Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: My rappel!

MAN: Oh, my gosh, it's beautiful.

MAN: Good morning, everybody.

Woo!

Let's do it again!

MAN: Nicely done!

MAN: Oh, yeah!

Fourteen and a half.

Yes, that was awesome!

[ people cheering ] There you go, up, up... ED JAHN: Next, on Oregon Field Guide: In the great basin desert, these women carry on a buckaroo tradition with a colorful twist.

WOMAN: You see how fluffy it is?

This is ideal to spin from.

Then it's a quick stop to smell the flowers in Portland's rhododendron garden.

WOMAN: All different kinds.

That's why you never get sick of rhododendrons.

There's always one more.

But first, the Indigenous people of Oregon never left.

[ all singing in Native language ] Now, they're restoring traditional land management practices to places they've reclaimed for their own.

This land alongside Willamette Falls used to be a tribal village.

Clearly, that's changed.

But now, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are reclaiming this area and others across the state.

And with a lot of redevelopment work, they're hoping to restore more than just the land.

It's the end of an era for these old industrial buildings that used to be part of the Blue Heron Paper Mill in Oregon City.

This kind of destruction is a form of healing for Cheryle Kennedy.

This is the third building that is going to be laid to rest.

Once all of this is down, we will be able to look at it differently.

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde recently purchased this land, buying their way back to this place hundreds of years after their ancestors were forced out by the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855.

My great-great grandfather was one of the treaty signers that signed.

Our village was right here.

At the time, white settlers were claiming land in the Willamette Valley, spreading disease and violently harassing Indigenous people who lived there.

The tribes at Willamette Falls, like many others across the country, were promised safety and reservation land if they agreed to leave their homeland.

Many of those treaty promises were broken.

And after the tribes left the falls, industrial development took over the site.

American flag, when I look at that flag, I see that I'm not welcome, almost like "keep out."

It's a place of ownership to a nation that decided they wanted to rid this land of me and my people.

The tribes plan to replace all these industrial buildings with a cultural site and a development of their own.

It's a prominent example of how the Grand Ronde are reclaiming their traditional lands acre by acre.

It's been very difficult.

We used to be the owners from time immemorial of this place.

And so now it's back into our ownership.

[ all singing in Native language ] Our role here is to heal the land as best we can, healing ourself, because we are tied to the land.

After signing treaties with the U.S. government, dozens of tribes gave up their ancestral homelands across western Oregon and moved to the Grande Ronde Reservation in the Coast Range.

[ man singing in Native language ] Here, members of the newly formed Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde were able to continue some of their traditions.

MAN: You know, singing to these hazel trees here, you know, just giving them thanks for what they're giving us and offering something back to them for offering something to us.

Today, Bobby Mercier and other tribal members are pruning hazel trees and gathering branches for basketry.

[ Bobby speaks in Native language ] [ speaks in Native language ] He speaks a Native language called Chinuk Wawa.

So we're just talking about what we're going to do, and we'll trim and do our cuts at the same time on each bush.

The language is-- it's what ties us... Ties us to our old people, you know?

And they say that's how they recognize us, that's how they hear us.

We'll clip it right at the knuckle.

By pruning it, pruning it back, you get those really nice straight shoots that come up.

Yeah, this is what we want, something nice and straight.

And we've been doing this since the beginning of time.

Yeah... [ speaks in Native language ] Forever we've been making baskets.

The Grand Ronde haven't always had land like this to manage for their cultural traditions.

The tribes were terminated by the U.S. government in 1954.

They lost federal recognition and all of their land except a cemetery.

It was part of a national effort to end tribal sovereignty and assimilate Native Americans into mainstream culture.

These ones are awesome right here.

Losing their land put tribal traditions like this at risk.

This is one thing, weaving with hazel sticks, that, you know, a lot of our grandmas did and our great grandmas.

And it was actually the way that we survived.

And this is just something unique and special that we have.

And, you know, it almost went away.

The tribes didn't let it go.

Without land of their own, they had to find other places where they could continue managing traditional plants and harvesting their first foods.

MAN: Lots of camas, whoo!

Tribal members Greg Archuleta and Chris Rempel work with the U.S. Forest Service to manage this camas prairie in the Willamette National Forest.

