TINA MCDUFFIE: In Northern California, wildfires are now catastrophic.

ELIZABETH AZZUZ: The land can't take much more.

Everywhere you go, everything's on fire.

MCDUFFIE: But to many Native tribes, the solution is controlled fire.

MARGO ROBBINS: Fire is meant to be part of the ecosystems.

AZZUZ: It makes the land feel better.

MARGO ROBBINS: It's really gratifying to see how clear the land is-- also, all of this new growth.

MCDUFFIE: "Firelighters: Fire Is Medicine," on Local, U.S.A. ♪ ♪ (flames crackling) That is so awesome.

I love this-- look at that!

♪ ♪ (man speaking on radio) ♪ ♪ MAN: A gauge for how much fuel?

WOMAN: You're about, about halfway full?

WOMAN: Testing, testing.

♪ ♪ (radio beeps) - Okay.

(radio squawks) AZZUZ: Grandfather, Grandmother.

See us, hear your children.

Guide our hands as we bring fire back to the land to restore our environment.

Help us to teach those outside of our world what needs to be done to bring ourselves back into balance.

We're going to reach out and we're going to put fire on the land now, and then we're going to pass it on to our Indigenous brothers and sisters, so that they may lay fire on the land, also.

(speaking Yurok) - (whooping) ♪ ♪ AZZUZ: We're firelighters.

We are not firefighters.

We don't chase it.

We light it and we work with it.

AMANAKA YANCEY: You feel it so much when you're out here.

You can't not feel it.

When you look at areas of forests that used to be open plains and prairies, they're Douglas fir plantations now, and that's because of colonization.

This is who we are and this is part of our culture.

We're playing the part that we're supposed to play in the ecosystem.

MARGO ROBBINS: We've been taking care of this land for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

When the Europeans came, they came to these park-like landscapes and thought that they was naturally that way.

They was that way because we stewarded the land, and you can see what a hands-off approach has done.

We have megafires because they said, "Hands off!

"Nobody do anything to that land.

"And any time a fire starts, "you're going to put it out by 10:00 the next morning.

And any Native you see starting a fire, you shoot 'im."

AZZUZ: It's 150 years of fire seclusion, because the Forest Service didn't think that people could maintain land, didn't have that skill, didn't have that ability.

We didn't sit in that classroom.

This is our classroom.

This is our church.

This is our grocery store.

It's our pharmacy.

This is where we get what we need.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ CRISTINA ROBBINS: Whoo!

First springer of the year!

- (loudly): Whoo!

- Whoo!

MARGO ROBBINS: We live next to the Klamath River.

Our reservation extends on a mile on each side.

The river is like our lifeblood.

(both talking softly) MARGO ROBBINS: The tattoo on my face is called a "one-eleven."

It is a traditional tattoo of the women in our tribe and our neighboring tribes.

So I was taught that it is a symbol of beauty.

I got mine when I was 50.

Little past puberty.

(laughs) AZZUZ: I wander out in these mountains, I gather up as much as I can, and I process them and give them to, to elders, to single families.

I just make sure that everyone in the community always has good food-- healthy food.

I pretty much eat roots, barks, things.

(chuckles) Think, I think I'm part wild.

(birds chirping) We always ask permission from nature to take something, because it's not our right to just assume that we can do that.

I asked if I could take these for you girls.

So here you go.

- Thank you.

(grasses snapping) We'll start this way-- you ready?

WOMAN: Yeah.

- Okay.

I started burning at four years old.

As any curious child will do, I was playing with matches, and my grandfather, who was blind, smelled the smoke.

And he made me put the fire out.

And then I was told to sit at his feet.

And, while sitting at his feet, I was informed of who I was as a true human being, what my responsibility was to the Earth, what my responsibility is to the people, to the land.

So, very young, I got a lesson in, okay, we don't play with matches, because fire is a tool.

Fire warms us.

It cooks our food.

Fire restores our environment.

It takes care of our land, takes care of our plants, our animals, takes care of the water.

