Welcome to Way Back When, Big Blend Radio's History Podcast. So, everyone, we're back here with a cinematographer, a cinematographer, showrunner Jeff Reed talking about the National Parks USA that premieres on National Geographic September 8th. So, if you're listening today, it's airing tomorrow, so you've got to go keep up with that and go look up on all the channels. All those links are in the episode notes. Today, we're going to talk about the cultural connection and the human connection of the parks featured in this amazing series. Again, we've got Zion National Park, Katmai National Park, Yellowstone, Everglades, and Olympic National Parks all featured in them. And I think what's great about this, Jack, is that you guys have focused in on the indigenous people that lived in these parks and telling their stories, and so you've really brought a then and now to this part of it, bringing in some of the families now today and finding them and being able to share their story, which is pretty special. Right. Yeah. I mean, we went in there with that idea consciously, we wanted to tell the stories of the National Parks to have these love letters to the National Parks, but not necessarily to the political organization of the National Park, you know, as an established place, really the land, the wildlife, the cultures there. And so part of that for far more history than has been Euro-American history has been indigenous history. So, you know, there were people that loved Yellowstone for 10,000 years before we, you know, we're calling it Yellowstone and before we all moved in. And so, and before there was really necessarily a need for the National Parks as well. And so we wanted to make sure that we incorporated some of that at least, you know, we could, we could do an entire mini-series about that topic, but at least to touch it on. These are primarily wildlife shows, but we want to make sure we paid some attribution to the people who've been there. Well, what I thought was also brilliant is that you showed the coexistence. I think let's go to the Everglades again, because we want to. So the Everglades, we look at what Marjory Stoma Douglas did as a conservationist. And that's also modern history now, right? Yeah. That's the other thing. You've got the indigenous people, but then you've also got scientists like Griggs out in Katmai and explorers on these expeditions. So a little bit of then and now with that, but I think what was great was, I think, is it Betty Osceola that was out there in the Everglades talking about her people of today. And so they show this coexistence. And so it's kind of this Marjory Stoma Douglas did one thing. I know she didn't like being in bugs. I remember even reading her talk about that. Like, I do not want to be around bugs. I'm not into it, but people lived within the bugs and still do. And so that I thought was really special. So when you talk about nature and wildlife, this cultural connection, this is a coexistence that we can learn from, I believe, when we step in the parks right before we were recording, Nancy came in and she says, I just wish we'd watched some of these, what you've done with the series before we go to the parks, because you have a bigger set of eyes when you go in from the work you've done. Yeah, I mean, it's a huge thing to know that when you're going in places like the Everglades and yeah, like Marjory, she respected the area. She valued it intrinsically for its wildlife, for its plants. She didn't necessarily want to be out in it. And so she brought that kind of Euro-American mentality to it of pushing against nature. And the people who lived there before her were, I think, pushing against it in their own way. They certainly found their own sorts of insect repellent. They found their... They lived in harmony with it though, because it was their land and it was where they hunted and they traveled. They moved along. They were, for a long time, nomadic in there and would travel down where the good fishing was and back in the north during the winter. And yeah, I think each person that has ever been in these places, I think, has felt some sort of connection to them. There's a reason people lived in the area that's the Everglades for so long. And there's a reason Marjory Stomen Douglas, who was worldly, but she hadn't been... She wasn't like an extreme outdoors person. She wasn't driven to get out there and be uncomfortable, but she saw the value in this place existing, untouched. And so I think that's where her vision, our vision, and the vision of indigenous people like Betty, align is this idea that that nature, if we just let it be, often it's okay. I think there's some corrections that are underway, especially in places like the Everglades, to make sure that it's able to coexist with places like Miami on the periphery and to try to mitigate invasive species and these things that will damage the park. So there's a few different aspect, ways of looking at it, and we could learn something from everyone. But the one thing we wanted to get across was that people have been stepping foot onto this land forever and using it, falling in love with it, respecting it, and that's kind of what we want to get to, no matter where you are. You know, I don't think we've been to a park where you don't have history connected. I mean, even Gettysburg has, you know, a huge part of the area where you go through the battlefields and we're like, okay, now if we get overwhelming, the history is really brutal there. But then you go in this pastoral areas and there's woodpeckers and cardinals and everything, we're just in there going, look at that, that's a big woodpecker. And they're massive out there. So