>> Julian Garcia [offscreen]: This whole area is Tamaya Kwii Kee Nee Puu.

[MUSIC] This place is full of villages.

We're sitting here up on this rim rock.

You know, you can look, and we've got the on the west there about four miles, five miles out, and that's more like a basalt.

That area there we call [word in Keres], that's the name of that black mountain mesa there.

[MUSIC] Then here, this is [words in Keres] meaning sandstone.

>> Nathan Garcia: There is a lot of artifacts here.

There's a lot of ruins.

So, it would be a traditional home to them.

Cooking, hunting, you know, walking the landscape, even down to farming in some areas where there's natural springs here, water holes.

It would just be another pueblo within itself here.

I'm sure there's traditional dances that will take place here, migration hikes.

>> Narrator: In 2016, the Pueblo of Santa Ana bought lands that have been a part of their history since their migrations from Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon in the thirteenth century.

These lands, Tamaya Kwii Kee Nee Puu, the pueblo had to buy them.

They bought the sixty thousand acres for more than thirty million dollars from private landowners who ran cattle and grazed these lands hard for more than a century.

[MUSIC] >> Thomas Armijo: This place connects me to the past.

Growing up, you hear all these stories of you know, where we came from, where we've been.

But like kind of seeing it physically kind of, it puts a bigger impact.

It's kind of like eye- opening for me.

So this kind of like reinforces that wanting to know who you are, where you come from.

>> Monica Murrell: The entire history dating back thousands of years is represented out here.

In contrast to archaeologists mostly doing research and excavation, the historic preservation office is really more about preservation, stewardship of cultural sites and protecting them.

>> Thomas Armijo: It's telling our story from the beginning, but then it's also adding in you know, the present.

Our story is just getting bigger and bigger as the years go by.

It's small.

I don't even fit in there.

You can see the hearth where they built the fire.

So, you can kind of imagine all the things that they did back then.

Just living.

It's just really cool, kind of, brings you back, or kind of take a step back in time.

>> Narrator: When buying the lands, the tribal council passed a resolution to always protect them.

They won't be developed or sold.

Instead, they're set aside for traditional uses like hunting, gathering plants, prayer, celebration.

Here, lands that were used hard for more than a century will heal.

>> Dan Ginter: The Europeans, that we pushed, we took the best lands and a lot of those best lands were those things surrounding water.

And we've done a really good job of of channeling that water and pulling it out and using it for our own needs and not having it left necessarily for wildlife.

And so one of the things that we've found out is that you need to put water on the landscape for for animals.

And it and it really makes a big difference, and we see when we put in these, we call them wildlife guzzlers and then they fill up on their own and then the wildlife very quickly find them.

And and when you put a wildlife camera on them, you see within a month or within even a couple weeks, you just see the the birds and the deer and the antelope and the elk come in and recognize these as good water sources and just regularly use them.

And then culturally, those animals share that information with their young and then they just, it becomes a permanent water source in their minds.

>> Glenn Harper: Over ahundred years of grazing, the runoff in these little valleys has created these large head cuts.

It's just lowered the water table away.

The number of head cuts that we see going through this landscape is is huge and and to try to reverse that is going to take a lot of effort.

We're working for the pueblo to improve the quality of these lands, knowing that they want it for traditional purposes.

>> Narrator: With a grant from the federal government and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the pueblo will restore grasslands and springs.

And they'll remove more than 60 miles of interior fence lines.

Fences that halt the movement of wildlife, trap tumbleweeds, and scar the landscape.

Restoring this land won't be easy.

Just like buying it back wasn't.

Even though the pueblo paid thirty million dollars for these lands eight years ago, they still have a ways to go, legally and logistically.

>> Nathan Garcia: It's very difficult in the process of buying land back.

>> Julian Garcia: You've got to watch out for snakes too, now.

Because there are snake skins around.

>> Nathan Garcia: It's actually a number one priority, to buy our lands back.

But it comes at a cost, and we see the value in it.

And these lands are priceless to us, so it doesn't matter really what it costs.

We just do what we got to do and um get our lands back, one one parcel at a time or one acre at a time.

When I say fight the good fight, that's the fight that we're fighting.

>> Narrator: The pueblo is still waiting for the U.S. Congress to put these lands in trust, so they're a part of the pueblo's sovereign lands.

But this is a homecoming.

>> Ruben Lujan: We're here at the Kwii Kee Nee Puu, going down to Collier Canyon.

This is [word in Keres] what they call [word in Keres], like a parsley.

My elders taught me this growing up as I was a little kid.

They showed me different types of plants we could harvest from the landscape.

For me, it means a lot because my father used to say that we owned a lot of this land here, but we ended up losing it.

And then now that we purchased it all back, it seems like it's heartwarming that we all own it back now.

And it's exciting just to be out here, out in the open, beautiful out here.

>> Ruben Lujan: Trying to get back to our ancestral roots, that's how I see it.

>> Narrator: These lands that protected and fed the pueblo's people in the past today stand against the push and the shove of cities and development, which has exploded in the past few decades.