All this charcoal and ash that we put on the ground leaches back into the water table and purifies the water.

♪ ♪ MARGO ROBBINS: Fire is meant to be part of the ecosystems, and as people, we also play a very critical part in utilizing fire to keep our ecosystems healthy.

The animals rely on fire, because without fire, the land becomes so choked with brush, they have no place to live and raise their young.

AZZUZ: Fire is regrowth.

It's new life, it's regeneration.

You know, when you open it all up and it can breathe, and the water can get down into the trees and the plants, instead of just hitting the leaf duff and floating down the hill and not going into the water table, it's, gives me the ability to get materials I need, foods I need.

It makes the land feel better.

♪ ♪ MARGO ROBBINS: This place actually used to be about 50% prairie.

So it was attractive to settlers.

Back in the Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, they sent surveyors out here, and they decided that one way to assimilate Native people was to give them ownership of land.

All the rest of the land that wasn't allotted to people they declared surplus.

So, of course, all the big timber, all the redwood places down by the mouth, it was all surplus, and big timber barons bought them.

♪ ♪ The settlers were given so many acres to create homesteads and farms.

They saw the trees as a crop that could be exploited, so they logged all the big ones.

A combination of these timber barons planting fir trees where they didn't belong and not allowing Native people to burn like we used to, the fir trees were allowed to encroach on even those prairies that hadn't been planted.

AZZUZ: We're coming out of a huge fire suppression.

It's been about 150 years.

We have forested areas.

I wish we only had meadows and prairies and grasslands, because we probably would have been a lot further along by now.

♪ ♪ (camera shutter clicking) MARGO ROBBINS: We as a society have had it pounded into us for over 100 years that fire is bad and all fires need to be put out.

In the late 1800s, Native people were actually shot for trying to take care of the land with fire.

In the early 1900s, around 1930, laws was written against the average person being able to burn, and the Forest Service was ordered to put every fire out by 10:00 the next morning.

The result of removing the ability to use fire from Native people resulted in diminished food sources, diminished water quality, wildfire risk-- all of these very detrimental things to the environment and to us as Native people.

And so that's what we're living with today.

The right to use fire is heavily regulated by the government, and we need to follow the rules and regulations that they have established or risk very severe consequences.

DAWN BLAKE: With climate change exacerbating everything, the state of the forest right now has a lot to do with the way that it's been managed.

In order to be able to get fire back on the landscape at a management level, we have to reduce the fuel loading and the number of trees per acre.

That's restoration.

It's kind of funny that I found myself in the position of being a forestry director, because I feel like I stumbled on this career that really just suited me as a person.

I've always been an outdoor person.

You know, my, my mom tells me about when I was a baby, and they said that I, I loved it outside so much, and so they would try to, they'd take me outside, but they would try to bring me back in the house, and I would cry as soon as they stepped foot in the door.

Stepped back out with me and I would stop crying.

Step in, cry, step out... (clears throat): They were young parents, so they probably thought that was really funny.

(laughs) In my lifetime, what we're looking at now is pretty normal, and I'm just now trying to train myself and training myself to change my lens and try to think back to what this would have looked like 100 years ago.

One of the ways that we can do that is look at the residual trees, the larger-diameter trees, or sometimes the stumps on the landscape, and you can kind of understand what the spacing was before, when we were actually managing.

And when you're looking at these large tanoak trees, they were undoubtedly managed to be that.

We as Indigenous people were manipulating the landscape for food production.

So that's my process right now, to look at the spacing in here.

And it's really hard to maneuver through.

When you put fire on the ground, you're going to have a little bit of tree mortality.

Sometimes not actual mortality.

Sometimes you're just having the scarring.

But that's all helping this ecosystem and the process for, you know, not just our own food production, but for habitat, as well, for animals.

When these tanoak trees get to a certain diameter, they're likely to have rot on the inside, where the inner portion of the tree is starting to rot, and it becomes soft.

So that's really important wildlife habitat when it gets to these certain diameters, or decadence.