Native people maintained this prairie for thousands of years.

So right now the camas is in bloom.

Kind of just checking out the landscape today to see how healthy the population is.

Eh, just a little foggy right there.

Oh, there's another one.

The camas is one of our first foods.

What's happened today is that we have fewer and fewer places that are like this, especially within the main Willamette Valley, which has been converted to farms and housing, roads, et cetera.

When they spot a cluster of invasive blackberry, they get out their clippers.

You got the berry, and it's competing-- you don't see any camas in here.

CHRIS: Traditionally, it was thousands of people doing this, where it's not just the land, that's only half of it.

The other half is our community and culture.

Like, it's a living culture, being out here on the land.

It's not... Let's protect the land, but the land also protects the culture.

GARY: We're using the clippers right now, but ideally we'd want fire on the landscape.

That's why I keep saying, "Fire, fire, fire."

Controlled fires like this clear away brush and kill invasives while helping native plants like camas to thrive because its bulbs are underground.

It's a tool Native American tribes have used throughout their history to manage the landscape.

Here's a good one.

That's what we're looking for, these seed pods.

Greg returns to the camas prairie in the fall with his sister, Lisa Archuleta, to dig for those bulbs.

LISA: Do you want a patch of them, brother?

GREG: Yeah, like right here.

Having access to land like this is part of how the tribes have held on to their first-foods gathering traditions.

See, there he is.

-A smaller one.

-Yep.

There's my dinner.

Where's yours?

[ Lisa laughs ] Exactly what this food tastes like is debatable.

They're kind of like a potato.

They taste like a potato.

GREG: Onion.

More like an onion, I think.

The longer you cook 'em, they crystallize and they turn into, like, sugar.

GREG: Caramelize.

Caramelize, yeah.

I think he's the biggest one yet.

Federal recognition of the Grand Ronde Tribes was restored in 1983.

GREG: So then we've pretty much been working on restoration and rebuilding the tribal community since then.

The U.S. government returned about 10,000 acres of reservation land back to the tribes.

But over the years, much of the land had been converted to agriculture.

So now it was dominated by non-native species.

To reestablish native plants, the tribes built a nursery.

This is a little serviceberry that started from a cutting.

Jeremy Ojua cultivates the plants here so they can be reestablished on tribal lands.

We have a slenderleaf onion.

This is a native onion.

We're growing yampa, and this is a native carrot.

Salmonberry here, all the willows.

All these plants will end up going to our different properties, and what we really wanted to do with the nursery here is focus on culturally significant species, so plants that are important to the tribes for foods, medicine, tools, basketry, things like that.

So hopefully over time, with us growing these plants and then putting them back into our restoration sites, we'll have places where tribal members can go and do traditional gathering.

The tribes have also purchased some land, like this oak prairie, to maintain and restore traditional foods like flour made with acorns from oak trees.

But the land is riddled with invasive daisies and tansy ragwort, and it was planted over with commercial timber that now needs to be removed to restore the oak savanna and prairie habitat.

So right now, I'm just twining up the wall of the basket.

This has been soaked for a long time, and so that makes the hazel, the tukwilla sticks, makes them pliable.

A year after we saw Jordan Mercier gathering hazel shoots from reservation land, he can start weaving with them.

I'm running out right there, so that's where you add in.

So you're doing that a lot as you go.

You're always having to add in new sticks.

So this is Martha Jane Sands, my great-great-great grandma.

She walked to Grand Ronde when she was 11 or so.

She was one of hundreds of Indigenous people who had to walk from southern Oregon to the Grand Ronde Reservation on a route that became known as the Rogue River Trail of Tears.

That's her sitting there with a hazel basket she's working on.

For Jordan, basketry is a family tradition tied to the hazel trees and the landscape in the Willamette Valley.

There's a lot that goes into it and a lot of different things that you have to know and do.

We all help each other with that, and I think in the same way a basket comes together, we come together.

We're able to maintain that connection that, honestly, people have tried to take away from us for a long time.

There's been a lot of things trying to break us up as a community and as a people, and we've overcome all those things.

And it really comes back to the strength of our ancestors, their brilliance, their survival.

