I've always loved plants and I knew that we were from the prairie, but I didn't realize how special they were and how it functioned before their stories about the grass being really tall.

And I kind of thought a prairie was just all one type of grass, and it's really made up of lots of different grasses, different plants, and I just love the flowers.

They're all really beautiful flowers.

We have a particularly fluorophores prairie compared to the tallgrass prairie in the Midwest.

The southwest corner of our state has several times amount of wildflowers per acre.

And all the plant species that we have in Louisiana really add to the prairies incredibly diverse beauty.

Prairie is a kaleidoscope.

It's ever changing.

Once you began to learn, the says to me, fall in love with.

When I first started working with Prairie, I was trying to figure out which plants were which.

But everything in the prairie is making a contribution.

The animals, insects, fungi and bacteria all work together.

It's truly an ecosystem built around a community.

Is one of the most valuable habitats we have in North America.

But it's not an easy system to drive by and recognize.

Historical coastal prairie goes from Lafayette, Louisiana, all the way to Corpus Christi, Texas.

Flooding is becoming more and more common.

Prairie is very good, capturing water and could mitigate flooding tremendously.

Native plants produce huge root systems, and there's evidence to indicate that native grasslands sequester more carbon and forested.

When it dies, it falls over.

That carbon goes back into the atmosphere.

But when the prairie is grazed down to the ground or burned, very little of the carbon is lost.

It's all stored below ground.

And by sequestering large quantities of carbon, Prairie mitigates climate change in a way that's extremely sustainable.

It's a beautiful and diverse system, and its cultural importance is really significant.

Prairies are part of our people's lineage and heritage.

My own people in our tribe lived in prairies, and there were practices that were developed that would keep land healthy and to grow things sustainably.

Practices that were learned over several thousands of years.

European populations did not understand indigenous plants and some of the practices they simply didn't understand at all.

Like controlled burns.

It prevents forest fires, but it also means useful plants grow up after the burn.

And of course, wildlife play an important role in their ecosystems.

The word for bison is shocking, which means a grass thing makes sense.

Bison fertilize areas.

Spread seeds.

It was a very useful animal.

You won't see bison roaming the prairies around here now, but there was a time when they would.

So the reason we don't have very much prairie now is because the settlers who arrived here spread out on the prairie and kept cattle.

They began to grow rope crops, and the land was very fertile.

So they grew rice, corn and cotton and sugarcane in the prairie.

Then they began to build homes and highways.

The prairies in Louisiana covered an area of about 2.5 million acres.

Many of the species we no longer have the combination of agriculture, overgrazing, and settlements eventually displaced all of the prairie.

With the exception of less than 1% that still exists today, we lost most of our lands, and it's had long ranging environmental consequences.

The number of birds, the number of bees, the number of butterflies, the number of plants species are crashing, climate change.

These things are all converging at the same point and which will end Acadiana as we know it.

So I'm screaming at the top of my lungs.

We must do something now.

That.

Something or the.

Taco Bell wish.

Yeah.

And for those immigrants who still haven't learned our language.

I am Jeffrey, the alligator clan of the attack nation I live in.

I often tell the story I found in a newspaper article about this Ishak trapper who lived next to a white family named Phillips.

In 1830, a Phillips family settled at Grand, where they were neighbors with an Indian trapper who spoke some English.

He said, look, there's a big storm coming, and what our tribe would do.

We would have certain oak trees that we would shape with platforms on them, so that in a storm you could go up into the tree, would tie yourself in with various vines, and as the wind move by, you could just you would survive.

When the tidal waves and winds receded, the Indian climb down out of the tree that the Phillips family, which had not heeded his advice, was swept away.

That Phillips family, they drowned in the hurricane.

And in some ways the Ishak were still in this tree saying like, you know, there's this thing you could do to avoid environmental catastrophe.

And still the case that people aren't listening.

For the most part, and it's still the case that they're going to drown if they don't.

Grasslands throughout the southeast, for some reason, they haven't been focused on.

They were the first places that we put cattle on, the first places that we plowed and built cities on.

So we just kind of forgot they existed just because they weren't there anymore.

So we really need to have general public awareness to be able to do anything, to have anybody care about what used to be our main ecosystem in southwest Louisiana, but trying to recreate these native grasslands, we have to have seeds, and the seeds are scarce.