The cavities are really important for animals.

And so cavity recruitment is a really slow process.

We, as Native people who are managing with fire, we're acting as ecosystem engineers to initiate some of the scarring and to start that cavity development.

When we're talking about management with fire that's a missing component is the human influence.

In a young forest, those are really rare things.

Cavities and the standing dead trees are really uncommon in a newer forest.

♪ ♪ (flames crackling) ♪ ♪ AZZUZ: This is what happens on a daily fire.

We do business on the side of the road.

We sign checks, stuff them in envelopes... - It doesn't say what for, says I was gone.

(both laugh) AZZUZ: Margo and I have known each other our whole life.

We grew up in culture training together.

We went to culture training with our elders.

Twice a week, we had to go, our parents would drop us off, and we would wear our regalia, and we learned how to do our ceremonial dances.

We learned our songs, we learned our stories, we learned who we were.

And over the years, obviously, I left home when I was 18, I went away, I went to college, raised a family, got married, got divorced, all that-- came back.

I happened to be at the community center in Weitchpec one day, and Margo walked in, and we just kind of smiled at each other, and we chitchatted a little bit, and she wandered off, and I wandered off.

And Bob McConnell, he was our former executive director, he said, "I want you to go help Margo with fire."

I was, like, "Yes, finally, I get to work on fire!"

♪ ♪ A few years ago, Building Healthy Communities came onto our reservation and asked us what we needed.

"You're in a very rural place.

"You have no hospital.

"You have no grocery stores.

"There's really no transportation "other than the tribal van "that will pick you up and take you a few places.

"What do you guys want out here?

What do you need?"

And everybody in that room said they wanted fire back on the ground: the elder women, the elder men, the young people...

The young people wanted to know how to gather, but didn't know what to gather and didn't know where it was.

So we started out to work on fire, and the young man that was there said, "Well, you know, we're, "it's going to take us at least five years to accomplish this.

"We're gonna have to get 500 people in this room.

"We gotta get media, we've gotta get cameras, we gotta get all these people."

And he said, "Well, you know, "you just don't understand about an action item.

"You gotta get people out there, you gotta talk about it.

You gotta protest, you gotta do all this stuff."

And I'm, like, well, that's just wasting my time.

And we all said, "We're really sorry, "but we can do this on our own, thank you very much.

Have a nice day."

And the poor man went away defeated.

MARGO ROBBINS: Fire was our number-one issue.

We needed to reduce the risk of fire danger, because we was actually living in a tinderbox.

♪ ♪ AZZUZ: We're in areas that have fuel laying everywhere, and we have to be really careful about that.

We can't just light the forest on fire and let it go.

It actually needs to be tended.

Prescribed burns, so you're doing land restoration, you're clearing dead and downed fuels.

We're going in, we're clearing.

We got to get all this stuff cleared up.

Somebody's home is safe, an elder is safe, a family is safe, a forest is safe.

That's a prescribed burn, or a controlled burn.

But a cultural burn is for resources.

It's for plants, basket materials, medicine, food.

It's to be able to open a forest up like this so you can see for miles.

It, you know, revolves around the animals.

It revolves around the trees.

It revolves around the food and the medicine.

It was at least a year before we was able to do first burn.

It was 2013 or 2014, and it was done in a traditional hazel-gathering area, and they burned seven acres-- so exciting.

♪ ♪ AZZUZ: We use the hazel and the willow for baskets.

Having the ability for them to come out and gather again is something that, you know, I didn't actually think would happen in my lifetime.

Everybody was excited.

People were driving by cheering, and, you know, "Don't put the fire out!

Let it go, let it go!"

they kept saying, you know?

And we were, like, "We're not putting it out.

"Don't worry," you know, "we're right here."

And one young man came back, and he brought me a little jar of jelly, and I said, "Oh, what's this for?"

He says, "My mom thinks you're the greatest person on Earth."

And I said, "Well, I don't know about all that."

He goes, "No."

