♪♪ -Montana, where the Great Northern Plains meet the Rockies, a melding of landscapes and cultures that evokes an unmistakable feel in the American zeitgeist.

Hardy men and women who make their living on the open range.

Thrill seekers working deep into the backcountry in search of adventure, and the best trout fishing west of the Mississippi.

The intersection of great western tribes who still hold this landscape and its largest wild resident as sacred.

-The buffalo needs help, and the people are offering themselves back to the buffalo.

There's a confluence here, not just of rivers and streams, mountains and plains, But of old ways, providing potential solutions to new problems.

-The loss of diversity across the West is astonishing.

-It's the wisdom of our ancestors providing a road map to reinvent our food system and our relationship with the natural world.

-Ultimately, people saw food as just like any other industry.

It was about money.

It's about power.

I believe that we can help facilitate a much healthier world.

All we have to do is listen to what she's telling us.

♪♪ -My name is Kevin Chap, and for me, wild foods aren't just a luxury, they're a way of life.

As an environmentalist, educator, and professional forager, I know the best ingredients are still waiting to be discovered.

You just need to know where to look.

♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from -- the Vermont International Film Foundation, bringing the world to Vermont through film and supporting filmmakers in Vermont and beyond for 40 years.

And with support from -- ♪♪ -The Bears Paw Mountains in northern Montana are the eroded remnants of an ancient volcanic thrust that lifted the prairie into the sky.

Forests of Douglas fir, ponderosa, and quaking aspen frame wide open slopes and meadows.

♪♪ From these high ridges, it's possible to take in the entire range.

♪♪ And just before sunrise on crisp autumn mornings, this is where hunters come to stock the largest remaining wild ruminant to graze these lands.

-For Jason Belcourt and his son, Brandon, this is where their annual elk hunt begins.

-Typically when we hunt, we try to get up high and let our optics do the work for us, and we'll locate the animal.

Where we're at, we can see any direction four or five miles.

So this is a favorite spot of the local hunters.

♪♪ -Can you just talk to me about that experience?

Like how you learn how to do it.

What it kind of means to you guys to be able to share this together.

-I think it's just a way of life.

We grew up hunting.

Back when I was a kid, there wasn't too much money flowing around, and so deer meat was always a favorite.

-I mean, this animal's been on the land forever.

It's still a totally wild ruminant that lives naturally in these mountains and all over Montana, right?

-Yeah.

I guess you got to look at it from a Chippewa-Cree perspective.

Our people were all over the plains, nomadic, and the Indian wars started coming to an end, and people started getting put on reservations.

There was no buffalo.

They were gone.

-Yeah.

-So we had to depend on elk and deer.

And we also had to be careful not to hunt them out.

You only take what you need, right?

So you don't overharvest.

If you overharvest anything, that's to your demise.

♪♪ -As you gaze out across the land, you peer into what was once part of the bison's home range.

It's like looking back in time.

Back when the bison, this land, and native peoples evolved together, supporting one another.

-He was explained to me by my grandma said the buffalo is a medicine because he goes out and he's a forager.

He knows which plants are medicinal.

When he eats those plants, he becomes medicine.

And then when we consume him, we're ingesting medicine.

-Oh, that's awesome.

-So it's health.

And so again, when we were put on this reservation, the buffalo was destroyed, gone, and we were put on a diet that didn't fit us.

Now, today we're all high blood pressure, heart disease, you know, diabetic.

We pray to this animal that he's going to make us strong again.

♪♪ -As the sun breaks through the clouds, Jason bugles for elk.

Hoping to draw in a bull looking for a mate.

[ Bugling ] ♪♪ -Oh, yeah.

Wow.

That is something else, man.

♪♪ As we descend the mountains in pursuit of the elk, Jason draws us up short, taking us by way of a sacred site that outlines the history and mythos of his people, reminding us just how special this place really is.

This is a particular buffalo, right?

-The white buffalo, yeah.

-White buffalo.

What's the significance of the white buffalo?

-Our creation story is before there was human beings here on this earth here, the creator gathered all his spirits and buffalo, all the animals and he said, "I'm going to bring my children.

And who's going to help me?"

None of the animals would step up.

None of them.

Finally the buffalo stepped up and he said, "I'll help."

