(gentle music) -[Tantoo] I want to tell you a story about the land of the American Southwest.

In the beginning, there were mountains, rivers, plants and animals.

Creator made these and brought people to the world to take care of their given place.

Places that give life.

Places of our ancestors, our history, our connection to the earth.

Each place remains sacred.

No place was ever abandoned.

This is our story.

-[Kurt R.] If you want to know the earth as it really is, learn it from its sacred places.

If you want to center yourself, you can reach that spot.

-[Theresa] One has to go back to the fundamentals, the very basis of who we are as Indigenous people.

Our origin stories are retelling of how we came to be in this world, and its from those origin stories that our people have that tell us what our own responsibilities are as Pueblo people.

There's often this misconception that landscapes are somehow separated from culture, that they are two distinct resources that we focus on as Indigenous people, but they are one and the same.

One cannot exist without the other.

-[Kurt R.] The connection betwe and culture for Pueblo people has always been ingrained in us since childhood.

We are instructed through prayer that the land always comes first.

We pray for it to be nourished through rainfall, moisture, so that all the plants can grow on the land, therefore feeding the animals, therefore feeding us.

When the ancestors prayed, they prayed for the land as far as they could see.

However wide the sky is, this is who I pray for.

Our ancestral land spread from Southern Colorado to Eastern Arizona, almost down to the Mexican border, to the Manzano mountains.

That was our cultural use area.

It didn't mean that we occupied it on a daily basis, it meant that through pilgrimage, we could go out to these areas and renew ourselves in -[Tantoo] Each group migrated in a spiral, from the outward edge toward the center, to find the place creator prepared for them.

During this migration, signs such as earthquakes, disease, and drought told them they had not yet reached their center.

Like the clouds, the wind and rain, movement is necessary to sustain life, so the earth can rest and renew.

-[Carleton] We emerged out of the Grand Canyon after the Sun Father saw that he was lonely, and so he created the (native language), his twin sons He created them and he told them, "There are people down in the fourth world.

If you bring them up, you can teach them how to offer me cornmeal, how to offer me prayer sticks, how to offer me prayers."

So the two twins of the Sun got onto their bow made out of a rainbow and made themselves in to their lightning arrows, and traveled down into the fourth underworld.

With those two beings in place, they provide us, not only nurturing and guidance, but purpose.

When we emerged, we were given different instructions.

Some people went directly from emergence straight through the present day Zuni.

Others traveled North along the Bears Ears area, up to Mesa Verde, down into Bandelier, also down into Chaco.

These are all different ways that our people gained learning of how to survive.

-[Kurt A.]

Landscape, most simply, is the interactions between nature and culture.

And what we see is each one of these descendant communities has a homeland layer in the same geographic space.

The Central San Juan Basin as a whole being a traditional cultural property because it is a multi-layered landscape.

Think about taking a handful of gravel and you toss those pebbles into a pond, and each pebble hits the water and ripples emanate out.

And the ripples of each pebble interlock with the other and he says, "That's who we are."

How do they interact with the land?

How do they interact with the water?

The soils?

The plants?

The animals?

The birds?

The bees?

That it's holistic and it's in a cultural perspective.

I like to think of this world as a pottery vessel.

If we don't take care of it and we punch out the bottom of that vessel, what do we have left?

It doesn't hold anything.

We've broken the integrity of it.

As an archeologist, I look at the archeological record.

The material stuff.

The pottery, the chipped stone tools, the ground stone tools, the houses, agricultural fields.

The anthropological part of it is actually that the people and the land are inseparable, they are parts of one another.

They're interdependent with one another, so they are of a place, they are not from a place.

That's saying that their relationship with that place still exists.

It still defines who they are and it's a process that we talk about as becoming.

-[Tantoo] Then a new people, not of this place came to the land and made a world where everything can Where nature is exploited and people displaced.

For my people, the land is a spiritual being.

To be separated from the land is to be separated from who we are.

-[Mark] Places that are important to the oral history of Tesuque Pueblo, such as Chaco Canyon, (native language for Chaco) the place where the wide arroyo village is.

Chaco is the ancestral ruins of the Pueblos.

We still do pilgrimages to Chaco.

This is our origin.

This landscape is forever living.

-[Tantoo] Our people have lived in the Chaco region for thousands of years.

High desert, it is sun-scorched in summer and bitter cold in winter.

Water is scarce.

The bare landscape reveals the importance of every mountain, rock and arroyo.

