♪♪ -The Adirondacks -- six million acres of wilderness in Upstate New York.

This is where the Hudson River begins its journey to the sea.

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples came here on pilgrimage to this sacred and hallowed ground.

Two great nations shared this abundant land.

-This is really the body of water where the Hudson River takes its name.

-I'm heading into the primordial forest to explore what beauty the land has to offer.

-I could hear my grandmother telling me, "You have everything you need in your basket."

-What abundance can we find when we practice stewardship instead of extraction?

-Bringing cultures together over food I think is very important.

-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... ♪♪ -These are the headwaters of the Hudson River, the wellspring of life and Indigenous culture that ultimately flows past the Statue of Liberty.

♪♪ I'm here meeting up with my buddy Dave Olbert from Cloudsplitter Outfitters at historic Lake Henderson.

♪♪ -We're sitting here at Lake Henderson, about to launch you off.

-This is a glacial lake, right?

-It is.

Yeah.

-Yeah.

-When the ice sheet moved across down from North America, it actually gouged out sections of the Earth.

It created pockets for bodies of water all over the Adirondacks, actually.

What makes it a little bit unique is the fact that there are so many lakes in the Adirondacks, and we can thank our glacial times for that.

-This would be considered a successional forest, right?

Because it was denuded at some point, right, with -- with mining and logging and timber?

-Yeah, it was mostly saw logs in the beginning for construction, and then it became pulp once they figured out they could make paper out of -- out of the stuff.

And the last log drive on the Hudson was around 1950.

-You think back to what this would have looked like before Europeans arrived, but, boy, it's come back pretty good from where it was, you know, 100 years ago to what we're seeing in front of us right now.

It's really exciting.

-Absolutely.

'Cause this whole area was harvested completely.

So they really took everything.

-So it's just a testament to when we reimagine our wild landscapes, it becomes a place for high adventure.

-I would encourage you to spend a little time on this lake.

Basically, it's total wilderness.

You will have that solitude that you're -- you're seeking.

-Thanks, Dave.

-Enjoy!

♪♪ -Taking Dave's advice, I head into the backcountry around Lake Henderson.

♪♪ Towering cliffs, marshes, and beaver-influenced waterways create a wild mosaic around the lake... ♪♪ ...and beneath the canopy of hardwoods and evergreens, there's a lot to eat.

♪♪ Well, this is a fun find.

So this is Inonotus obliquus, also known as birch conk or clinker polypore, but I think most of you will know it as chaga.

This is a growth that grows off of the birch tree and actually has the highest concentration of antioxidants known to man.

So a thousand times more antioxidants than blueberries and 100 times more than açai berry.

Indigenous people, especially from Lapland and Siberia, used this for tens of thousands of years to actually help prevent cancer.

Scientists have recently discovered that this creates apoptosis in cancer cells and that helps flush them out.

So it's an amazing find.

We're gonna go ahead and harvest it now.

These can be a little tricky to harvest because they're really dense.

So I'm gonna be using a special Japanese foraging knife called a hori hori.

[ Birds singing ] [ Grunts ] So we can see the inside of this is kind of orangey yellow.

The outside is deep black.

So we would want to give this a couple of weeks to cure, to dry, and then we'd grind that up into a powder, throw it in tea, let it boil for a few minutes, and you've got your chaga tea.

♪♪ So this is another great find here.

This is Ganoderma lucidum, better known as Reishi mushroom.

Actually, this is our indigenous reishi, which is also called hemlock shelf.

So this has been being used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years, and they refer to it as "the mushroom of immortality."

♪♪ ♪♪ Alright.

Now finally, here is a choice edible of the northeastern forest.

This is called Pleurotus ostreatus, better known as Oyster Mushroom.

It is a prime edible, and it will grow on just about any deciduous tree.

It happens to be growing on a beech here that's infected with the beech scale fungus.

In fact, we have a couple of friends that are joining in the meal.

We're gonna actually steal their dinner.

It lets us know that this is actually an edible.

That is a good indication that this is an edible mushroom.

Another interesting thing about the oyster mushroom is prevailing science suggests that they may actually be carnivorous as well.

So while they're feeding off of the decaying tree, they're also releasing a pheromone that attracts aphids.

After a day of foraging, my basket is filling with treasures -- chestnut mushrooms, chaga for tea, reishi for medicine, and choice oyster mushrooms for tonight's dinner.

This is what abundance looks like when you know where to find it -- not extraction, but participation in the forest's natural cycles.

♪♪ And that includes harvesting meat from these headwaters of the Hudson in a traditional way -- with a bow and arrow.

