For decades, conservation organizations have measured success in acres protected, habitat restored, and development prevented.
A documentary screened Friday night at the Historic Park Theatre asked the audience of more than 70 people to consider another measure: relationships restored.
“Rooted” tells the story of the Traditional Harvest Project in southwestern Colorado, where the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Montezuma Land Conservancy, Trees, Water & People, private landowners, and other partners are working to restore Indigenous access to ancestral lands while healing damaged rivers and habitat along the Mancos River, an 85-mile-long stream in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
But by the end of a panel discussion and Q&A session following the film, the conversation had traveled hundreds of miles north — to Estes Park, Rocky Mountain National Park and Old Man Mountain — and to the possibility that the same approach could reshape conservation in the Estes Valley.
At the heart of the film is a concept its participants describe as “rematriation” — restoring relationships between Indigenous people and their ancestral homelands.
Wyatt Wilson, a cross-cultural program coordinator who works jointly with Montezuma Land Conservancy and Trees, Water & People, described it during the discussion as “the return of the mother.” In practice, he said, it means bringing Indigenous people back to places from which generations have been separated.
He recalled Indigenous youth working near Mesa Verde National Park, including Hopi participants whose ancestors lived in the region. For some, simply returning to the landscape carried meaning.
“I wonder how long it’s been since the water, since the trees, since our bird relatives have been addressed and prayed to and talked to,” Wilson recalled one participant wondering.
Conservation beyond property lines
The Traditional Harvest Project began taking shape in 2021 as Montezuma Land Conservancy reconsidered what a land trust should do beyond acquiring conservation easements.
The project connects Ute Mountain Ute community members with willing private landowners so tribal members can return to ancestral lands to sustainably and spiritually gather, hunt, fish, and cultivate local foods and ceremonial materials. Restoration work accompanies that access, using both traditional knowledge and Western science to improve riparian habitat.
Crews featured in the documentary use low-tech restoration methods designed to mimic beaver dams and natural woody debris. The structures slow and spread water across floodplains, improve habitat, and help restore vegetation. But the physical restoration is only half the story.
The project respects Indigenous people not as visitors to conserved land, but as people whose relationship with that land predates today’s property boundaries. It also emphasizes reciprocity. Tribal members do not simply return to harvest plants. They participate in restoring the places from which they harvest.
One participant in the film described that reciprocity as giving Mother Earth “a little helping hand” through planting, restoring natural river processes, and creating conditions that could someday support beaver and native vegetation again.
That represents a significant shift from a conservation model that has often separated people from protected places, explained Travis Custer, executive director of Montezuma Land Conservancy
Custer said conservation organizations have a responsibility to understand the history behind that separation and reconsider who belongs within the definition of a conservation community.
“A lot of what we’re dealing with is a disconnection from place,” Custer said.
Trust measured in generations
Restoration crews can plant a willow in an afternoon. Rebuilding trust takes considerably longer, said Custer.
About 25 private landowners have signed up for the Traditional Harvest Project, representing roughly 8,000 to 10,000 acres potentially available for the work.
The response surprised organizers, but tribal relationships cannot be built and repaired through a grant cycle or a handful of meetings, Custer said. Indigenous communities have experienced generations of broken promises, dispossession and exclusion. Building something different requires that organizations keep showing up, listen to elders and tribal leaders, and commit resources over the long term.
“We’re embarking on work that will be beyond the scope of our lifetime,” Custer said.
Ernest House Jr., an enrolled member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and senior policy director and director for tribal and Indigenous engagement at the Keystone Policy Center, reinforced that point.
House said organizations interested in working with tribes should not let fear of making a mistake keep them from starting.
“This is a marathon. This is not a sprint,” he said. “You have to go slow to go fast.”
Traditional knowledge also cannot simply be requested in an email or downloaded from a database, House said. It may emerge only after people spend time together — over coffee, during a meal, or while standing together on a landscape.
That means conservation organizations have to value relationships as part of the work itself.
Private landowners become part of the bridge
The project also challenges assumptions about private property.
Custer said the Montezuma Land Conservancy initially approached landowners with whom it already had relationships through 25 years of conservation work. Other property owners later heard about the project and volunteered. The response crossed lines that organizers might have expected to create resistance.