The seed source is gone.

If you want native prairie plants, you've got to get them from somebody who knows where to collect them and have some sense of what they're collecting over here.

Look, here's a prairie plant.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

Right here.

The Tephrosia on a bracket.

I think it's not being snout p something like that coming, but I've never seen assemblies that would be called prairie or Cajun prairie that's never been plowed.

Never been for at least from our viewpoint.

Looking at it seemed to not be plowed, not to be destroyed.

About 40 years ago, we were doing a project on rice fields.

Doctor Beijing and I, we were driving right on this road there.

I jumped out and walked out and started collecting plants out here.

He was out there for about 20 minutes.

So I went out to get him and I said, Charles, we need to get out of here.

It's time to move.

And he stood up and he said, this is prairie.

As it turns out, the only prairie left was along railroad right of ways.

We studied and detailed every plan.

The plants in the remnant strip are partially destroyed by railroad activities, by spraying from the highways or nearby cultivated fields.

And we realized that those strips were in great danger of being destroyed.

Then I bought a camera and started taking pictures.

The photographs are the good insight into what native prairie was like 100 or 1000 years ago.

We were within 200 acres of losing native Cajun prairie.

All habitats should be protected because once they're gone.

They're gone and there's just no way to bring them back.

Oh.

Another train.

We know enough now to recreate Prairie to some extent, and possibly the ecological services that the Prairie provided.

There really was a prairie at one time down here in south Louisiana.

The first time I saw that Cajun Prairie was the restoration site.

No one had ever told me about the prairie, and I had been involved with environmental and ecological stuff throughout my high school and college, and I never heard about it, and it just seemed something special and rare.

It was incredible.

Ten acres of native plant species that I'd never seen before.

I'm really humbled to work in Charles and Malcolm's footsteps and manage the Cajun Prairie restoration sites.

It's such a precious resource for us.

I've been involved with about 600 acres planted so far, at least in my lifetime.

My dream is to be able to recreate 10,000 acres of Cajun prairie.

It's going to take some work and it's going to take some time.

But 30 years from now, you can have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres, and this world will change.

So I'm pushing for a million acres.

It's uneven.

So watch your footing.

Well, we're coming up on the butterfly area.

Not seeing a lot.

Let's hope we see a bunch of them.

All right.

I see a half dozen butterflies right in this area.

You see the butterflies starting to dance?

They're waking up.

They drying their wings off.

When I see a distinctive bee or butterfly, you begin to understand the complex coevolution.

Rather than just a plan.

This is a signature spider.

He's probably caught one of my butterflies.

So rather than say, I love this plant, I love this b I love this butterfly.

I love the interactions.

I like the fact they co-evolved together and we can maintain them by just growing the plants.

This this is a plant that has the longest route.

It goes down 16 to 18ft just like my front yard.

We need to invest our land in the prairie.

All my neighbors here have two three acre lawns.

They can actually just put half of that back in the Cajun prairie.

Talking to.

They have lost their topsoil.

And now the farmers are having a real problem producing crops, which is why this is what they need to do.

Reinvigorate the soils by installing prairie.

I've had about 30 years a deep interest in coastal prairie plants.

We have a 12 acre farm, and we hope to eventually have seven and a half acres of prairie, or in the process of growing prairie species suited for ranchers and farmers, planting small amounts every year because the seed is very difficult to come by.

The seed was hand collected from remnants.

Prairie benefits us and there are many, many ecosystem services.

We named the formed Cajun Prairie form.

We want to produce seed and generate knowledge about how to do this.

I run the form with my son, Andre.

He's a terrific vegetable grower and largely in charge of marketing.

He's really done a good job.

I had no idea until I was 40 that the land that my family formed was historically prairie.

The fact that we plowed all of that system under it was a very sad realization for me.

And.

Well, once it's gone, it's gone forever.

My grandpa, he didn't remember what it looked like before farmland, because it was just so integral to their way of life in like the early 1900s.

And we come back with such a greater appreciation for what we took for granted before, because it was all we knew.

We do a lot by land, so we traditionally have been so isolated, but there's somehow just this explosion of community and creativity, the cooking and the dancing.