you kind of have this thing and you understand, you have to go back to what people were living with. I mean, the Europeans coming over started exploiting. I mean, we all, you know, everyone's had a little bit of a story of exploitation, but I think the indigenous people of these areas really understood how to work with what landscape they were in and to treasure it and to connect. So like Zion, I thought with the night skies, how that connects to today and how they were going. This has been part of their people, just the stars. The stories that come from the stars, right? So that was something special to you also again, showed parks after dark, which is really an important thing too. Yeah. And I loved Autumn's story as well, who is our dark sky ranger in Zion. And she technically works, worked for the Pipes Springs National Monument and which is on the periphery of Zion, but her, you know, her ancestors, the Southern Paiute is also that ancestral Pueblan who would have been in and around Zion. And it's a unique park in the sense that there was the Virgin River Valley, which I think was productive and a good farmland, good for agriculture, good for hunting, for indigenous peoples for a long time, but then there's also an aspect of beauty that I don't think there was much reason to be up in certain parts of Zion, like the narrows where there's evidence that there were people other than to enjoy it. I could be wrong. There could be some resource gathering, but there was, you know, I think there was, there were people driven in that area to just go in there to look at it and to be in awe of Zion forever. And the same with the stars, the same with that, with Autumn, the stars hold the stories. It's something they took with them when they're forcibly removed from the area that Zion and moved around. And so they could still keep those star stories. And I think that's one reason the stories have persisted over the last few centuries where, you know, they may have been lost with a lot of the other, with a lot of their other culture, you know. And so that's an important part that she helps carry on. It's a part of, you know, this idea of the stars that we all grow up with and, and, you know, American and Western society often we grow up with the stories of Orion and Greek and Roman myths and the stars. And we don't ever really think twice about do other people have analogous stories and of course they do. Yeah. And yeah, Autumn was able to share some of those with us. That was really cool. You know, the, you know, Olympic National Park, too, I mean, that history on that coastline, I mean, that's, that's incredible history. I mean, that even ties into even Lewis and Clark coming through that way. It's like when you think about the tribes on the coastlands where it's really beautiful, but that's some hardcore terrain for them to live in. That was the other part of, you know, Yellowstone is beautiful, right? And gorgeous. You know, you're in the wildlife part, you're saying, come in the winter and then I'm thinking, well, how did they live out there back then? You know, it's like you've got to think about all these indigenous people, how they really had to acclimate. I mean, I'd be a total bait. Well, I have this snow photo from Yosemite in the background because, you know, I'm melting in New Orleans. Like, you know, but can, what can they do, you know, there? I mean, they really had to adapt and learn a way of life. And I think that was great to see in Yellowstone and then also Olympic National Park to learn more about their stories. Yeah. I mean, totally. Yeah. These places were, you know, you forget how much we've removed ourselves from being in tune with the land, with this ability to understand the weather, understand animal movement, understand anything. Just based on living out there, we as filmmakers get this tiny glimpse of we start to learn the behaviors of animals and we start to learn kind of the characteristics of a land over a year or so of working out there and spending a good amount of time. And that's a fraction of a fraction of a time that, you know, somebody who was living subsistence off the same land would have done, you know, and they would have had generations of knowledge passed down. So, you know, I think they had just this connection. It was hard, but they understood the what was coming their way later in the year, how they were going to make it through hard times, how to adapt and use the land in that situation. And so it's, I think, like, yes, we, we focus on the preservation of these lands as national parks as well, but they would, they would focus on how to preserve and use it. Yeah. And so these were these places provided resources, a land pick you mentioned was, you know, the salmon or the backbone of diet there. And one of the first things that happened with, with industrialization is we damped up those rivers, right? And it took decades and decades for those dams to come down. And that was a monumental achievement to bring the Elwa Dam down, for instance. There's still a fight going up even in Northern California and there's changes being made all the way up, I believe right now, which is good. We need to make those changes. I just wonder if they're going to ever unleash Hoover Dam. Yeah. Right. Not salmon, but yeah. I'm just like the Colorado River is like, we still have all those sensitivities, right? For all of that. So it's kind of like, but you know, our native peoples really understood water and filtration and all of that. And then you think you, when you go to some of our national parks, you see where settlers came in, dry farming, you know, even just south of you and Yellowstone up in the, that corner by Colorado, there was a lot of dry farmers in just like Northeast Colorado is rough. How did they do this? You know? Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it's like, wow. I love that you brought that part into, into these stories, but the other part is that you brought in this wonderful history of the then and now of scientists and conservationists. So Marjorie Stone, Doug Stone and Douglas and then also going to Griggs, Robert Griggs and Katami. That is an incredibly fascinating, crazy, cool story of him, just, you know, didn't really quite know everything until you got out there because he was kind of like, Hey, I'll go out there and see an explosion the way back. What? 1915. I can't remember the date. 1912 would have been the eruption. And then, yeah. 1915. Yeah. The exhibition. Yeah. He was a, he was funny. I like him because he, he was kind of this like classic fake until you make it guy in some ways. I think he was a sharp guy and a sharp botanist and had a, had a mind for science. He wasn't a geologist. And so he missed, he missed the cues on some of that that I think, you know, he didn't bring a geologist so long on most of his expeditions and kind of took it on to himself as a hobby in some ways. And I may be giving him less credit than he deserves, but he, yeah, yeah, he misread the volcanoes and to be fair, that that's a unique landscape, it's a unique volcano. But I think a trained volcanologist, which was a rare thing at the time, or a trained geologist would have recognized what he did not a little bit faster, which was the fact that Mount Katmai, this famous mountain that, you know, became the center of the park and collapsed during the eruption was not the actual volcano that erupted. Instead, it was a neighboring smaller volcano called nove erupta six miles away. And you can understand where, you know, they look up and they see this Mount Katmai and then they have an eruption, then Mount Katmai looks like a volcano with a big crater in it called air in it and steaming and of course that's the natural way to think about it. But no, it took them, it took them, you know, there were hints and people making hypotheses about what actually happened, but took several decades for people to first scientists to go in and actually prove that it wasn't Mount Katmai that erupted. It was nove erupta. It was the biggest eruption of the 20th century. It was unique in the way that erupted the type of rock that erupted under. And so this is incredibly hard kind of silica based material that is now 500, 600 feet deep in the Valley of 10,000 smokes and it created this amazing landscape. And yeah, you referenced that the story, you know, that was the catalyst to make this a national park to protect as a national one at first. It was Robert Greggs and his team going there over several years from 1915 to 1920 or so and it's not easy doing that either. Can we just go back then? I mean, it's not like, I mean, going to Alaska, you've been there, right? You've been to where he was, right? And it's not exactly a quick, easy drive over there. Yeah, it's not. And I think, you know, back then I'm trying to look at it through the eyes of history and he wrote in his book that it was easier to access than Yellowstone for him and which was an interesting perspective and he might have been using hyperbole to try to get it, you know, to compete with the Yellowstone, which he seemed to have a grudge against to some extent. He said, this is the next Yellowstone. It's far easier to get to. And I think it was because they could get to the coast by ship and they didn't have to do a huge cross-country voyage and that's speculating there. And I guess, you know, that's assuming you start on the west coast. But yeah, they were porting pretty close to, you know, the camp mine, then they hiked over this hill and I guess he had this grand vision of just building a road up into there. And he had the theory that Yellowstone, which was being degraded at the time by tourism and people kind of throwing stuff and bathing and bottling water and all this thing, all these things that happened at the hot springs there, he had this idea that Yellowstone was going to cool off and die and Valley of 10,000 smokes would never cool down and was eternal. And this was like a primordial Yellowstone, a birthplace of geysers and didn't really realize it was just magma steaming, you know, the last remaining water burning off underground. And the steam 30 years later was pretty much done. There's a couple of little steam pockets left and that's about it. That's so interesting because, you know, then you go to Yellowstone and you've got your indigenous people who know what's going on, you know, and they always follow the path of water and, you know, he was talking about the one guide he was talking about the obsidian, which is insanely cool. I saw that in Oregon, outside of south of Bend, Newberry, I think it's a Newberry national monument and it's like this crater and then got a national forest out there. And we found this hike of the city and it's like literally boulders of obsidian everywhere. It's weird, man. It's like, it looks like licorice, you actually want to eat it. It's like, and we were getting snowed on with all these black boulders and it was just like, this is kind of like what's going on where you are in that area, I suppose, back then those explosions and the obsidian. So, you know, when we talk about history, all those things must, I mean, it must have been so fascinating as the indigenous people watching what was going on. So that is very spiritual and deep and those stories go through from there. And trends go through down and here we bring