Around 850 AD, our Chaco ancestors began to build great houses, four to five stories high with hundreds of rooms built to align with the cycles of sun and moon.

A center of ceremony and trade, Chaco could host up to 2,000 people.

Chaco culture continued to thrive for 300 years.

In time, the people of Chaco sealed the great houses and left.

Why this great place of civilization came to an end is a mystery.

It remains a sacred place of pilgrimage.

-[Aaron] Acoma's connection to Chaco is a deep connection and it's a very direct connection.

One of its ancestral homelands and every generation has that responsibility of ensuring and maintaining those connections to those places.

It really comes with this understanding of stewarding our inheritance.

-[Tantoo] Today, the Chaco world is threatened by oil drilling and fracking.

90% of federal lands in the San Juan Basin have already been leased for drilling.

Flares from gas wells pierce the serenity and light the night sky.

A new web of access roads, well pads and pipelines surround many of its important cultural sites.

Earthquakes and vibrations caused by fracking and heavy trucks pose a serious risk to the fragile ruins.

-[Aaron] Within those boundaries are land owned by the Navajo Nation, land owned by individual Navajo Indian allottees.

One of the biggest issues that we constantly run into is the understanding of what is a cultural resource.

For Acoma, all ancestral Pueblo archaeological resources are cultural resources, but not all cultural resources are archaeological in nature.

The idea came to work with our New Mexico congressional delegation to create buffer zones around theses major areas that are considered the Chaco Culture National Historic Park.

-[Theresa] You begin to see, much like a web, the reach of Chaco out on the landscape.

-[Kurt R.] So in protecting Chaco, it's not just the ruins, the remnants of structures, it's the landscape that needs to be protected.

-[Aaron] There are federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, National Historic Preservation Act, that are key expressions from our nation about how it considers the impacts of projects upon the environment.

-[Ann] Federal agencies have a responsibility to go in and identify historic properties under the National Historic Preservation Act that could be effected by something.

- The mandate of the National Historic Preservation Act is to attempt to avoid adverse effects, or if you can't avoid them, to mitigate them.

It's really critical at that point of mitigation to work with the tribal communities because it's their cultural resources, their inheritance, that is being lost.

-[Theresa] I was fortunate as a child growing up that I got to see my beloved mountain every day.

I grew up on that mountain, people know it as Mount Taylor.

I heard it called Koweshtema.

I memorized its outline and when I went away to school, and I grew homesick for my parents and their stories, and my father's songs, all I had to do was close my eyes and see that mountain in my memory and I was home.

Everything was tied to memory, and memory was tied to place.

It is my yellow mountain, the mountain from which all things begin.

-[Tantoo] Mount Taylor is a volcanic peak in Northwestern New Mexico, a sacred place to many tribes.

The Zuni believe the lightning hole at the summit must be kept open to avert drought.

For the Acoma and Laguna people, it is rainmaker of the North created by two sisters who made and populated the earth.

The Navajo call it Tsoodzil, female bringer and taker of life, home to turquoise boy and yellow corn girl, guarded by the big snake deity.

During the atomic age uranium boom, between 1944 and the 1980s, Mount Taylor was mined heavily.

Four million tons of uranium were extracted.

In an area where water is precious and scarce, earth and water were poisoned with radioactive dust.

Towns and farmlands were contaminated by mine water.

Native homes were unknowingly built from radioactive rock piles.

People and animals were exposed, inhaling and ingesting radioactive waste.

-[Theresa] Sacredness is not a term that is argued in the court of law and we have to go back to how the legal systems were founded in this country and we have to look at property ownership.

Many of us are still restricted from free access of lands that many of the public uses that were our ancestral lands.

Places in which we prayed and worshiped and harvested resources, and while we celebrate the rich culture and diversity of national park systems, national monuments and state monuments, we have to fundamentally remember that many of these places were established by the taking of ancestral places.

We are still a people who have to fight with federal laws that were not of our creation, but were created with value systems meant to push our people off the land.

As lands were being taken for development, for exploration, as people settled in the West, the United States government operated from a value of ownership.

And so when we see conflict arise, really it is the conflict of two value systems, of ownership versus stewardship.

One has to look at laws like the 1872 Mining Act, which still fundamentally guides extraction in this country, is going to be the law that we use for the rest of our lives.

We know it was written with values that don't have stewardship in mind of these places.

-[Tantoo] Racial tensions were inflamed by a series of hate crimes against tribal citizens.