♪♪ So, this is kind of a perfect setup to showcase where the deer are right now.

It's kind of early season still, and what's happened is they're in blackberry bushes and it looks like a recent cut that's happened.

There's some underbrush and these blackberry bushes that are growing up.

And while the blackberries are gone, it's these leaves that the deer are after 'cause they still hold sugars inside.

[ Rain pattering gently ] [ Hushed ] My feeling is that if you're gonna make the effort to go out and harvest your own meat, that you do it as ethically as possible.

You are taking a life, and I think if more of us had this kind of emotional experience with our food... that we'd actually understand that a lot of the industrial meat that we're eating is really, really terrible for us.

It's terrible emotionally, it's terrible nutritionally, and it's -- and it's torture for the animal.

Now, if somebody wants to be a vegetarian or a vegan, that's a great choice.

But if you're gonna eat meat, it's really important to remember that you are ingesting the life of a living, sentient being.

One of the challenges of using a traditional bow is that you can do everything right and still be off by just a fraction of an inch.

[ Bow string twangs softly ] ♪♪ We've been blessed with food that is truly medicine -- natural wild protein.

Now it's time to honor what the forest has provided with a wild cook.

♪♪ Alright, well, we had some luck out in the woods today.

We've come back and we've set a gorgeous harvest table here, and we're gonna make a little bit of a wild meal.

So, what I've decided to do is use that venison loin as the centerpiece and create a wild venison schnitzel, and we're gonna use some wheat flour as well as acorn flour, and we're gonna fry that all in a little bit of rendered bear fat.

We're gonna set it off with some wild grape that we found on the way out, a little bit of chaga, and, of course, no Vermonter's sauce is complete without maple syrup that I portaged in.

We're going to start with the venison loin that we have just butchered.

Tenderized these out a little bit.

Now, this will help it cook a lot quicker.

Let's go ahead and start with the sauce.

Break off a little piece of this chaga.

And you don't need much of that.

That's just for that earthy kind of woodiness.

And then we're gonna strip some of these grapes, touch it up with a little bit of maple syrup, smash that together.

So, go ahead and put that on the flame and let that reduce for a few minutes.

And the trick with cooking with acorn flour is you usually want to add like a 50/50 mix with some regular baking flour because it's not quite as sticky.

I'm gonna use some lemon salt and an herb medley.

Now what we're gonna do is do an egg wash.

I'm gonna just use the egg whites, and that will make the flours adhere really well.

And I love cooking with rendered bear fat.

It's a very, very underutilized fat.

This bear that I harvested last year was eating out of the apple trees kind of all fall, and so it has a little bit of an apple flavor to it, but bear fat, one of the best animal fats that you can cook with.

What we're gonna do is we're gonna wash the venison in the egg bath, and then that goes directly into the flour.

And we're gonna put them right in that hot, boiling oil.

[ Sizzling ] And that is perfect when you hear that nice sizzle.

While the schnitzel cooks, we're reducing the wild grape and chaga sauce.

Temperature regulation on open fire is the name of the game.

We'll take our chicken of the woods mushrooms, go ahead and shred those and lay them in the sauce.

I'm gonna flip them one more time.

There we go.

Yeah, we want to crisp all that up.

One of the wonderful things about cooking outside is experiencing how the appetizing smells from the cook fire blend with the mountain air and its clean evergreen scent.

Now we're gonna plate this schnitzel cooked perfectly, and next we're gonna pull these mushrooms.

So we're gonna have some of that nice flavor from the mushrooms, from the wild grape, and the chaga.

I'm just gonna drizzle that right over the top.

And that looks gorgeous.

And there you have it -- venison schnitzel with acorn flour and chicken of the woods mushrooms.

From the field to your plate.

Enjoy.

♪♪ By using these wild ingredients in here, there's just a whole plethora of flavors that are happening -- the nuttiness with the acorn, the earthiness of the chaga, and the fruitiness of the grape.

And these are all things that deer would eat, so it just makes for a really natural, symbiotic flavor relationship.

A lot of people say that they don't love wild foods because they're gamey or they're earthy.

These are flavors we've lost out of our palates.

One of my missions is to bring those back onto American tables.

♪♪ I'm heading south to Papscanee Island, just south of Albany, where I've come in search of the roots of abundance... place where Indigenous people cultivated the land for 6,000 years using methods so advanced that European settlers couldn't even recognize what they were seeing.

Just off the banks of the Mighty Hudson, this floodplain became one of the most productive food systems in the Americas, producing enough corn, beans, and squash to feed an entire modern city.