He goes, "She was so excited "that you young women are out here burning for materials that she couldn't even find, you know, before."

And he said, "She's actually starting to want to weave again because she knows those materials are available."

So exciting-- we was thrilled.

We was going to have hazel again.

And we had a celebration at the community center in Weitchpec.

And then we started planning our next burn.

♪ ♪ AZZUZ: From there came Cultural Fire Management Council.

We formed as a nonprofit.

I'm the secretary for Cultural Fire Management Council.

Margo is my boss.

She's our executive director.

(people talking in background) ♪ ♪ MARGO ROBBINS: The TREX model of, of burning was developed by The Nature Conservancy, and it stands for Training Exchange, and it is a training for qualified firefighters.

I'd like to take a minute to acknowledge that we are on Yurok ancestral territory.

The Yurok people have never been removed from our homelands.

We have resided here for tens of thousands of years.

The people that come come from all across the United States and other countries, and their qualifications range from, "This is my first fire," to decades of experience.

And when we say train, you get experience doing it with this qualified mentor teaching you how.

So our TREXes are cultural burn training exchanges.

And we're, make sure that while the people are here, we are sharing some of our culture with them.

We have a reciprocal relationship with nature.

We depend on it and it depends on us.

AZZUZ: It's like a classroom setting.

So we have a base set up where we have sandwich boards everywhere, easels.

We have papers put up on all the walls.

They have our burn zones, they have our thoughts and ideas about how we're going to go about doing it.

We take field trips out into those units before we actually ignite.

Our burn units are going to be down below us.

We have with us today a couple of plant experts, the fabulous Claire Brown and also Amanaka.

They've been doing plant surveys on the different units, logging what is growing there, and they will come back in afterwards and see how our work affected the plant population.

♪ ♪ YANCEY: I never went looking for fire.

Fire found me.

It's hard to find things in this life that you can give yourself to that feel greater than you.

Okay, yeah, you can barely see it.

I was born in Hawaii, having a background with growing food and, like, engaging with seasons, and a bit more Earth connection, which is really similar to the community I've met here.

Whenever I came here and got invited to be here and stay a while, I started and plug into the community, and, like, try and hear, like, what the ask is and what the need is.

And when I first moved here, it was, like, pretty predominantly fire.

Okay, I've got a strong body.

Like, maybe that's a way that I can start plugging in.

(talking softly) YANCEY: I volunteered and spent a couple of weeks getting trained on how to cut fire line and how to engage with the forest, how to read winds, and fuel types, and what trees were what.

At first, I was just, like... (blows out slowly) Had no idea what the hell was going on.

(laughs) It was so over my head.

But by the end of that week, I was, like, "I'm hooked."

(man talking on radio in background) But meeting Margo and Elizabeth was one of the first reasons that I decided to, to really give fire a go.

I have been really, really lucky and really privileged to learn everything I know about fire from women-- Yurok women, Indigenous women.

Guide our hands as we bring fire back to the land, to restore the ecosystem, to restore our food sources and our medicinal sources.

(singing in Yurok) (song continues) (song continues) ♪ ♪ After we start that initial fire with the wormwood torches, then the guys will light up their, their drip torches from that, which are a mix of, of diesel and regular gas.

♪ ♪ We always start at the top of the slope.

Critically important if you want to keep a fire under control to keep, start at the top, at the highest point.

- (whooping) ♪ ♪ YANCEY: As soon as you hear fire on the ground, you can feel your heart just start to... (imitates rapid heartbeat) And, like, all of your senses have to be alive.

You have to pay attention to the wind, to the ground, to the trees, to the fire, to the smoke, to what people are saying what.

Perfect, copy that, thank you.

It is such an adrenaline rush.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ AZZUZ: Fire lines are put in basically anywhere from six to ten feet wide and down to bare mineral soil.

There's hose lays put on them to mitigate any situation.

And that's why we have people out in the units, roving the units, looking for any potential spots or anything like that.

♪ ♪ YANCEY: There's firing and holding are the two biggest teams.