- The passion and the anger boiled over.

There were specific instances where I had to also question my own safety, in which there were threats, personal threats that were made.

There were shots fired at my vehicle.

A snake was left at my door.

They wanted me to stop what I was doing.

- We started the process to get Mount Taylor designated by the State of New Mexico, as well as the federal government, as a traditional cultural property.

-[Theresa] To read the nomination in its entirety, it is a beautiful piece of work that the authors were the community themselves.

-[Ann] There is some power when you have that ability for tribes to come together and recognize that they need to work together for each of their ends.

-[Theresa] And so to this day when I see people engaged in the good fight and standing up for what they believe in, to protect these spaces, these sacred places, these places of power, I'm moved by the sacrifice that they make.

One of the elders said, "If you were to stand up on the top of the mountain and unfurl a blanket and that blanket went down the slopes of the mountain, across the mesas and into the arroyos, and across the watershed areas, it would be as far as the eye can see.

It's more than just the top of the mountain.

It is everything that flows out from it."

(upbeat music) - I am beauty, I can provide life.

When I'm out in the field, I use my hands to touch the earth.

I use my hands to touch the crops.

I sweat.

I sometimes cut myself and bleed.

What I am, I offer to her and in return, I eat what she offers.

I was taught that we are part of the land, we are the land.

Acknowledge your seeds, talk to them because they hold a life and they will provide life, they'll provide sustenance.

We utilize every part of the corn, the kernels, the stalk.

We lay the stalk down once we're done to let it rest because it has completed what it needed to do.

-[Natasha] Just being born and raised on the Navajo Nation, just growing up with a deep reverence for the land and for the water, for the elements, it was just part of growing up and who I was.

(Natasha speaking native language) Honoring that identity is the protection of land, protection of water.

Food, culture, language, all of that is so critical.

- [Tantoo] Taos Pueblo has existed for more than 1,000 years.

In a secluded mountain valley, high above the Pueblo, lies Blue Lake.

It is source of the Rio Pueblo that flows through the center of their village and central to the religion, culture and survival of the Taos Pueblo people.

Through centuries of colonial rule by Spain, Mexico and the United States, Taos Pueblo's sovereign land rights were respected and guaranteed with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In 1906, the federal government unjustly took thousands of acres of Taos Pueblo land, including Blue Lake.

Controlled by the forest service, it was promoted as a fishing and tourist destination and opened for grazing and harvesting lumber.

The once pristine forest and lake were violated.

Under a cloud of dread, Taos Pueblo fought for over 60 years to restore their rights to this most sacred place.

During his 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon declared his support for American Indian rights.

When he was elected president, Taos Pueblo sought the help of Comanche Native rights activist, LaDonna Harris, and her husband, Oklahoma Senator, Fred Harris.

- One of the reasons that we felt supportive of them came from our first visit to their Pueblo and they reminded me so much of my grandfather and I thought, "Oh, well maybe we're kin to them someway."

So Fred said, "We're gonna take this on and see what we can do."

The legislation was built in the committee on Indian affairs in the senate and they wouldn't let it out, and so Fred figured out a way to have to put it out and I remember Anderson, the senator from New Mexico, was against them.

Senator Anderson saw Fred on the floor of the senate, he said, "I don't mess with your Indians in Oklahoma and you don't mess with mine."

And Fred turned around and said, "They're not your Indians."

That really made Fred mad enough to really fight, so he got the vote out of the committee.

-[Tantoo] When the bill was brought to the senate floor, the Taos governor and his delegation were seated in the gallery.

Cacique Juan de Jesus Romero held the ceremonial canes given by Spain, Mexico and Abraham Lincoln as symbols of tribal sovereignty.

When the bill passed, the Cacique stood up and raised the canes.

In a moment of silence, all 100 senators turned to look.

He acknowledged them with a nod and sat down.

The entire senate burst into applause.

(applause) Nixon's decision to sign the bill was influenced by his deep respect for Wallace Chief Newman, the football coach at Whittier College and a tribal leader for the La Jolla band of the Luiseno Indians.

-[Richard] Not because he taught me to play football, I never made the team, but because he had character, strong, indomitable character.

-[LaDonna] So he had remembered that, Nixon did, and was one of the reasons he wanted to be helpful.