It's just a matter of honoring our ancestors and also taking care of the land.

[ people singing in Native language ] [ ♪♪♪ ] Years ago, I met Frankie Dougal, a 98-year-old woman who was an absolute legend for her craftsmanship making horsehair mecate or McCartie ropes, which are used by buckaroos around the West.

Well, she died a while back, but producer Ian McCluskey found her daughter and granddaughter keeping the tradition alive... and with a very colorful twist.

McCLUSKEY: At the end of a long dirt road, far in the remote sagebrush ranges near Jordan Valley, Oregon, lived an old woman who cooked on a wood stove, lit her home with kerosene lamps, and spun horse hair into traditional reins known as mecates.

Her name was Frankie Dougal, and we went to meet her when she was 98.

When I was about 9 years old, I started.

The traditional horse gear she crafted gained such a reputation that it earned a place in the Smithsonian Museum.

Can you imagine that one?

Go back to Washington, D.C.?

Oh, my gosh.

Frankie passed away at the age of 99, but the art of spinning horsehair mecates didn't die with her.

Her daughter Helen and granddaughter Gloria carry on this family tradition.

Mecates are a traditional type of Western horse tack used to lead a horse when walking or as reins to steer when riding.

They are functional but also stylish.

And the art of making them has been handed down in this family, mother to daughter, for four generations.

We've got to decide what color we're making.

I'll do the turquoise, so you're going to be down there.

So put them in the black tub.

[ drill whirring ] With the exception of an electric drill, the techniques are essentially unchanged through the generations.

But Gloria, the youngest generation, is putting her new twist into the family's signature craft.

[ cows mooing ] When I was growing up and I was riding out on the ranches, I was called "the colorful cowgirl" because I would show up in all the red Wranglers and the matching shirt with the red in it and the stripes and all the things.

So I've always liked color.

Gloria takes hair from the horses' manes and dyes them vibrant colors.

Once washed and dried, the hair is ready for the step called picking.

So this is my trusty picker.

This is what it looks like on the inside.

And, see, it goes around and the hair goes through these nails.

You've got to beg, borrow, steal, and beg some more to get somebody to make you one.

We're ready to roll.

So we're getting it all fluffed up so it's easier to spin.

So when we're spinning, we don't want to run into a big chunk.

So it looks like we're good.

Do you see how fluffy it is?

This is ideal to spin from.

So I have greens, blues, turquoises, pinks, red, oranges, and yellows.

The various colors will be spun together, creating the patterns that define the look of the finished mecates.

You'll find them hanging in the tack rooms of the Great Basin, the area of the West once ridden by the Spanish vaqueros, known today as buckaroos.

HELEN: The Spanish used them way before we did.

It was a Spaniard who taught my grandmother how to make 'em.

It was great-grandma Clara who started this family lineage of mecate makers.

She lived on a homestead deep in Oregon's Owyhee River Canyon, and this is where she raised her daughter Frankie and taught her to make mecates.

This is the Five Bar from the Y in the Owyhee River, where I was born and raised.

Born in 1918.

Taken in there when I was three weeks old.

Was probably a good 16 mile to the nearest neighbor, uh-huh.

They went a-horseback, of course.

In this family, riding horses and making mecates go hand in hand.

And just like Frankie had been raised, her daughter Helen grew up in the saddle.

[ cows mooing ] I probably have been riding when I was in my mom's belly, I bet.

Because she always rode, and I know there's pictures when I was like-- probably wasn't even a year old, I was put on a horse and told to ride.

And so, you know, I've had horses in my life my whole life.

And my kids grew up on horseback.

They learned how to ride at a really young age and go long days.

And sometimes they would get mad.

[ laughs ] Sometimes they didn't want to go because they were too tired, but that's how they grew up, that's how they learned how to work, and it was remote.

We grew up without electricity.

I didn't have electricity until I was a junior in high school.

So that's part of this tradition, is the rural part of it.

HELEN: Everybody had to work, you know.

It was not easy.

And that's where I first started making all my mecates.

[ whirring ] Okay, so what are we doing with the brown then?

GLORIA: For the end product, it's going to be one turquoise, one brown, one black-and-white, and one rust.