This is hallowed ground, and I wanted to walk it for myself.

♪♪ The Hudson River slides past, gray-green and restless.

On Papscanee Island, the soil holds moisture and memory in equal measure.

♪♪ So, we're standing here on a floodplain, and what would happen is every spring, the high water mark would actually till the land for them.

So they would plant their seeds -- corn, beans, and squash -- using the floodplains for tillage as opposed to using tractors or furrows.

Now, the Europeans didn't understand how you don't aerate land, but the Stockbridge-Munsee figured out that all that nutrient-dense sediment would help fertilize the land, and Europeans couldn't see the advancement of the agricultural system that was happening here.

There was enough food in one longhouse to fill three Dutch freighters.

Now, if you do that math, that suggested not only were they feeding themselves and the surrounding communities up and down the Hudson Valley, but they actually were producing enough food here on Papscanee Island to feed the entire metropolitan area of Albany today.

♪♪ This is a 300-year-old cottonwood, and it's actually been ripped up by flood waters.

So this tree actually buffers the flood waters in the spring, and you can see all this sediment coming off of them.

You look down here, and you've got this really rich loamy soil, which is perfect for agriculture.

I mean, the abundance that was coming out of this river was incredible.

In fact, there was no fighting along the Hudson, like, between the Algonquin and the Haudenosaunee, 'cause there was so much food.

They were just like, "Yeah, well, let's just share it."

[ Laughs ] We should harvest inspiration from hallowed grounds like this.

These are places long revered for sustainability, meeting our needs.

♪♪ [ Woman singing in an Indigenous language ] Welcome to the land of the Haudenosaunee -- an egalitarian society where women held the real power, where every member was equal, and where nations resolve their conflicts without violence.

If we're gonna talk about constitutional originalism as we approach the 250th birthday of the United States, we have to recognize our democracy isn't Greek or Roman -- it's Indigenous, homegrown right here along this river.

♪♪ Let's flash back to when Benjamin Franklin traveled to Albany in the 1750s.

He encountered something that would profoundly shape his thinking about governance.

-Benjamin Franklin and others, they were knowledgeable of what Indigenous people were doing, and they were seeing that and realizing that it was essentially a self-rule.

Certainly in Haudenosaunee culture, the women were the power holders in these communities, and they would, um, choose who the -- the chiefs would be.

They would have lived in longhouses, which were quite large, and they would sometimes hold several families.

So that symbolism of the longhouse, that's the symbol that they used for their -- their Confederacy, really.

-The Six Nations -- Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and later Tuscarora -- envisioned their relationship as family members living together under one roof.

We wouldn't have been exposed to this as Europeans coming over here.

We were in a class system, right?

-Yeah.

-You were born into a class system.

You died out in that class system.

-Yeah.

-But once we landed here, we were exposed to an egalitarian society.

-Yes, owning land was a concept that Indigenous people would not have thought in that regard.

There was a belief and a philosophy that the abundance was enough for everyone.

Why would we try to take possession of it... -Yeah.

Fight over it.

-...and "this is ours and that's yours"?

That form of interaction between the tribes and this idea that we are all one people... -Yeah.

-...essentially, we are different nations, but we are part of the same longhouse.

[ Man singing in an Indigenous language ] -When the Haudenosaunee were asked to share the abundance by the settlers, they didn't just shake hands or sign a contract.

They wove an agreement into shell beads, a Wampum belt that would bind two peoples together while keeping them apart.

[ Man continues singing ] I wanted to understand how this ancient diplomacy worked, so I went to learn about the Two Row Wampum from somebody who carries this tradition today.

[ Man continues singing ] -Wampum is a small bead that is made from quahog clam shell.

It comes in only two colors -- white and purple.

Wampum belts are the way that Haudenosaunee people used those small shell beads and sewed them together with patterns or pictures.

Each belt told its own story.

The Two Row Wampum, or Guswenta in our languages, is an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the early Dutch settlers.

The Dutch colonists asked permission to live here.

The belt has two purple lines that represent rivers -- one for the Haudenosaunee and one for the Dutch.

We could step from one river to the other if we wanted to get something from the other group, and then step back into our own canoe to continue with our traditional way of living.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -Two rivers running side by side, two people sharing the same one and Mighty Hudson, but never steering each other's boat.

I realized this wasn't just diplomacy.

It was a blueprint for coexistence that we've spent the last 400 years forgetting.

♪♪ After days in the wilderness foraging, hunting, and learning from the people who still carry these traditions, it's time to bring it all together.

