Name: An Inside Look at Indigenous Culture in America
Uploaded: 2026-02-20T17:01:35.000Z
Duration: 11 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The Black Hills is the beginning and the origin of our people.

Without it, our ceremonies would not exist.

To the Lakota, we call it Hesapa, the heart of everything that is.

In the United States, there's many different Native nations, and

We go by our tribal name of Lakota, and Lakota means friends and allies.

I'm a musician, the cultural relations advisor, and a teacher.

My job is to educate people about this area and about the history of this area and to preserve the stories so that we have it for the next generations to come.

My goal is to open people's minds about the Native population here in the Black Hills by taking them on tours.

The role of the storyteller is to teach truth through stories and through myths.

You're keeping that history alive every time you tell that story to somebody new.

Without storytelling, our culture and our history could fade away.

In the southwest of the Black Hills, you can find petroglyphs that date back about 10,000 years, if not older.

It's telling stories of people's lives that lived there at that point in time.

So this is considered the oldest petroglyph in all the United States.

You have a mountain lion in one corner and a mountain lion in the other corner.

There kind of gathering in a herd of elk.

Beyond just the artifacts and the petroglyphs, the land formations and the areas around the Black Hills are significant to the Lakota people for spiritual and historical values of where the people existed and how they came to be.

It gives me an overwhelming feeling to know that I'm walking the same footsteps of where my ancestors have been.

And it encourages me to become a warrior to protect this place and to ensure its existence for many generations to come.

People need to understand that all of North America is indigenous land.

People tend to forget that there was a vibrant Native culture living in all parts of North America.

And food is really the piece that's going to help us move forward into a brighter future.

My name is Sean Sherman, and I am a chef.

So this is going to be two pieces per plate for these.

Our mission is revitalizing Native American foods and reidentifying North American cuisine.

We've tried really hard to maintain authenticity by removing all of the colonial ingredients like dairy, wheat flour, processed sugar, beef Pork, chicken, and

we're just using a lot of wild game, a lot of the native agricultural heirloom varietals, a lot of the wild foods around us, and

really making those plates that taste like a region.

Most of these ingredients are very familiar to people, but

the usage of a lot of the wild plants really talk about a place and a community.

We prioritize purchasing from the indigenous vendors first because we really want to open up a lot of opportunity for indigenous people growing out farms or collecting things from the wild or raising animals.

So for the big dinner, we're actually cooking this bison down with a bunch of fresh cedar and some bergamot.

We will purchase from anybody raising these indigenous pieces because it is such an important part of the landscape and the history.

As we travel around the country, we like to make dinners and foods that really represent those areas.

What's great about being able to do these dinners, especially in non indigenous communities, is just to bring awareness.

This kind of food that we're eating today, like, you're going to feel really good when you leave here.

You're not going to feel heavy and weighted down.

You're going to feel energized and just happy because you're knowing where this food is coming from.

We feel like anybody across North America will benefit from the understanding of the indigenous food systems around you, and

We feel that she is alive and she wants to do.

The job that she told our creator she would do is to feed our people and nourish them.

The work that we do, if we didn't have this, we would lose everything.

For a few thousand years, Potawatomi people have been incredible farmers and have grown lots and lots of varieties of crops.

The seed library is a place where we take crops which are disappearing, rare and endangered Potawatomi vegetables, and

we grow them out and we restore them and put them back in the hands of native farmers.

George Martin carries the Potawatomi tradition of making damn nabu, or corn soup.

In our seed Library, we have 76 unique varieties of corn.

Each one has its own cultural identity, its own unique flavor.

After a while, when we stir it, you'll see how tough it gets to stir it.

Our corn is a lot different than other corns which are out there.

If we didn't have the seed library, these traditional foods might be gone forever.

Within our seed library, 80% of the varieties which we take care of are rare or nearly extinct.

We're the only place in the world which has them.

Four years ago, when we first got our white flower corn, we only had a half a canning jar, a very small amount of seed.

And now we have enough that we may have a hundred bushels full.

That's enough that next year we could plant six or seven acres of just this corn.

That's what we were sent down here for, to take care of Mother Earth and all her creations here.

And that corn realizes that we're back using it again.

Makes the corn feel good that they're being used by our people again.

Eagle feathers give us that strength and courage to go on.

They've been in our ceremonies for centuries.

And to be able to have these feathers in our time of prayer, in our time of need, is really important to us.

Last year we received right at 2700 Eagles that were found dead or died for one reason or another.

And we provide loose feathers from eagles to Native Americans for their religious and cultural purposes.

They are protected by various laws, such as the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection act, so people can't just go picking them up.

But this way, it allows Native Americans a lawful way to obtain and possess eagles.

The birds that we get have died from various causes.

It causes them to break a wing and of course results in death.

But usually those injuries are pretty minor to the feathers, so we could still use most of the feathers.

So we're checking what needs to be replaced there or what feathers need to be added in in an effort to try to give them the equivalent of one whole bird.

The role of the National Egg Repository, it's very important.

It helps us to keep going with our lives that we know it.

It's good to know that you're a part of something that means so much to a group of people and that you're playing a role in protecting a very treasured resource.

That is a military code of the Choctaw Nation.