So to do that, we have to do half and half to get one strand, because we double 'em back.

So we have to change at the halfway mark to the other color.

So this is what I'm doing, is I'm changing colors.

[ drill whirring ] HELEN: Oh, my.

You really got it tight.

Gloria left the Great Basin buckaroo life for college and an early professional career in the cities.

But in her 30s, she returned to her roots and spent more time making mecates with her Grandma Frankie.

GLORIA: And so she really helped me, she gave me all kinds of tips and tricks, and I went up there to her ranch and really spent a lot of time with her.

FRANKIE: I love to get out here early in the mornings.

The air's beautiful and it's wonderful.

Frankie insisted on holding true to the buckaroo tradition, and that meant a color palette natural to the wild horses of the Great Basin.

All these colors are natural.

All come from horses.

This here's got three grays and one white.

My grandma, I mean, you know, she's old school, all the old traditions.

You know, there's no pink horses.

So when Gloria began to experiment with using colors, she broke with centuries of buckaroo tradition and the three generations of her family, especially Grandma Frankie.

My mom didn't like it.

She didn't like the colors at all.

She even said so.

"I hate those blankety-blank colors."

[ laughs ] "You just can't do that!"

That's just the way she was, just a "raunchity" old ranch lady.

GLORIA: In the bridle horse traditions, they want pretty and simple but more natural is kind of the way it went.

I'm not totally traditional.

I love all the traditions and stuff, but I just wanted to add just a little bit of my personality into it.

Helen and Gloria have now made all the individual strands for their mecate.

Okay.

Now it's time to take the individual strands and spin these all together.

Okay, that's good.

This is the workhorse part.

[ grunts softly ] We're good?

They're getting pretty tight.

GLORIA: Okay, it's going to go together.

Ready, set, go.

It's really fun, I think, to spin them together and make one that we both made it.

And that's it, a finished mecate made in the tradition handed down generations... but with the signature twist of the colorful cowgirl.

Sometimes they just turn out the way they turn out.

[ chuckles ] [ ♪♪♪ ] [ ducks quacking, birds chirping ] WOMAN: You walk in this gate, and you're away from all that traffic and that chaos.

We're in our little paradise.

This garden was founded by the Rhododendron Society in 1950.

There are at least 2,000 different types of rhododendrons on this property.

It's a great big flower.

There's many colors: purple, yellow, orange.

But then there's all variations of that.

I mean, there's so much variety, and that's why we tell people, "Why do you need any other plant in this whole wide world?"

Some of them smell really good, and there's all different flavors of smell.

All different kinds.

That's why you never get sick of rhododendrons.

There's always one more.

William S. Ladd, who was one of the founders of the city, owned all this land, and he called it Crystal Springs Farm because of all the springs around here.

There's a big aquifer underneath the ground here, and there's at least 14 or so springs that they know of.

You could walk through here in a half an hour if you wanted, but if you're going to enjoy it, you can spend all day.

You walk down the paths and you're surrounded by rhododendrons taller than you are, all blooming, all different colors, and it smells so good.

[ birds chirping ] The birds chirping and the squirrels running past you, it's a nice, tranquil place.

[ quacking ] There's at least 80 different species of birds that have been seen here.

People come here and they say, "I can relax here."

You've got the water and the sound of the geese.

[ honking ] And sometimes the sound of the train going by.

[ train rumbling softly ] I like that.

Some people don't, but I do.

It is maintained by the people who volunteer.

Every Wednesday since 1950, people have gathered here from February until November.

And it's master gardeners and neighbors and Rhododendron Society people.

I mean, people who love the garden.

Done that for 65 years.

We talk about it as the Rhododendron Society's gift to the city and to the people of the city.

It is open 365 days a year, but a lot of people still don't know it's here.

But that's okay.

I mean, if it was too many people, it wouldn't be too fun either.

[ ♪♪♪ ] You can now find many Oregon Field Guide stories and episodes online.

And to be part of the conversation about the outdoors and environment here in the Northwest, join us on Facebook.

[ birds chirping ] Major support for Oregon Field Guide is provided by... Additional support provided by... And the following... and the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.