Custer said participating landowners include people with different political views, agricultural interests and conservation priorities.
“It’s really been a bridge builder across political lines,” he said.
Not everyone agrees about Indigenous land access or land return, he said. But many landowners recognize that allowing access to their property can benefit a larger community.
“We give a lot of credit to division,” Custer said, “and we don’t give enough credit because we don’t celebrate enough the opportunities for bridge building.”
Bringing the conversation to Estes Park
Jeff Boring, executive director of the Estes Valley Land Trust, who led the discussion after the film, eventually posed the question most relevant to the local audience: What could Estes Park do? House said Estes can start by inviting people.
Tribal cultural officers, elders, and other representatives could be invited to visit the Estes Valley, walk the landscape, share meals, and begin conversations about places that have meaning to their communities.
House said Ute history extends throughout Colorado, including the Estes Valley and Rocky Mountain National Park.
Communities should tell that history “with tribes, not for tribes, not in place of tribes,” he said.
Bringing tribal voices back onto the landscape can also reveal cultural resources that outside land managers may not know exist. Plants, minerals and other materials found in particular places can have ceremonial uses passed through generations, he said.
“There’s not a book out there” explaining where all those resources are located, House said. That knowledge comes through relationships.
Boring said the Land Trust, which has more than 10,000 acres in conservation easements in the Estes Valley, has begun taking those steps and suggested the Traditional Harvest Project could offer a model for working with area landowners.
“If there’s an opportunity for Traditional Harvest in our community, we have fantastic relationships with landowners,” Boring said. “I bet many of them would love to provide access.”
Old Man Mountain as a test of a new approach
The most tangible local example may be Old Man Mountain, one of Colorado’s oldest and largest Native American sacred sites, with evidence of use dating back roughly 5,000 years. It is also one of only three documented vision quest sites in the state.
The prominent landmark just outside the Estes Park town boundary has been a conservation priority for the Land Trust for decades. The University of Northern Colorado has owned 80 acres of the property since 1956. While the Land Trust has negotiated a letter of intent to purchase a conservation easement, Boring said the organization is now approaching the project differently.
Instead of treating the easement strictly as a transaction between the Land Trust and the university, it is reaching out to tribal leaders to learn more about ancestral uses of the mountain and how Indigenous people might use it in the future for ceremonies and other activities.
The roughly $2 million project could eventually involve 15 to 20 tribes, Boring said. The Land Trust is pursuing funding and expects the process could take three to five years because it intends to spend time building relationships before completing the conservation agreement.
That could mean meals, site visits, trips to reservations, attending powwows and, above all, listening. Traditional conservation work often treats the signing of a conservation easement as the finish line, Boring said. Old Man Mountain could turn that concept around.
“We’re also beginning to see that a conservation easement can be the start of something,” he said.
House suggested conservation organizations could go even further by exploring whether “cultural easements” could accompany conservation easements, providing long-term protection not only for ecological resources but also for tribal access and culturally important places. The question, he acknowledged, remains largely unexplored in Colorado.
But asking it reflects the larger message running through the documentary “Rooted” —conservation may require institutions to rethink practices they have considered settled for generations.
Restoring people and place together
The film also placed young people at the center of that work. Wilson described Indigenous youth who initially arrived at restoration projects reluctant to participate, only to begin talking, joking, and asking questions as the day progressed.
One young participant later expressed interest in studying environmental conservation in college.
“If you just plant those little seeds, if you get one person or maybe two people who come back, I think that’s a success,” Wilson said.
The metaphor applies equally to the broader project. The Traditional Harvest Project is still relatively small. Its river restoration covers particular properties. Its private-land network remains a fraction of the ancestral territory Indigenous people once moved through freely. Yet its ambitions are much larger.
Organizers hope the approach can be replicated by land trusts elsewhere and contribute to a national conversation about Indigenous access, conservation, and land return.
For Estes Park, the immediate lesson Friday night was less about copying a particular project than adopting its process to invite people in, listen, spend time together, accept discomfort, restore land together, and allow trust to develop.
That approach could influence the future of Old Man Mountain. It could lead to traditional harvest opportunities on private land. It could also change how the Estes Valley tells the history of the landscape surrounding it.
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