-[Richard] This is a bill that represents justice because in 1906, an injustice was done in which land involved in this bill, 48,000 acres, was taken from the Taos Pueblo Indians, and now after all those years, the congress of the United States returns that land to whom it belongs and we restore this place of worship to them for all the years to come.

(applause) -[Tantoo] The return of Blue Lake was the first time lands were returned to an American Indian tribe.

In arid western New Mexico, inside a volcanic caldera, lies the small shallow salt water lake, no more than four feet deep.

In summer, the water evaporates, leaving a sheet of salt.

This is Zuni Salt Lake, home of Salt Woman, a deity central to Zuni religion.

The salt is the flesh of Salt Woman and nourishes life.

-[Carleton] Our Zuni salt mother Ma'l Oyattsik'i.

In our stories we're told that Zuni salt mother used to reside where people used to be able to go and collect salt.

-[Kirk] The Zuni salt lake is a unique water body at the bottom of a mar that was created by an explosion when magma under the earth had encountered water and exploded up and ruptured the earth's surface.

-[Tantoo] This unique place is important for other tribes, the Pueblos of Acoma, Laguna and Hopi, the Navajo, the White Mountain Apache, all visit the lake to collect salt.

Like umbilical cords tying them to the Salt Mother, each tribe has their own path to the lake.

-[Carleton] Whenever we approach an area such as this, we always approach it with a sense of reverence and respect.

-[Tantoo] In the 1980s, a public utility company in Arizona, the Salt River Project, planned to build a coal mine in New Mexico near the town of Fence Lake, 11 miles from Zuni Salt Lake.

The vast amount of water used by the mine would parch the land and deplete the aquifer that feeds the Salt Mother.

-[Kirk] And so our experts requested to see the original data used for the pumping test and they realized that it was either misinterpreted or intentionally mischaracterized to support negligible effects.

That federal expert did conclude that it would have effects on the lake and therefore, the federal government prohibited use of that aquifer for the mine.

-[Ann] And nominated to the federal register was the protection area around Zuni Salt Lake, which is the area recognized by all of the tribes as a sacred area.

It was the first time that a geological area was designated as a cultural property.

-[Carleton] There's a shared comradery around it because they showed respect and provided her prayers and prayer bundles.

She provided them salt and told them that, "As long as you continue to respect me, you can come and collect salt."

And from what I hear from different Pueblos, it's just how wonderful Zuni salt is.

-[Myron] We've always considered all land sacred, everywhere that we've been.

When we get to a place that we're going to, we pray.

We tell the spirits who live there, why we are there.

We ask for their help and it's a continuum from time immemorial.

We traveled to a place called Mesa Verde.

(Mesa Verde in native language) We stayed for a period of time and the leaders finally decided that we needed to move on again and we came to a place that we call Chaco Canyon, (Chaco in native language) At another time, the leaders decided it was time to move on, again.

We came to this area, to the east side of the mountains, a place called Paa-kuu on the north face of the mountain there.

So, we were formed into two groups, one to stay at Paa-kuu, the other to journey across this river here, the Rio Grande.

In the end to where we are today, we call it (Santa Ana in native language), as you know it in English, Santa Ana Pueblo.

-[Tantoo] In 1540, explorers with fierce weapons came to claim our lands for the King of Spain.

The Spaniards forced my people to submit to their religion and pay a tribute of food and goods.

If they resisted, they were enslaved or brutally punished.

The Pueblo revolt in 1680 drove the Spanish out, but 12 years later, they returned.

Spain decreed each Pueblo was entitled to a four league square of land surrounding their village and usurped the rest for land grants given to Spanish settlers.

Without good land, my people suffered.

The only way to get their land back was to buy it from the settlers.

Negotiations often took years.

-[Myron] The people of the Pueblo gave a rooster, a saddle, saddle blanket, pottery, whatever the people could gather to buy some of our lands back.

-[Tantoo] Since the late 1600s, Tamaya has steadily reacquired land taken by the Spanish and US governments.

-[Myron] It was discovered that there was this piece of land west of here that we now call (site in foreign language) was called the King Alamo Ranch.

We were in a meeting and we made that call to the realtor in Colorado, who was handling the transaction for the King family, but from that call to the time that the final papers were signed, was a little over three months.

How great is that?

And once again belonged to the Pueblo of Santa Ana.

(mesa in native language) the Mesa out there.

(other sites in native language) The whole area was a place where, as our oral traditions says, we once lived, we traveled and it was very important for us to take that back.

Our tradition and culture and the protection of the lands all inter-mingle.