There's lots of artists, musicians, and it's just a nice community to be a part of.

We just were always hard working people.

We did a lot of farm work back in the days.

My family didn't have the resources and the money and land to own a lot of cattle, but they worked a lot of people's cattle.

And you were to doing this?

I guess it's just in the blood, you know?

It's what we do.

I finally was able to buy my own land and buy my own cattle.

And it's a gamble.

Some years the market is good, some years the market is not as good.

People lived a lot off the land around here in the prairies.

They don't make a living doing that on these lands.

No, more like they used to do back in the days.

It's not plentiful enough.

You have to go further out and get out of the prairie.

I've been raising cows for 30 years now on my own.

But I never knew what it was like to not play music.

And the way we play the music down here, there's a lot of connection with the land.

Till I call love.

I need to catch it, I call.

Lover Valley now.

There's a lot of musicians around the area, but if that whole Cajun person dies out, it's like a whole different Louisiana.

And so I like keeping that tradition alive.

And there's a whole lot more to be done.

The prairie is a place of homeland, even when I see it without fields of river cane, even when I see it without a lot of indigenous practices being followed.

There's a common American prejudice that all the real Indians are something of the past, and we are something of the past, but we're something of the present as well.

And part of our cultural preservation is to ensure that we're something of the future.

That's your favorite?

When Adam and I got together, we used to just take walks in the prairie almost daily.

When we started having kids.

They were digging in the garden with us.

They were planting with us, lear Look how pretty you want to get through.

I really hope that they understand they're not weeds, that they serve a purpose.

I hope it broadens their kind of understanding of life.

There's so much that lies below all of this.

A whole ecosystem, below all of this, because of these plants.

And I hope they can pass it on to.

During the winter.

The prairies dormant, but.

We're still very active in management.

Burning off the previous year's growth to open up the ground for the New Year's growth to come.

The springtime in the summer is basically just time to appreciate the wildflowers as the spring flowers bloom and set seed will be more active in selective weed management and seed collection.

The clumps will be at the bottom, shaded out by all the fluffy stuff, so you got to keep stirring.

It is really only the stuff on the top dries out.

There have been a lot of efforts to try to restore parts of the prairie, to sort of rebuild those ecosystems, and it's a lot of work.

10,000 acres.

I think I can do it.

I don't think it's too far fetched.

Might be kind of big to get in my truck.

We like to get the seeds planted as early as possible in the fall, so they can come up during the winter.

If we aren't able to restore and save prairie, the southwestern habitat of Louisiana will have no natural ecosystem, and ecosystem diversity allows humans to do what we do to farm, how we farm to harvest, what we harvest, and to be able to live here.

We can't really stand to lose anymore because we don't have anything else left to lose.

We're struggling to find enough seed, but we have enough, I think, to reconstruct a viable Cajun prairie, which will maintain what we call a Acadiana as a natural area.

We can put Prairie back.

This is the time to do that.

So whenever y'all are finished with the buckets, we can move on to the next one.

Nice to meet you.

More and more people are hearing about Prairie, and that's one of the important aspects to be able to save it.

We have to have public support.

People have to know it's there.

Good morning.

You listening to broadcasting the language, the music and the culture of Louisiana to you guys here in Acadiana, but also everyone listening via the web around the world.

We are so excited to be with you here and tell you about native prairie plants.

Hope is to.

Yes.

Native plants are wonderful for the soil in Louisiana.

They prevent erosion.

They remove toxins from the ground, and they're wonderful for the pollinators with a lot of good pollinator plants in here.

So you can help the bees and benefit your backyard, front yard and your neighborhood.

One of the most beautiful prairies we have is one that my neighbors created.

It's absolutely gorgeous.

You can prevent erosion and cultural erosion, really, to get granular in our language, Ishak means someone who has been born.

That was in.

Malcolm and I started the Cajun Prairie, and we worked and got students to come out and actually gathered seeds.

And even today, I'm still trying to spread the word about nature, and I hope I can keep going for many more years out there to get more people involved in planting seeds and in nurturing nature, if I can.

So thank you very much.

So it's such an honor.

And you can say what she has.

We can.

Anybody else they want to add to this campus that we might see in that prairie bug that must be pollinators.

Pollinators.

That's right.