The firing team directly feeds the earth.

Firing is going to make their way back and forth along that, pulling fire down.

And then as they do, we're going to have holding teams along every edge of that.

So on the two sides, like, as they're coming down, and on the top, so that way, we have eyes all around and making sure that that fire stays in the lines of where we want to keep it.

♪ ♪ MARGO ROBBINS: Let's see, I might have a lighter.

(fire crackling) We have made fire!

(laughs) Well, we use sticks to light this little bottom part.

- (responds indistinctly) - (laughs) We're, like, "We don't need torches!"

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (people talking in background) MARGO ROBBINS: As we bring the fire down, down the hill in strips, when we get close to the bottom, we will finish burning just the outside edges.

And then we can go all the way down to the bottom and light it from the bottom.

And it flares up really big because fire loves to race uphill.

And so when we're lighting it at the bottom of the hill, when all the top is already black and the sides are black, it flares up really big, it races up the hill till it meets that black, and then there's no more, no more fuel for it to burn, and so it just dies down.

♪ ♪ AZZUZ: There we go, there's the picture right there.

I'm, I'm bubbling with joy with the way that today went.

I'm so impressed that, you know, we went through and lit up the bottom, and it shot up the hill and met up with the road prism like they predicted.

And it was hard work, but I'm just so happy.

♪ ♪ (birds chirping, insects buzzing) MARGO ROBBINS: This is one of the burn units.

We call it the transfer unit.

It's really gratifying to see how clear the land is, and also all of this new growth.

We have really greatly reduced the fire hazard in this area.

So this is actually rated by Cal Fire as very high fire-risk area along this stretch.

It provides cultural resources, as well as providing wildfire protection.

This is actually a place that's full of hazel.

And so it was one of our priority places to burn.

Now we can see between all of the trees down to the ground, we can see up to the sky line.

It's also returning into some grasslands.

So that's also an important priority for us, to restore the grasslands, because there are certain species of animals that, that's their preferred territory, elk being one of them.

So at one time, our lands were about 50% prairie, and we had a lot of elk here.

But there's no more elk here.

They're over the ridge, where there's grass.

And so our goal in restoring the grasslands is to bring the elk home.

AZZUZ: So this area I'm walking in actually is part of a program through the Roots & Shoots.

And you can see all these young Doug firs in here, in a area that's really crowded out and suffocated.

But as you go through and you look around and see where all these young firs are, they've crowded out the bear grass, you know?

And they've shaded out the ground, so certain things won't grow underneath them anymore.

And, you know, and then when you're able to leave that area and you come out into an area where the ground starts to open up more, and the fire has been here and consumed a lot of the dead and down, then you'll come out into an area that has, you know, amazing clearings that are open, accessible for the people to gather, and a lot less young Doug firs.

So you'll see some new trees coming in, some new grasses coming in.

So you have a completely different forest type here.

This ground has been maintained.

This is, you know, the difference between an unmanaged forest and a managed forest.

♪ ♪ CLAIRE BROWN: It's very clear in the landscape when you look now, like, after 100 years or so of fire suppression, that the places that people have been able to keep burning here and there, like this place, where the hazel is, have this incredible diversity.

It's what keeps these places alive.

This was burned one year ago, almost exactly to the day.

Margo asked me and Amanaka to try to develop this plant study to help track how the burns are changing the vegetation over time.

CFMC as a group developed a list of questions that would guide this plant study.

And some of the questions are just, like, what plants are here in the landscape?

YANCEY: Okay, cool, now let's just walk the plot and get the whole plant list, and then we'll estimate the cover.

Lupine.

- Lupine.

And then, like, are our burns making it weedier?

Are they bringing back native plants?

Just, like, what's going on?

Amanaka and I have been putting in these monitoring plots.

We go to a place that's going to be burned in the coming season, walk around, get familiar with what plants are growing where, and a plot is just kind of like a snapshot.

Basically, list all the plants that are growing there, and then do an estimate of their cover.

