffalo Project in general, the whole thing?

What did you like the most?

- The pipe ceremony.

- The pipe ceremony.

That's pretty neat.

I've heard that answer more than once.

Was it your first pipe ceremony?

Pretty neat to see.

We have some students that find it very difficult to share whether it be on paper or whether it be orally.

I can relate to that.

I could relate to not wanting to share how I feel.

Do we always listen to our heart?

Over time, I've realized and I've come to learn how healing that can be.

(student chatter) (drums playing) (singing traditional song) We come from all walks of life in our community.

We're all willing to help each other, no matter who we are.

At times, it seems that we have forgotten.

We have forgotten that we're better, we're stronger as a group, as a whole.

The buffalo created that for our people.

Now, how can we continue that now?

(drums and singing continues) - [Student 9] Everyone can heal in their own unique ways.

Searching for truth, like buffalo searching for food.

- [Student 10] Life is very valuable.

Precious like the blood that runs through our veins.

- [Student 11] There's music in the world even when you can't see it.

- [Student 12] Run free like the wind, buffalo.

We are more than just a number.

(slow music) - [Student 13] Fly on set.

- [Instructor] Let's quiet, please.

Let's focus.

- To flow with intelligent, to your challenge of unknown, to always be true, to always give respect.

- Ready?

- Many people in our communities are trying to keep our culture alive.

- You're going like this.

(slow music) - Nice work.

(slow music)