And he said, "They can consume me and I'll give them energy and it'll make them strong, and they can take my hide, and they can make their lodges and make their clothes."

-The buffalo first stepped up to help people come into existence, and now you guys are stepping up to help it come back into existence, right?

-Exactly.

-I mean, that's a pretty special full circle story.

♪♪ -Before wild buffalo can once again take their place among the other creator's children, like the elk that eluded us, the Chippewa-Cree must first build a new herd on their reservation lands.

♪♪ On an autumn day in 2021, the Chippewa-Cree welcomed 11 bison back to the swath of former wild habitat through the Rocky Boy Buffalo Project, named for a famed Chippewa chief.

Today, the ranch called Buffalo Child is home to nearly 50 recovered bison.

♪♪ Their project is one of seven happening with all the indigenous tribes throughout Montana.

And they're off to an impressive start.

Pockets of restored bison range stretch from the Blackfeet's herd in the shadow of Glacier Park to Fort Belknap Reservation in north central Montana.

Cows and bulls from those more established herds come here.

And their primary caretaker is Wyatt Caplette a Smithsonian trained biologist who grew up here.

-Grasslands are one of the most endangered and least protected environments in the world.

-No kidding.

-And they're also one of the rarest natural native grasslands that haven't been disturbed at all.

-Yep.

-So no plowing, no, um, human development.

Those are the rarest environments in the world.

Mainly because they're prime agricultural lands.

-Right.

-Like grasslands are where you want to keep your animals or they're where you want to put your fields at.

♪♪ Regions where grasslands are still abundant.

That's here in the northern Great Plains of North America, the plains of South America, and the central steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia in Central Asia.

Those are the last bastions of grasslands.

-Like, originals.

-Yeah.

-The ruminants play a huge part in the fact of why it's so valuable a land, right?

-Yes, a big part.

-So, I mean, I have to imagine that, like the reintroduction of the natural ruminants that actually helped build this soil has to be interesting to Smithsonian, but it's also got to be personally interesting to you, right, because of your heritage.

-Oh, yes.

Of course.

-Across northern Montana, on restored bison ranges, a half dozen native grasses are making a comeback.

♪♪ Preservation also includes the reintroduction, right, of the natural ruminants that were here, because they were the ones that made this rangeland as fertile.

That's why it's so coveted, right?

-Oh, yes.

Yeah.

-Like they're supposed to be here.

-Yes.

Buffalo are very important.

They go hand in hand with this habitat.

You realize how important family is to them, how much they value being around one another.

Spending time with one another.

♪♪ -The bison's instinct to stick close to family is mirrored by the Chippewa-Cree community, which comes together for meals.

-Today we're gonna have some buffalo that we grew on reservation, along with the potatoes and squash and corn that went into this meal.

It's all grown right here in Rocky Boy.

With that, I'm gonna call up our elder here, Sam Vernon Windy Boy, to come bless the food.

[ Speaking Cree ] ♪♪ -Pot roast done with the potatoes from the community garden.

This Juneberries I was just told, which I've never had before.

So I'm so excited about.

This is a plate of completely rewilded food, so it's a pretty special opportunity to break some bread with some really amazing people.

♪♪ -During the community meal, everyone is invited to share -- something many of us have gotten away from.

Thank all of you for inviting us into your home.

And I was just blown away by the vision, the stories, the community.

♪♪ Afterwards, Wyatt shares the success of the tribe's growing bison herd by leading his elders out into the range.

Powerful.

You can just feel 'em like... Boom, boom, boom.

-A very commanding presence.

-Yeah.

♪♪ -Like tree rings, like the way you could age a tree by looking at its rings.

You could look at their horns and count the rings on their horns to tell their age.

-Oh, no kidding.

-You have to be really close to do that.

Closer than we want to get tonight, right?

[laughs] ♪♪ -From the Rocky Boy Reservation in Box Elder, we're heading about three hours south to Adel, Montana to meet up with Cooper Hibbard, fifth generation ranch manager at Sieben Live Stock Company.

We're here to learn how wild bison are informing a massive shift in stock growing, and spawning a new generation of working in closer relationship to the land, family, and community.