It gets burned, we come back and then document first the effects of the fire, like, how much of the leaf litter was consumed by the fire, how much of the shrubs were?

Did it barely burn at all?

Did it kill any trees?

And then after that, the regrowth.

♪ ♪ AZZUZ: Spending a day in the woods, I can come out here with just my water and myself, and be fine all day long, and not realize that I didn't bring any food.

You know, because it's out here.

Most people wouldn't know what to do for a toothache or an injury or anything.

You know, the nearest clinic is an hour away.

The nearest hospital is an hour-and-a-half away.

Most of the Indigenous peoples all around the world still practice and use their traditional medicines.

CRISTINA ROBBINS: Going to the medicine patch here.

Ready?

Foot forward.

One, two, three...

There we go.

All right.

♪ Going to the medicine patch ♪ Remember what this is called?

- Yeah.

- What is it called?

- Um, wormwood.

- Yeah, wormwood.

What do we do with the wormwood?

- Cook it in the house!

- We cook it in the house, huh?

All right, what do we tell the wormwood?

- Thank you.

- Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

(speaking Yurok) Want to show Grandma what you got?

MARGO ROBBINS: What you got?

What is it?

Awesome!

Is it wormwood?

KENNETH: Yeah.

- Nice!

- One.

CRISTINA ROBBINS: Count them-- two.

- Three.

- Three.

I'm gonna help you pour this-- it's really hot.

They're hot-- okay, let me put that one on.

Thank you for your help.

Now we just let them sit and we gotta wait for them to harden up.

And then we'll put the labels on, and they're ready to give out.

- (sighs) - (sighs): Thank you.

Oh, awesome.

MARGO ROBBINS: So this is one of the medicinal teas.

It is called the lemon balm.

And, oh, my gosh, it smells so good.

(sniffs) You can make it into a tea, and it is a mood enhancer.

It makes you happy.

(laughs) Because there is so much vegetation that has been reduced on the hillside, it has enough water to flourish now.

This is the soaproot.

Look at that.

Is that cool or what?

So it's these hairs that you use for the basket brush, and the bulb part that you use for either soap or to get rid of poison oak.

AZZUZ: We don't metabolize modern foods, I guess you would say.

We didn't have fried foods, you know, we didn't have all the sugars, all these things that other people are able to tolerate.

We don't metabolize alcohol, because alcohol was never something we had.

So we have huge amounts of diabetes because of the alcohol, the sugar...

The, the food in general is not healthy for us, you know, as people in general-- it's not healthy for anyone, but especially for people that live off the land.

We eat just about everything that comes out of the river-- sturgeon, salmon, eels, trout, steelhead, everything.

You know, we eat all of that.

You can find river mussels.

So, you know, it's perfectly reasonable that a person could survive out here without having a grocery store or a pharmacist, for that matter.

You know, you have everything you need here.

(Kenneth babbling) CRISTINA: Can you say... (speaking Yurok) - (repeating hesitantly) AZZUZ: Having those foods available and knowing that our babies get to eat these things, you know, our kids are used to eating acorns and salmon and eels on a daily basis.

♪ ♪ DANIA COLEGROVE: So this right here is acorn soup.

The best way to eat it is with smoked fish.

So this is traditionally cooked with rocks.

These rocks right here come from the river.

River bar.

You find them down below here.

They're like an iron rock.

And so they're made to get red-hot.

These rocks don't bust when they get red-hot.

The average rock, it gets red-hot, it'll crack.

We make flour out of the acorn, and we make, to make soup.

We, we leach the acorn first and get all the, all the acid, tannic acids out of it.

And so then it sweetens the acorn.

We put them in the wood stove to get them hot, hot, red-hot.

And then we just cook it right on the stove.

Traditionally, you use a basket made out of hazel and spruce.

So when it gets wet, it kind of... Basically, it doesn't leak.

A little over a gallon of flour makes about 15 pints, 15 to 18 pints.

So, and then, and then, that's how we process it, basically, so you can have it on hand to eat all the time.

