- Our relatives, the buffalo suffered great, great extermination almost to the point of becoming extinct.

When the buffalo were removed off of the landscape that caused a direct loss of balance on the earth, the grass, the soil, the trees, the water that directly affected indigenous people.

The buffalo are everything to me, just as they were to my ancestors.

At one time the buffalo were our food, our shelter, our religion, our examples of governance, and today we get to live in that way of life once again.

(light music) Hey girls!

Hey girls!

That's my good girls.

We have 28 buffalo and we have about eight or nine more gonna be born any day now.

I think this one that's coming up at the end, she is probably in labor right now.

The way that she's walking, she's last.

She can't run.

Here you go, my girl.

My name is Lucille R Contreras and I am the CEO and founder of Texas Tribal Buffalo Project.

I'm a real buffalo y'all.

(laughing) We are currently in Waelder, Texas, which is in the heart of Lipan Apache territory, south central Texas.

Since the early 1800s, Buffalo have been removed from this landscape.

We know that buffalo numbered in the millions, up to 80 million is the estimate right now.

And if you consider even 1 million on this landscape, you realize it would have looked completely different.

Buffalo are one of the keystone species that keeps our world, our beautiful earth in balance.

The buffalo's removal off of the landscape from the northern plains to the southern plains that resulted in the Dust Bowl.

That resulted in the overgrazing of beef cattle onto the plains, changing the biodiversity.

In the short amount of time that I have been living here with the buffalo, I've seen the interconnectedness of the buffalo and all life connected to the buffalo grow and expand and thrive.

(light music) We live on this small piece of land and the only way that we are successfully able to continue managing the buffalo and the way that we are doing is because we do use rotational grazing and regenerative agriculture.

- There's grasses on this side that were not on this side and on this side, that weren't on this side, but now that we have the buffalo doing their, you know, rotation, they're actually taking the grasses that were here over there and vice versa.

Sorry.

Look at her big old thing of hay on her head.

And if you just look around, especially right now where they were and rubbing themselves, and there's trees over here, they start to leave their fur in those spaces so their fur will pass on those seeds.

- Imagine there being 60 to 80 million buffalo here on Turtle Island, otherwise known as North America.

And as these buffalo walked, they would walk and rub against trees and leave long locks of fur and within these locks of fur or seeds like this.

And I just love how the buffalo continue biodiversity, restoring native grasses by carrying seeds in their fur all across the land.

They're so amazing.

When we walk through the pasture that the buffalo have been on for only four years, one thing that I'm really so excited to see is like native grasses coming back.

Yeah, on the other side of the pond wasn't there some, there was some more of that Honeysuckle.

So the honeysuckle is a bio indicator.

We're definitely noticing that there's a lot of bio indicators that show that the soil, the ecology, the microbes that the buffalo live on and have created are having a big effect on the land.

They're improving the land.

Some of the other bio indicators are honeysuckle, native Texas Huisache, Texas, Agarita.

These are plants that when they grow and they're healthy like this, it shows that the soil is healthy.

There's my friend the buffalo, and this is a native plant too, and holly buckets.

We have seen so many amazing beautiful birds and animals that won't dare go where the cattle are because it's all flat and there's nowhere for these birds and other little animals to hide and live in.

And so the buffalo, they don't graze flat and everything level.

As they graze, they walk around and they move and they eat, and so they leave these big clumps of grass that become an entire habitat in their own selves.

It's just beautiful.

There were a lot of challenges growing up as a Native American in south central Texas.

In the seventies, I was an elementary school and I remember our fourth grade teacher telling the entire class, there were no more Native Americans in Texas, that all the Indians were dead and extinct.

And I remember how much confusion that caused within me.

We have for generations had to hide in plain sight and assimilate into a larger Mexican, Mexican American culture for survival.

Our people have been so disconnected from so many of our traditional ways because of the loss of land, because of the loss of our language, because of the loss of our culture.

When my father told me, (speaking foreign language) it was like a switch in my life, a switch in my spirit.

And from that day on, I've been connected to where I come from, where I'm going and who I am.

Our people have been through so much trauma generation after generation after generation that right now we are like actually living and breathing the prayers that our ancestors put forth for us to live.

All right, boys, let's go get your breakfast.

Come on, come on.

Oh my God, I love you so much.

Yes.

Wow.

It's so beautiful.

Go eat your food before your brother eats it, and then you're gonna be hungry later.

Look at him.

He's just scarfing it down.

Ah, he's ready to go, This way.

Let's go this way.

Oh, this is wild honeysuckle.

- Oh, wow.

- It's beautiful.

Look at it.

Little relative.

So delicate and beautiful and strong, just like us indigenous people.