Cooper brings his past experience of working on ranches in Mexico, Argentina, and Australia to his family's ranch.

-It's all Mother Nature and to allow her to do her job to the greatest extent possible.

So when you apply linear thinking and you're looking at maximum output, what you end up doing is extracting and you are mining the resource.

So you're depleting your soils and you're ending up with lifeless soils, and so you end up with lifeless food and lifeless landscapes.

-Yeah.

Right, right, right.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Out on the range, Cooper practices non-selective cattle grazing, which mimics the feeding behaviors of bison herds.

Like bison, the cattle are moved frequently across the landscape in dense groups, creating the same trampling, fertilization, and rest periods that historically shaped grassland ecosystems.

-Mimicking that relationship that these grasses need in order to thrive.

By grazing non-selectively, we're building soil, we're selecting for our desirable species by default, to the point where it increased our forage productivity and harvest rate by 300% in eight years.

-Wait.

In the last how many years?

-Eight years.

-300%?

-300% on average.

And what makes that even more dramatic is that productivity and harvest rate increase happen in the driest decade in the history of the ranch.

♪♪ If you leave Mother Nature to her own devices, best of conditions 100 to 500 years to build one inch of topsoil.

You enter in management, all of a sudden you're building one inch of topsoil in four years.

That's what's possible.

-Yeah.

I think so many times when we're talking about the environment or stewardship, we take ourselves out of the equation, too, right?

-Yeah.

-We get to live here as well, right?

-I think we're a very important part.

I think nature needs us.

-Yeah.

-And I believe that we can help facilitate a much healthier world.

All we have to do is listen to what she's telling us.

That's it.

-Yeah.

♪♪ -Joining Cooper in a quest to raise healthy food while restoring health to Montana's wild spaces, are other ranchers bound together by the Old Salt Co-op.

♪♪ -That right there is what we're trying to do with Old Salt, is to create a community, to bridge that gap, to provide that connection to people who want and value that, to be a part of these open, wild landscapes and knowing that that's where their life force is coming from.

When someone does go to pick up their fork, if they make sure that that food is from a healthy, intact landscape that's supporting wildlife, healthy water, respect for people, you're voting with your fork.

-Yeah.

-And you're voting for what future you want to have for your kids by doing that.

-Like Cooper, Cole Mannix raises beef for Old Salt on his family's long running ranch.

-Old Salt was kind of built from a couple of ranches that had been in Montana for a long time.

My family's and Cooper Hibbard's place, the Sieben Live Stock.

First in the 1860s, 1870s, and those ranches are still in the same families.

We talk about the food system we have today as having been built on efficiency, but I think the homogenization has resulted because ultimately people saw food as just like any other industry.

It was about money.

It's about power.

-Yeah.

-If we were going to get outside of this commodity system that treats every ranch the same, we were gonna need to build a community of people that shared our values.

♪♪ -So Old Salt isn't just raising cattle, it's actually growing soils.

It's raising grasslands.

It's creating community.

And you get to taste that on your plate.

♪♪ Instead of getting sucked in to the homogenized American food system, everything produced by Old Salt ranchers and their partners flows through the Union, Old Salt's flagship market and restaurant.

The culinary director for the pioneering food experience at the Union is Andrew Mace.

You're really on the vanguard of how we get these animals from the field onto people's plates, right?

And that's a position of stewardship.

-Right.

-And like, deep kind of natural understanding as well as the commercial aspect of running a restaurant.

-Yeah.

-Right?

You have to be profitable.

-You know, traditionally these animals would be born, raised, and then they would sort of just be handed off to the commodity food supply where it's anonymous and they don't know where it goes.

And also the consumers don't know where it came from either.

Now, the restaurants and the culinary sort of division of Old Salt is taking the place of that.

So now we have this immense pressure of, okay, this animal was raised its entire life, and now it's in your hands.

So, like, don't mess this up.

The more I get to know these ranchers, and the more I go to these landscapes and see these animals, the pressure kind of just gets ratcheted up on us to kind of treat that with as much care as it was given in the pasture.

-The grass fed steaks sold and served at The Union offer a lower, healthier fat content than the average grocery store, where the fat content can be as high as 50%.

The meat also holds different seasonal flavor profiles and comes in hard-to-find cuts like these Denver Steaks.