in science, but then I think the two have to meet. And I think you did that too, is bringing the history, are you talking about the salmon? That's the same thing as this history of how things were and, you know, science, if science was allowed to be heard, maybe that wouldn't have been dammed up, just saying. Right, yeah, I totally agree and, you know, Shane Doyle, he referenced in Yellowstone who is an archaeologist and just kind of, he's kind of just this huge source of wisdom and knowledge about specifically his tribe, the Atzalka Crow and, you know, Yellowstone in general and the history there and obsidian cliff was so fascinating because it's directly tied to the creation of Yellowstone, it's directly tied to the volcanism there. It's a beautiful rock and it has this incredible history with indigenous peoples that have been, you know, they were some of the first hard stone miners in the area, they were mining obsidian and shipping it, you know, and it's kind of for me as, you know, and it was an entry point into remembering that native tribes were far more cosmopolitan than we were taught to believe and was intentional, you know, to kind of make them another, but it, you know, there were highways, there were, there were trade routes, I mean, yeah, if you even go think about the Royal Roads and all these historic trails, you know, the migratory tribes, it's amazing because of Canada, that elastic Canada and then going all the way down Mexico and people were migrating for all kinds of reasons, very nomadic, some just kind of disappeared from the region and, you know, and they traded and so, like, you know, Mexican Indians, they would all trade, like you find macaw feathers in Chaco Canyon, you know, it's like, it's like, what do you mean? Yeah, it's like, yeah, we'll find shark teeth in the desert too. Exactly, yeah, and Yellowstone, Yellowstone obsidian has like a lot of rock has a chemical signature that they can track, and so if there's obsidian found elsewhere in the country, elsewhere in the world, they can, they can say this is where it came from, so they found Yellowstone obsidian from coast to coast basically, it's all the way the Hoping Mountains in Ohio, I think, in the Midwest are, you know, there are huge deposits of, I think, hundreds of pounds of Yellowstone obsidian that was moved across, and so it has to be pretty valuable to move hundreds of pounds of rock across the country, you know, and so what Shane was referencing in that pretty short segment was that, well, yeah, so let's use the rivers, let's use things that make it a little bit easier to do that, and so the river being right next to obsidian cliff was perfect for them and move it out and ship it and that geology is crazy because you're not looking at the black on the outside by it, but it looks like devil's post-pile in a way, like that kind of, you know, it's just, it looks like beef, I don't know how to explain it. Yeah, yeah, it's a special, it's an attractive place in like, and you can't get very far up there, there's, there's, you know, hundreds of yards of these big obsidian cliffs and I think, you know, you can find these big ditches where they've mined it out and, and there's plenty still there and you're not allowed to take it anymore, so it's protected. No, that's, that's the most important thing is that it's protected. Yeah, and it's great to see it and, you know, if you look down on the ground, you see a little fragments of it everywhere and it's just fun to pick those up, look through them, drop them down where you, where you picked them up, but you can definitely see the, the remnants of that and then around Yellowstone, a greater Yellowstone ecosystem where obsidian isn't natural. If you're finding it, it's often that it was brought there, brought there by indigenous people and, and, you know, naps there or used and, and so there's a lot of archaeological evidence of it throughout. Yeah, this is just great stuff. So when you're going to do that new series, we need to, we need to get started. We need to get started. We need that to do this one to rate well. Oh, listen, everyone, I don't know what needs to happen, but vote, vote nicely, give good reviews, right? Reviews, people can do reviews on this, you know, go be nice. We want more. That's all I can say is we want more, you know, 63 national parks, you got five in, you've got a lot to do. Yeah, and I should, and I should add that we're really proud of the fact that Michael Spears got to narrate this. Yeah, he's got great voice, man. Indigenous guy here, Boseman from the Lakota and South Dakota, and he just was, was special to have in the, in the booth and I think gave this a voice that, that is not typical in natural history stuff and I think we'll add a little bit more to, to the series. And we were excited to have him on. That's balance. He adds balance because he's got good timing. It's just kind of that very strong, but not over powerful and just makes you want to sit down and listen, you know, it's, it's this natural storyteller, you know, but I have to, I, Nance and I were both saying it was just the way you tied all the stories together between nature and, and human, and geology, all of that, the way it was woven together was really, really smart. I, you guys all like really sat like, okay, well, we couldn't segue to this and that was, I was like segue, segue, this is fantastic. I love it. I love it. But thank you so much for what you've done. Everyone again, I'll go get it on National Geographic September 8th. It's out there. So thanks so much, Jeff. Thanks. Thank you for joining us here on Big Blend Radio's Wayback When History Podcast. Keep up with us at bigblendradio.com.
