 Tonight as part of our campfire dessert lecture series we have the amazing Val Lopez in person live Hello everybody and thank you for being here Our creation story takes place at Mount Amunam on the Santa Cruz Mountains just south of highway 17 Creator gave our ancestors the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth All the animals and all the plants and all living things It's important to understand that native people had learned through thousands of years of adaptation To steward the land stewardship is the key role There's a relationship of people attending the land for the benefit of the animals You know that both they survive with but also to maintain a healthy ecosystem and environment that depends on itself The really detailed Ecoarcheological work that we're doing provides another line of evidence besides the native oral traditions to really understand what's going on Features like this that are intact that are undisturbed are very valuable in archaeology We can take samples from them and see what sorts of activities are associated with each type of feature It looks a little too irregular on this surface to be like intentionally shaped It's important to us to have this information about how people use plants and animals because that gives the tribe information that they can use to Decide how to bring these practices back today This first stage of our process after we take materials from the field We sift them into different size classes There's some really small objects fish scale vertebrae sea urchin spines What I'm looking for here is actually charred seeds and wood that'll give us a bigger picture As far as what they were eating and things that they were burning By doing this sort of analysis we can get fairly representative pictures that can inform policy management and native Relationships to the environment that need to be restored because all the historic injustice that's gone That's happened to those communities Currently our tribe is working hard to restore our indigenous knowledge our Amamutin land trust has a stewardship program We bring in our young adults They learn of our culture It's really nice being out here and having this collaboration And especially doing it for our ancestors and knowing that we're not just out here for a check It's rare. It's really meaningful I think it's nice that we're collaborating with them because you can you can either let them dig up your ancestors bones Or you can work with them and we kind of learn from each other You know they probably learn from us from our native ways and you know, we're learning, you know from them from educational Experience I like working with Berkeley Professor Lightfoot and Rob he shares all of his knowledge No, so that's that's what I love about it And that's that's what our culture was about found a deer vertebrae on the last one. Okay. Yeah, Rob told that There's a lot of our ancestors They could not be more happy than I am with the work of our stewards They recognize that of our culture is survived. They must be successful in their learning They've been experimenting with doing x-rays as we learn how native people lived on the land And it took stewardship responsibility for the land We learn how to adapt and survive in our own right if we don't manage the land properly We won't survive as a people