>> Ruben Lujan: Fifteen years ago, down by the casino, there was really no homes and then all of a sudden, fifteen years later and then you see all these homes encroaching the boundary lines, and I think that will stop all the future development coming north and back up, out this way to this property.

"The elk took off out that way.

There's some ruins over there."

>> Julian Garcia: You know maybe some people don't realize what we're we're losing in America.

Like I said it seems like to me we're living in a trashy society.

We are a very, very trashy society.

Coming up to this area 65,000 acres, give or take, you've seen solar farms down the way, of course that's clean energy.

>> Narrator: But just since 2016, Tamaya Kwii Kee Nee Puu has been healing.

>> Dillion Eustace: This is a place I grew up.

Just seeing like, it's pretty much night and day because before everyone would come in and like dump their trash or ATV dirt bike around here.

And now there's grass where you don't see grass.

You could see deer and elk.

And I've never seen deer and elk out here until like a couple years ago.

>> Narrator: Now Dillion Eustace works for the Pueblo of Santa Ana's Department of Natural Resources, checking guzzlers, caring for this land.

And gathering data on everything from wood rats to pronghorn, elk, deer, and mountains lions.

>> Dillion Eustace: When I was little, I didn't really have that like, I didn't have a lot of people explaining everything in detail.

And when I started this job, like I feel like, I feel more connected because I'm out here, I'm talking to people.

I'm talking to other tribal members that have been here, other elders.

And it's really pushed me to just be curious and just ask like, What was this?

Where, where did we come from?

Why did we do this?

Why did we domesticate this or for what?

So, to be able to tell my children, we have always been here.

We're primordial in a sense.

So, to be able to show my kids, our kids, everyone's kids, we've been here.

We're going to continue to be here.

>> Narrator: The work of the tribe's Natural Resources Department is<br/> directed by the tribal council.

And its employees put science to work hand in hand with traditional knowledge, across all of Santa Ana's lands.

Glenn Harper has worked for the pueblo for more than 25 years.

>> Glenn Harper: So, we use a lot of western science or the technology that comes with that to monitor where animals want to be on the landscape, using the GPS collars.

For instance, we're monitoring 25 cow elk that we've GPS collared on Mesa Prieta, to see where their migration routes carry them through the through the seasons.

For long-term planning, we need to know what areas need to be protected or improved, where we can do habitat restoration.

There's a way to work both together and come out with a better outcome.

>> Voice off camera: There's Dan.

Getting the collar ready.

I don't know why these elk have to pick these spots.

We shot her up there.

And then she decides to come down on this.

The side of this mountain.

The helicopter's way down over there somewhere.

So anyway, do what you gotta do, I guess.

>> Narrator: For five years, starting in 2006, the pueblo put a moratorium on hunting, to boost deer and elk populations.

And with that increase, came the mountain lions.

>> Dan Ginter: It was pretty amazing because it was right about 2015 or 2014 that you just saw lions showing up on the cameras, and it would be a female lion with three adult kittens.

Like a 10 year or 10-month- old or 11-month-old kittens.

And for a female lion to get three kittens to adulthood, because they're ready at that point, almost ready to just jump out on their own, for a female lion to get three kittens to that age group means that she's being really successful and that she's got a good prey base.

>> Narrator: In 2017, the pueblo started studying mountain lions.

Putting GPS collars on them to track their movements across the landscape and identify what they eat.

This way, they could learn more about the species, and keep watch on any lions putting too much of a dent in the pueblo's deer or elk populations.

In the past few years, they have learned a lot about what lions eat.

>> Glenn Harper: We had one lion that was named Broken Leg, and he was an adult male, that while we had him collared for two years, he killed around 35 to 37 badgers.

He also killed 19 elk.

We haven't had any lions that even approached that.

We have some lions that are just eating just beavers; they're living along the Rio Grande.

They eat beavers, porcupines, coyotes, gray fox, sandhill cranes.

We 've had other lions that are actually taking out feral horses, which is pretty interesting because some of the female lions that we've collared, we've seen their offspring move off out of their natal range and actually kill feral horses wherever they end up.

So it's kind of like this learned behavior that mom taught them.

Mountain lions are are one of the you know the most important most traditionally important species to the pueblo.

And they're good surrogates for identifying corridors on the landscape because they require such large home ranges.

>> Narrator: Huge home ranges...Consider Squeaks...Who earned his nickname by squeaking for his mom after being collared.

>> Glenn Harper: So, there's one young male lion that we collared at 16 months old.

And as young male lions do, they always disperse out of their natal range.

And this young lion, we collared him at 16 months, and then after two months, he was trying to start to disperse out of his natal range.

And we know what his natal range is because we'd collared his mother, too.

And so, we were able to watch him bounce around between 550 and I-25 and going up towards Tent Rocks.

We were able to catch him trying to get out of his natal range.

At two months old, he made his first movement north towards Tent Rocks and then came back into his natal range.

Eight more times during a two-month period he continued to try to leave the pueblo and then finally on on in early July he crossed Highway 550 and made his way up through Cuba, New Mexico, went through some Navajo land up by Bloomfield, crossed Navajo Reservoir, swam two legs of that, entered Colorado, and then ended up establishing a home territory on Mesa Verde National Park and Ute Mountain Ute lands.