♪ ♪ PETERS: I wove for a while when I was younger, and then I didn't weave for a while, and then I kind of got back into it.

This, and this one here I did several years ago.

I call it the bridge design, because it's on the bridge up there.

(laughs) But it's a tobacco pouch.

This black is black fern and the red is a Woodwardia fern, we call it (speaks Yurok).

And it's dyed with alder bark to make that red come out.

And they used it to tie on like this and tie it onto yous.

And they had Indian tobacco in it.

AZZUZ: Where everyone else has dishes, we had baskets.

We ate out of them, we carried water in them, we carried our babies in them, and we wear them for ceremony.

Our men carry a jump dance basket.

It's one of the most gorgeous baskets there is.

And when they lift that basket up to the heavens, they're lifting medicine up to pray.

And those baskets are woven by some of our best weavers.

You know, they're just gorgeous.

MARGO ROBBINS: I learned to weave baskets in elementary school, about fourth grade.

It was during that time that they had what was called the Nice program, and they hired elders from the community to teach us about our culture in the schools.

And then I met, went many, many, many years without making any other baskets.

♪ ♪ So I'm just putting the sticks in to soak so that they'll be pliable.

Weaving is like food for your soul.

It's just soothing.

There is something about it that you don't really understand or know until you've done it.

Connecting to the generations past and bringing that into the present day-- the materials themselves and interacting with the spirit of the, of the hazel and, and the willow roots... ...fire having created these beautiful sticks.

And so there is a lot of, of interaction between the weaver's spirit and the things that we are, materials we're working with, as well as with fire.

This is eel basket.

It is the first time I'm attempting to make an eel basket.

And it is made with hazel, and it is to trap eels in the river.

So this part here is a funnel, and the big wide open part of the funnel will face downriver, and the eels will swim in and get trapped in there.

♪ ♪ AZZUZ: There's a lot of time and energy that goes into making, you know, the regalia, the baskets, the things that we do.

And there's a lot of medicine and prayers that need to go into those things.

You pray, like, for the baby not to get harmed while they're in the basket.

You got to, like, think in your mind, "I hope nothing bad happens to them."

Like, you got to think good thoughts.

All these stitches are, like, one pair.

And these are to put the baby to sleep.

AZZUZ: We brought back something that was really kind of dying with our younger people.

They just didn't have access to the sticks, to the bear grass, to the ferns, to the things we needed, being able to go into your ancestral territory and gather materials that you couldn't find before because of fire seclusion, and the ability to carry our culture since time immemorial.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You come over on this side of that fir.

On this side, it's, like, going pretty good at the base and starting to go up it.

And that fir doesn't look, like, super-healthy.

AZZUZ: How do we spread this?

How do we make this bigger?

How do we talk to other tribes?

How do we bring them on board?

Because the more Indigenous people you have working on a project, the more voice you have.

And so the Indigenous peoples' network was formed.

The IPBN evolved out of a cultural fire, out of working with the Karuk tribe and the Hupa tribe.

And so Margo was working with Mary Huffman from The Nature Conservancy.

And we started having all these meetings and we started talking about what we were going to do as three tribes, how we were going to convince our tribal governments that we needed to be able to burn in our territory with their blessing, and that we would do everything we needed to do safely.

HUFFMAN: When you are a person of European descent, and you have been raised through Western science, you have to kind of start to listen and be quiet.

In The Nature Conservancy, these fire networks that we've been building and these fire partnerships we've been building all over the country, really didn't adequately include Indigenous people.

They had been burning for tens of thousands of years, and, as Indigenous people say, since time immemorial-- since time before memory.

We sat down with people from the Hupa, the Karuk, and the Yurok tribe.

We just asked the question, does this make any sense in a tribal context, this idea of partnering and networking across landscapes, and sharing knowledge and learning from each other, and getting burning done together?

And a Hupa man said, "Well, you know, tribes aren't always, they're not the same.

They're all different."