Protection of game, deer, bear, cougar, antelope, that's who we are as Tamayame.

-[Tantoo] In the 20th century, efforts to control flooding and soil erosion along the Rio Grande changed the river and the bosque.

Indigenous cottonwoods and willows were overwhelmed by invasive exotic trees.

Asian salt cedar and Russian olive suck up twice the water of native trees.

The stewards of their land, the Pueblo of Santa Ana is dedicated to restoring the natural bosque.

-[Myron] The restoration was a combination of partnerships, by the Pueblo and the federal government.

Tribal council authorized the removal of phreatophytes), salt cedar, Russian olive.

13,000 plus acres of land were cleared.

Once the project was done over a period time, the elders were brought out here to look at what was done and the reaction that the elders had was that this is how they saw back in their day, how the bosque was.

No jetty jacks, no Russian olive, no salt cedar.

We use these tools today which allows us to ensure that the land is taken care of and protected.

-[Tantoo] A place of power, the dark Mesa, Mesa Prieta, covers 36 square miles and towers 1,000 feet above the surrounding landscape.

Formed by an ancient lava flow and erosion by the Rio Grande, the Mesa is crowned by large basalt boulders varnished a deep brown by exposure to the elements.

Pecking on the stone reveals its original lighter color, making it the perfect surface to create petroglyphs.

More than 100,000 images adorn the rocks.

-[Matthew] There's various waves of how people came to be part of this landscape here.

Early on, we referred to them as the hunters and gatherers who came to the Mesa here to travel and leave their marks but it's also been a place of trade and relationships over time.

-[Matthew] We can't really fully understand the larger meaning and intent of why they were place here and what these specific images might mean, but based on a larger sense of understanding traditions, that what you see in these images are everything from birds to images of protection, and here on the Mesa, there's a predominant imagery of avanyu images and those are the serpent images and one way to read those is that they represent water, they represent fertility and that honoring of women as a center community figure.

-[Tantoo] While thousands of petroglyphs lie on land owned by the BLM, the Wells Petroglyph Preserve and the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh, most are on private land and vulnerable to development, rock mining, grazing and vandalism.

-[Matthew] There's a reason why they're protected from exploitation that would compromise the integrity of this larger history and that's a really important aspect to convey to the public.

-[Carleton] My journey to Bears has been really about healing.

Not only healing, I guess the relationships between tribes but also it spoke to me as a troubled veteran.

Once I got to Bears Ears and understood our relationship there and how my cultural elders defined that relationship for me, reconnecting me to the Zuni way of life.

-[Tantoo] The area called Bears Ears was named for a formation of rock.

Twin buttes like the head of a bear rising from the landscape.

Recognized by all who saw it for what it is, every native language calls it Bears Ears.

For ions, our people have migrated across these lands.

It is covered by cliff dwellings and shrines from ancestral Pueblos.

Great houses that respond to the heavens.

For Navajo, the Bears Ears is a shrine of protection.

Many Native people today depend on Bears Ears for medicine, food, hunting and firewood, and go there for ceremony and healing.

-[Carleton] My medicine father tells me that (Blue Mountain in native language) Blue Mountain resides in the Bears Ears area and that we learned some of our medicine ways there.

We did not pass through Bears Ears just to pass through it, we lived there, we raised families there.

-[Natasha] There has always been a deep connection tribal people have had with the Bears Ears.

A lot of our people resisted from being rounded up to go to the long walk and they hid up in the Bears Ears.

The land doesn't belong to us, we belong to the land.

And to be at the Bears Ears and to just take my shoes off and walk, the earth knows you and you wanna be able to connect your feet in to the earth.

There's that deep connection and people still go there and still give offerings, but to be able to organize that in a movement and come to tribal government and say, "Hey, this is what we need.

We wanna be able to protect these lands, we wanna be able to manage these lands, these Bureau of Land Management lands, these forest lands."

-[Carleton] At the heart of the proposal is collaborative management.

We as tribal leaders want to have a voice in the management of this landscape.

The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition was formed with its basis by those participating tribes of Zuni, Hopi, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute and the Northern Ute tribe.

We had identified those boundaries as being approximately 1.9 million acres that incorporated much of Indian Creek, Cedar Mesa.

We believe that President Obama had in his authority with the Antiquities Act that would allow us to have collaborative management.

-[Tantoo] In 2016, President Obama declared the Bears Ears a National Monument.