That's a home range of about 200 square miles, at least at this point.

His collar malfunctioned, so we don't know what he's up to these days.

But before it malfunctioned we were in contact with the biologists at Mesa Verde National Park.

>> Narrator: It's a remarkable journey.

Especially because highways make everything harder for wildlife.

>> Glenn Harper: As Squeaks was trying to leave his natal range, he kept running up against I-25 and he kept running up against 550.

And would literally get to the right-of-way fence on these stretches of road and then turn back and go back into his natal range.

Something along those roadways is keeping them from crossing those roadways, and it was obviously the vehicles.

I-25 has essentially become a barrier to wildlife movement.

Although there are individuals from a population that may move across the highway and successfully get across, all the GPS location data that we've collected from mountain lions, bears, pronghorn, deer, elk, none of our GPS animals have crossed I-25.

So, we consider that kind of a barrier and all of our roadkill data matches up with that, where these animals went across, the roadkill data stacks up right there.

>> Narrator: On their other lands closer to the Rio Grande and atop Santa Ana Mesa, the pueblo has reintroduced pronghorn and wild turkeys and done restoration along the river.

They're also planning for how to reconnect wildlife corridors severed by Highway 550 and Interstate 25.

Biologists have cameras that show how animals turn back from roads or are forced to navigate infrastructure like culverts.

And we have all seen the animals killed trying to cross our roads.

Across the landscape, animals face many challenges.

>> Glenn Harper: Sandoval Spring is an important water resource in this area.

It's a very arid landscape.

The Rio Puerco is the nearest perennial, or it's not really perennial, it's even an ephemeral water source.

Unless you can develop water in these landscapes, this is one of the only water sources.

It's an important area that we're looking at trying to, to restore.

There's many signs of past misuse, fencing, you know the cattails, the exotic species like cattails and salt cedar and some other exotics like tumbleweed and kosha are here.

Well, I came out to look at the spring, to see if, where the water level is at and see how the cattails were doing in it.

And walking around the spring, I found a dead mountain lion.

It appears to be a male, an older male mountain lion, doesn't seem to be any signs of injury.

It seems like it was relatively healthy.

It's really unusual to find a lion.

In the 20, 30 years that I've been a biologist I've never, I've only seen one mountain lion outside of the capture work that we do for mountain lions.

So yeah, finding one dead like this is extremely unusual.

As a department, our mission is really to identify problems, collect the information that we need to take at the tribal council, to have them direct us on how we should proceed.

And ideally, if I could come back in 200 years, I'd like to see that this landscape is still providing all the all the things that are necessary for the Santa Ana people to maintain their culture.

As the as the world around them continues to grow, they'll have the space that they need to be able to maintain that.

>> Narrator: The Land Back movement is growing.

But for tribes, getting lands back isn't easy or straightforward.

>> Dillion Eustace: A lot has been taken.

I'm not, I'm just going to put it plain and simple.

A lot has been taken.

And nothing has been given back.

>> Thomas Armijo: Not every tribe is able to get such a, you know, it's a big fight, and you know, it's a big hill to climb over.

But being able to get our land back, you know, also shows like for everybody else, you know, it's possible, you just have to keep working at it.

>> Narrator: For young leaders like Dillon Eustace...It's just a start.

>> Dillion Eustace: I always talk about this with my family.

Like, certain pueblos kind of have politics with each other and they can't really agree on certain things.

But this, I feel like shouldn't be something that should be even debated about.

As native people to the land, we're pretty much stewards of the land.

I would even extend it to outsiders.

Like, we're all stewards of the land.

Being that we have this position, we have all this land, we have this infrastructure and government like, why not come together?

Why not connect that gap, for all the way from Jemez mountains to here?

Why not deal that?

Because in a in a sense it's it's our culture, it's us so without this land, we don't exist.

Taking care of this land and being able to show the younger kids what I do, why I do it, and making sure they understand that this isn't for no reason, We're here for a reason and we have a duty to to take care of this land, all of this.

>> Thomas Armijo: My hope for the pueblo, and you know for the people, is just that it remains the same.

You think, how many people walked through here?

All their footprints.

So, it's kind of you taking the same steps.

So, you know, it's kind of a place to reconnect back to our past, reaffirming who we are, and how much we accomplished from our very beginning all the way up to now.

>> Nathan Garcia: This was home and I still feel that I can think about what it was way back in ancestral times and you know they walked this ground and now I'm here walking the ground and I think you know many, footprints, many years of our people on here, and now we're returned and now it's our turn to make our footprint here, in terms of how we move forward and then bring our children along the way.

>> Julian Garcia [offscreen]: I am so happy that we reacquired this lands.

We purchased this for cultural reasons.

This is all pristine.

This is all serene, this is what I like.

You know, I come up here during traditional hunts.

You know just take in the the natural beauty of things.

But we're trying to keep this pristine, in the natural state.

So you sit, you're sitting right here, nice sandstones, nice view to the north there.

The big old ravine there, those sandstone bluffs, [word in Keres] out in the distance there, there you know that's natural beauty, that's what I live for.