I'm heading north to Albany to visit The Delaware, where Chef Elliott Vogel is waiting to show me what happens when wild ingredients meet classical technique and Mohawk tradition.

Chef, can you just talk us through what we're looking at here?

-Right here we've got a venison loin mosaic style in a carpaccio with some beautiful local New York Harvest Moon cheese.

We have some apple chips, and then nasturtiums from my wife's mother's garden.

-Oh, amazing.

-I've been picking them every day.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

-The whole plant is edible.

-I love using flowers on a dish.

Most flowers are edible, but people don't realize that.

I see a lot of times when you serve a flower on a dish, that people will leave the flower on that dish as opposed to eating the whole thing.

-This is a peppery flower.

-Yeah.

-Little floral notes, but pepper goes great with venison.

We rolled this venison loin in local dried sumac and black trumpet mushroom powder.

♪♪ -Mmm.

It's wonderful.

And I did catch a little of that pepper with the flower.

-Oh, yeah.

-I got the flower in there, so... This is honoring your -- your family's heritage, right?

Your great-grandmother, was it?

-Great-great-grandmother.

-Was -- Was Mohawk.

-50% Mohawk.

♪♪ -Oh, Chef.

-And as a licensed forager and chef, I think it's important to focus on locality, focus on old-world flavors and techniques.

♪♪ We did find some chicken of the woods today.

-Yeah, that was a great find.

-They've been popping up for the last couple of weeks.

This one in particular is a Gochujang, sesame-glazed, crispy chicken of the woods with a minty meatball or baba ganoush.

We've got some candied nuts up top and a little bit of crisp of a lotus root.

People received it so well, the vegan and the gluten-free community.

It's a great alternative, and I get to go in the woods and forage for the ingredients.

-Right, right.

-It's one of the best parts about it.

Ignoring nature is -- is one of the worst things you could do.

-Right.

-As a chef, it's the worst thing.

Turn your back on nature, you turn the back on the only thing that's actually giving you life.

-We make a choice every time we pick up our fork, right?

Like, we have authority over what we eat.

-You keep doing that, the world can change -- one person, one dish at a time.

-By incorporating local ingredients in traditional dishes, chefs like Elliott are helping to reintroduce the American dining public to new ways of thinking about our food and our relationship with nature.

[ Glasses clinking ] I now head to one place in Upstate New York where tribal members like John Skenadore, a member of the Oneida Nation, and Kawenniiosta Jock, member of the Mohawk Nation, are still holding tight to Indigenous traditions.

♪♪ Wow.

That is...beautiful.

-We're in the Schoharie Valley, or Mohawk Valley.

We're on Vroman's Nose.

These are one of the lookouts that the Mohawks had.

This is the ancestral Turtle Village for the Mohawks.

What makes this so beautiful, this was a land that we've -- we've regained.

My people are a couple hours away from here, but we've been through here before, so these lands know us too.

Everybody's DNA is in this land.

You know, there has to be a higher power that's giving us what we need off of the land.

Just as we nurture her, she nurtures us.

Returning to the land is what has to happen.

Giving that recognition, we're returning and we're able to communicate again, not only with the land, but the spirits that have been here for centuries.

-There's this beautiful vision that I get standing up here what it might have looked like 400 years ago and what it could look like again.

-This is one of the -- the most critical places as it's being rematriated and we're nurturing the land as the land is nurturing us.

♪♪ Grandmother Moon here with you too, and the Sun -- and Brother Sun, both out at the same time.

So that's the balance.

That's the women.

That's the men.

You have to sacrifice yourself sometimes for the better cause and meaning and justice of everything.

And don't lose yourself while you're doing it, what we're doing right now, 'cause it is power.

♪♪ -[ Singing in an Indigenous language ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Singing fades ] ♪♪ -From the High Peaks wilderness where the Hudson begins its journey... to the floodplains of Papscanee Island where Indigenous farmers fed a civilization... to the kitchen in Albany where Chef Elliott carries forward traditions that stretch back for generations... this river connects it all.

The Haudenosaunee had a phrase for it, a philosophy woven into shell beads that said we can share this land, travel side by side, without steering each other's boats.

What is this land worth when we leave it alone?

I came here looking for that answer.

What I found was something more -- a reminder that abundance isn't something we take.

It's something we participate in.

♪♪ The Hudson is still flowing, the forests are still giving, and if we listen, really listen, to the people who never forgot how to hear them... we might just remember who we are.

-[ Singing in an Indigenous language ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"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... ♪♪ ♪♪