Haile Chase-The Boy stands in ankle-high, green and yellow grasses beneath a cloudless sky on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation on a hot, dry morning last summer.
“These native grasses were supposed to be gone,” Chase-The Boy said. “But we’re still here. These grasses are still here. And so that’s how I find it empowering.”
Chase-The Boy is a field technician for the Fort Belknap Grassland Restoration Project.
“Our ancestors walked all over this,” Chase-The Boy said. “They were here, you know, and for me, it’s like church out here. I think that this program will honestly, like, make that cool again.”
The Grassland Restoration Project started in 2020 and is a first-of-its-kind partnership between the Fort Belknap Indian Community and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Native youth from the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes enter the program as Community Fellows and are trained to collect data and seeds that can be used to restore prairie grasslands. The training, which is resuming for the 2022 season, also aims to empower young tribal members by teaching them how to heal the land.
Twenty-three-year-old Sakura Main was one of last year’s fellows and is returning this year as a field technician.
“I didn’t think I would be interested in, like, finding out, grasses that, you know, grow here and stuff like that,” Main said. “And especially having, like, the traditional part tied into it, it’s pretty interesting.”
Native grasses like green needlegrass, Sandberg's bluegrass, and western wheatgrass have adapted over millennia to thrive in the northern Great Plains. The plants’ deep roots help the soil retain moisture and nutrients, and their seeds hold genetic information that makes them more resilient to environmental stressors like the region’s persistent drought.
The once intact native prairie is fragmented today — a shift that can be traced to settlers moving to the plains to use its fertile soils for grazing and agriculture. This displaced Indigenous peoples and reduced plant diversity.
The effort to gather native grass seed opens the possibility of restoring a more drought resistant landscape.
“There have been a lot of different land uses happen on tribal and BLM land in the last hundred years,” said Wendy Velman, who as the BLM’s botany program lead for Montana and the Dakotas oversees the Fort Belknap Grassland Restoration Project..
“The cool part about working with the reservation is that as the elders share stories with the youth, they can get a much better understanding of very long-term historic uses on their landscapes,” she said. “They get to delve into that historic knowledge that is not available on other parts of land from, you know, from white science perspective.”
The program blends hands-on Western science training with Indigenous knowledge, exposing the young Fellows to sacred stories and places that provide a connection to Aaniiih and Nakoda language, morals, and culture.
Program coordinator and cultural liaison Dan Werk says this link is crucial.
“It’s powerful for them to hear those things, you know,” Werk said. “You know, just trying to set the tone for ‘em and let ‘em know that there’s things out here that you can grab a hold of and that are going to help you live a more fulfilling life.
"We’re really a unique people, you know, and letting ‘em know how unique they are.”
Indigenous ecologist Cristina Eisenberg leads and trains the fellows as they gather grass seeds.
“When they’re in the field, all they do is smile,” Eisenberg said. “They love what they’re doing and it’s very, deeply meaningful to them.”
Eisenberg and her team gathered 23 pounds of seed last summer, 96% of which came from tribal land. The seeds collected on the Fort Belknap reservation belong to the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes, who can choose to sell this seed to the BLM for future restoration projects on public lands.
“This is not science for the sake of science at all, you know,” Eisenberg said. “That’s, like, the least important part of this. It’s really about healing.”
Eisenberg recently went before the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisisto testify about the program's model. She spoke about the power of grasslands to sequester carbon, and the importance of partnering with tribal nations to increase resilience to climate change. Honoring tribal sovereignty and Indigenous knowledge, she said, are essential to this process.
“Together, we can empower tribal nations and help America meet the climate challenge,” she said.
The Fort Belknap Grassland Restoration Project plans to train and employ up to 30 young tribal members during the 2022 summer field season.
“This is where we feel grounded,” said field technician Haile Chase-The Boy. “And honestly, I hope everybody finds that in their life ‘cause it’s just, it’s such an amazing feeling and this program really does that for me and, you know, my co-workers.”
Copyright 2022 Montana Public Radio. To see more, visit Montana Public Radio.