I love it.

I love being back home so much.

Alrighty.

Ready boys?

Let's go home.

We better get to the office.

Change, put my jeans on.

(laughing) Fun with the dog.

(light music) Okay.

This pond usually is a lot fuller.

It usually comes all the way up to the rim.

And right now, because we're in a drought, it's just really low.

- [Sarah] This grass seems a little over grazed, huh?

- Yeah, right here.

So the height of the grass tells you and then the coloration and how much dirt and soil you're seeing and patches.

So it looks like they might like the grass in this area, so they're gonna overgraze it versus if you look just over here, that might just, the buffalo will naturally know what they like.

- I like to do this test, right?

So you put your hand in there and you go like this, and then we come over here be like, wow, look at that.

The buffalo air rate the soil and they restore native seeds and grasses to the landscape.

But because there is such a lack of water nowadays, we are in a state of drought.

So even though there is a lot of green grass, if it's not tall enough, the buffalo are not able to receive the protein they need to sustain themselves.

Our hope is that we will be able to restore the seed bank because if we restore the seed bank that also combats the drought.

It's so important for every farmer and rancher to realize that as we grow more into a holistic way of working with our animals and working with the plants, we truly believe that in the future, Buffalo are gonna make one of the biggest impacts in the landscape in North America.

(gentle music) We believe in the holistic benefits of the buffalo.

Mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Our indigenous women suffer the highest rate of gestational diabetes and many other health disparities.

Sarah, help.

One, two, three.

Thank you.

Meat for Mamas is a program where we deliver meat to indigenous mothers in Texas as a way to combat the health disparities that have occurred in our communities as a direct result from the loss of our own traditional diets.

One, two, thank you.

We get to deliver to 10 different individual mothers all throughout pregnancy and into postpartum so that we can have healthy mothers, healthy babies, and hopefully a future healthy buffalo woman.

from our Meat for Mama's babies.

Lavender.

- She's got a good garden.

- Hey, we brought y'all a delivery.

Oh my God.

Hi Jennifer.

Oh my God, it's so great to see you.

Connecting to our food as a relative is an ancient concept.

If we know where our food comes from, then we know best how we can help ourselves in the future.

All the buffalo herds all over Turtle Island are matriarchal, meaning they are led by a older female buffalo.

This older female buffalo is wise.

She has experienced drought and she still knows how to survive.

No matter where you go across North America, every single herd is led by an older female buffalo.

All the herds, as they're led by the older female, have younger females coming up, training, learning from the older aunties, how to be good relatives, how to be good mothers, and how to care for the rest of the herd.

Watching the buffalo matriarchy helps me to learn how to be a good leader, helps me to learn how to work with the other women in my team in a really good way.

We don't have competition and we don't have ego.

We have trust building.

We have love, caring and compassion for each other as relatives.

- That's what it is, is being a herd, being people of the earth, you know, is to be here for one another.

Nat's taught me how to be with Lucille, how to be with my wife, how to be with all of the women who we work together, like we're that main core of that herd.

Lou had this vision and she sees whatever she sees in us sometimes that we don't see in ourselves, and she just takes it.

You know, and she's like, yes you, okay over here and over here and over here.

And then before you know it, it's like, oh wow.

Everybody's like in that right space and that's exactly what the buffalo do.

They push each other to where they need to be.

- That is to me, true leadership.

When the other women around me can step into their own true leadership roles, their own responsibility, and flourish and thrive for each other, that's what the buffalo do.

They're all independently strong and powerful, and then together, the hurt cannot ever be stopped.

I take a lot of leadership and guidance from the buffalo and how they live and how they walk and work with each other and try my best to emulate that in my own life.

The biggest obstacle we face is access to land and access to funds to continue doing the work that we are doing.

If we never get another penny for this project, I'll be sure I am gonna still continue working on this project for the rest of my life.

My biggest motivation to continue doing this work is the love I have for the buffalo, the love I have for my people and the love I have for the earth.

I truly want to leave this world in a better place than when I arrived here.

I wanna leave a legacy that gives hope for the future so that our people continue thriving.

(light music) There's a beautiful quote that says "They tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds."

And that's how I feel about the buffalo, that each of these buffalo relatives are seeds as well.

It gives me a lot of hope and strength for the future when I see the buffalo thriving because we as people from the Buffalo Nation, we are also once again thriving.

I started Texas Tribal Buffalo Project because I egged for my homeland.

I longed for my community, and I longed to bring leadership into our family members.

Being rooted in the land is so important to me, and I've known that if the buffalo helped me heal, the buffalo helped me grow into the leader that I didn't know I was, I know that that would be able to happen for other people.

(gentle music) (cheerful music)