And he said, "But we three tribes "have a similar fire culture.

"We have very different languages, "but we have a similar fire culture, "and we are really trying to get more good fire on the ground, so we'd be willing to try it."

I really wanted to know how these people wanted to shape their fire future and let Indigenous people lead.

And so the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network very quickly defined itself, where we would focus on cultural burning and revitalization of fire culture, rather than just be like any other fire partnership.

AZZUZ: The Indigenous peoples' network started to grow out of this, so we went from the three tribes.

We're spreading out across the United States.

We're working with other tribes to help them get their burning rights back, helping them find their burning history.

Got a vehicle coming down!

AZZUZ: If we can do this across the United States, if every tribe, you know, truly wants to restore their ancestral territory, then we can put on training exchanges in their areas, where we go and we work with them.

We show them the techniques that we use.

We can adapt or amend what we do to their environment, and then help them to get through the policies.

You know, the permitting policies, the, the red tape that holds so many of us back.

You really have to be dedicated to what you're doing.

Roy, do you guys know how big that water tank is out there?

AZZUZ: It's just awesome to have the Native people feel empowered for their own land.

And that's what I hope to see across the United States eventually, is that all entities are able to restore their environment.

The fire seclusion has to come to an end.

♪ ♪ The land can't take much more.

You can look around us right now and see all this smoke.

Everywhere you go, everything is on fire.

MARGO ROBBINS: With these wildfires getting bigger and bigger, and these fir tree plantations that are all the same age, all the same height, all full of pitch, all that good stuff that fire loves, the fire is just raging through them and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

AZZUZ: It's basically negligence on our part.

You know, we've allowed the Earth to fall into such disrepair, that now we have to start over and clean this.

Once the Indigenous people stand back up and say, "Okay, enough of destroying the planet.

Can we please start regeneration?"

Because if we don't regenerate this, there won't be any of us here.

That's why we're in the pickle we're in now, because humans think that they dominate everything.

We don't own the land.

We don't own the planet.

We belong to her.

MARGO ROBBINS: You go up onto the go road, there's miles and miles and miles and miles of forest that have been burned down like they were moonscape.

And they're just waiting for a lightning strike to rage through them again.

And now it's been, like, four, five, eight years after the wildfire went through.

So there's all this brush in there.

So it's going to experience another wildfire.

It all comes back to the same thing, that they have taken the right to use fire away from the Indigenous people, and the land has gone untended.

♪ ♪ (talking softly) AZZUZ: After spending time with some firefighters, they question what they do.

Their whole goal is to save that house or save that, you know, forest or whatever they're working in.

Their thought about natural resources isn't even in their mindset.

And now they actually look at it in the sense of, "Oh, this is a tool "that we could use to clean this area "and to make it safe for everybody, and then we don't have to fight it."

You know, "We just can work with it."

(Margo Robbins singing in Yurok) (song continues) Hey!

(song continues) YANCEY: No matter where I'm at in this country, because I don't have roots here, I'm a guest.

When you're a guest in someone's home, how do you interact in that space?

And if you apply that mentality to how you interact with the land and the community, then it enables me to try and do better.

Accepting and owning that we are of settler descent and we are of colonizer descent is part of the healing process.

Where the world is at and where the Earth is at, we have a lot of mending to do.

We look to the original stewards of the land, we're going to get a lot better idea of how to do that.

(song continues) (song continues) AZZUZ: I do this because of my love for the land.

I do it because I get really excited when I see an elder tear up over basket material, when I give them food that we gathered off of the land.

This was my father's goal: to stand in a forest and look as far as he could see.

That's why I do this, because I want to stand in a forest with my grandkids, and I want them to look as far as they can see.

(song continues) AZZUZ: This is paying back to my people.

This is paying back to the land.

MARGO ROBBINS: We don't have to succumb to the trauma in our past.

Our history did not begin when non-Native people arrived on our shores.

We can't change the past, but we can educate people about what happened.

(song continues) I want to build a better future.

(song continues) (song ends) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