Less than a year later, President Trump removed 85% of the lands and all its cultural objects from protection.

On his first day in office, President Biden started the process to restore Bears Ears and protections.

-[Natasha] With this national monument I think very early on the tribes had said they just don't want it protected.

It was also about access for the tribes.

And the tribal coalition was really an opportunity for tribes as sovereign governments to come together and create a governance structure on how they wanted to work together.

And if you really look at the proclamation, it's the first time there's been tribal languages that are mentioned in a national monument designation.

It was like this beautiful love letter to the land and the sounds you hear there.

These are public lands and I think the tribes were clear that, this is not land that they just wanna protect for the tribes and for tribal people, but for all people who connect to these lands and who go there, and who love them.

-[Jasmine] I knew that Bears Ear was a place of healing.

The bear is a healer in many cultures.

President Trump had just ordered the executive order to reduce the lands of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

So the call was to bring runners to heal the land, to bring an awareness to unify.

-[Tantoo] In 2018, the Bears Ears Prayer Run Alliance organized Sacred Strides for Healing, an inter-tribal relay run to focus attention on the threats to Bears Ears National Monument.

-[Jasmine] And when we showed up to Bears Ears, I just remember being in awe.

It felt like home.

-[Tantoo] Santa Fe, New Mexico is the oldest capital city in North America, founded by Spanish invaders in 1607.

But my people have always been there, at least since 3,000 BC.

The ancestors of Tesuque Pueblo once lived where downtown Santa Fe now lies.

In that time, the river flowed year 'round, filled with freshwater mussels that gave shells and pearls.

Many tribes came there to trade.

It was one of several large Pueblos in the area, home to thousands of people.

-[Mark] Back then they were known as Oga Poge, the place of the white shell.

My grandmother would tell me, "That was our first home sight, that was where the majority of Tesuque people were."

But because of things that were to happen, such as the Pueblo Revolt, that's where the majority of the people perished.

-[Tantoo] In 2005, the city of Santa Fe started construction on a new convention center downtown.

Excavation at the site quickly revealed all that had been there before.

Tesuque's Governor, Mark Mitchell said, "To remove those burials and artifacts would be to erase the footprints of our ancestors, which we could not allow."

-[Mark] So we requested a meeting and they didn't understand why Tesuque was so adamant about them within city jurisdiction.

They hit human remains and at that point, the NAGPRA Law kicked in, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Things they found were human burials with associated funerary objects, intact potteries that were still there.

They found a native footprint there, and then the Hispanic footprint, and then the Anglo footprint.

To us as Native people, those items are never dead and gone.

They currently exist.

They are alive.

This was the first time that a tribal government and a city government came to the table to negotiate.

They made the decision and it was in favor of the tribe.

(applause) And there may be still burial sites and others that right now could be under the streets, under a building, in the parking lot.

I think that's what people need to know, to have that respect.

-[Theresa] Can all places be sacred?

Certainly.

People can deem places based on their experience on their ties to land and space and water.

-[Aaron] How do we think critically about the use of public lands that are the ancestral lands of the tribes.

This is our home, this is where my grandparents live, where our ancestors live.

These are the places that we are meant to live and where we will forever live.

-[Kurt A.]

I'm struck by Acoma members talking about the three Rs.

The respect for the past.

The responsibility to take care of the land.

And then the reflection of whatever we do in our lives to protect the land, well it becomes a reflection on us.

-[Jasmine] I want to live a life that is true to who I am.

I run, I plant, I work and become involved in these different issues because I care and I want others to care.

I say this is worth fighting for, I say no one is gonna touch this land because I'm gonna fight for it.

-[Theresa] I began to understand that it isn't simply about making an argument about stewardship.

One has to also make an argument about where do we as Native people have standing.

It's our Pueblo people, our Indigenous people who have one of the longest, richest, deepest rights to defend some of this land because it is in their blood.

Then we can stand side by side to each other and say, "We may not be of those communities, we may not be of those cultures, but I understand what justice means in this country.

And your fight is my fight, and it is the good fight, and it is one we must engage in on a daily basis."

(singer humming) Our Creator gave us mountains and streams A new sun rises every day He gave us visions and powerful dreams In the four directions we pray How wide the sky Power of Places Eagles fly Above sacred spaces Mother Earth will sing If we honor everything How wide the sky How wide the sky Power of Places Eagles fly Above sacred spaces Mother Earth will sing If we honor everything How wide the sky (logo whooshing)