-Potato salad, and then here we have two medium rare Denver steaks.

-These are from your ranch.

-Yeah, where we were just this morning.

So it's pretty fun to see it all the way through.

-Oh man.

Mm-hm.

-Good.

-Yeah, a ton of depth in that flavor.

And that's something that, like, we really have to reintroduce the American consumer or eater, too, right?

'Cause we've lost that -- that place, that terroir out of -- out of our meats.

-We're all a tiny little piece of it, right?

-Yeah.

-Just the tiniest piece.

And yeah, we have one life and one set of energy to spend.

When you spend it on things and you can directly see the result in the community.

-Mmm.

Good.

♪♪ -There's a place in Montana where the ideals of sustainable agriculture are reflected back as an intact wild landscape.

The ecological lessons offered by grazing bison and the vision of local cattle ranchers is culminating into a wildly successful and inspiring story of restoration.

This is the Centennial Valley, where cattle decimated this place just outside of Yellowstone National Park.

But now wild things and wild foods are thriving side by side.

There are migrating birds, gray wolves, grizzly bears, and large cattle operations that no longer degrade this place.

♪♪ That's why it's also home to a recovering population of nearly extinct native fish -- the Arctic grayling.

-We do have Grayling, a few left.

67, two years ago.

They think there's about a hundred this year -- that are living in the area between Alaska Basin and Upper Red Rock Lake.

-Old Salt rancher Xavier Rolet is restoring vital Grayling habitat, where overgrazing turned the once pristine Hell Roaring Creek into a giant mudhole.

Sediment from the cattle ranch here washed downstream and helped snuff out the native Grayling.

-About eight years ago, we bought those two contiguous ranches that had been overgrazed that were no longer used either by cows nor by wildlife.

Most of the valley floor is essentially a mud pit, because the riparian areas have been degraded to the point where the creeks no longer existed.

-And this means blown out by cattle overgrazing, like, washing banks out.

-Exactly.

-Washing the banks out, silting up the creeks.

So the first effort was to restore the creeks, the riparian areas.

♪♪ The second task was to rebuild the creek, rebuild and plant willows.

Eventually we set up a lot of these beaver dam analogs.

There's about 85 of them throughout this alluvial fan here that starts at the bottom of the Hell Roaring Creek canyon to retain water in the spring and essentially to recharge the aquifer.

-With his ranch manager, Cy McCullough, Xavier continues to return Hell Roaring Creek to its former wild glory.

-You know, with the water restoration and straightening things out with the overgrazing, that's bringing back the grasses, helping rejuvenate it.

That's trading up the ground, that's planting these seeds and bringing the grass back.

♪♪ -As Grayling return, so will cows.

And the business of ranching done the Old Salt way.

♪♪ -The whole purpose of this is to make a sustainable experiment that shows that you can improve the financial sustainability, in this case ranching, give ranchers a better deal, but at the same time give consumers a better deal at a pricing point that is not a premium to conventionally ranch proteins and meat.

And that has been proven to be possible.

What Old Salt is about is making it happen.

♪♪ We do not have more than another generation to get this right.

We have about 20 years.

All the models are showing it.

What could capital markets, what could modern finance do to help scale up the, at the moment, still early, but inevitable, inexorable movement to a form of agriculture that contributes a lot less to climate change, that is much friendlier to nature, much friendlier to animals, and also, of course, friendlier to human health.

That is the future of agriculture, in my view.

♪♪ -This future comes when communities find ways to prioritize their local food system.

The Old Salt community is eating great healthy food while supporting the great outdoors -- And I'm right there with them.

♪♪ The inspiration one finds in the Centennial Valley gives me a tremendous amount of hope.

It proves that through joint efforts and restoring balance in our ecosystem, specifically through our food system, we can restore landscapes and create healthier communities.

♪♪ From the banks of a newly restored stream to the pastures of some epic ranches, to the indigenous stewards working to restore one of the great American icons, we all have something we can learn from this infinitely unique landscape.

We just need to know where to look.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"Wild Foods" is made possible by generous support from -- the Vermont International Film Foundation, bringing the world to Vermont through film, and supporting filmmakers in Vermont and beyond for 40 years.

And with support from -- ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