(insects chirping) - My mom's father, he works in a place similar to this.

He ran the control room.

So basically all these belts and things like that are controlled from one central place.

- Yeah.

That's what my grandpa did on the oil field.

- Okay.

- [Sam] And so are there plants like this all around this area that are abandoned?

- Some are still in use.

I would say it wouldn't be uncommon to find one of these about every 20 or 30 minutes in any direction.

(insects chirping) This is the belt system that will be used to transport the coal.

Each train car is like a ton of coal.

- Oh, so yeah- - Each train's like 100 cars and there are probably thousands of trains, if not more.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

It's a good reminder of what was.

But at the end of the day, I guess it's kind of like seeing a ghost, you know, just what was left behind.

(water splashing) (soft music) - [David] Over generations and generations, the American people have believed that this is the land of unlimited opportunity.

- This right here is my truck, a very good pickup.

- We believe that we're all born free and we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It's pretty hard to disagree with those principles.

But the promise of American life is not always what it's cracked up to be.

- [Jonathan] In this area, we've saw what happens when industry packs up and leaves.

There is no plan B in places like this.

- [Sam] From the beginning of time, our tribes have fished to support our families, but our communities have been pushed out.

Industry and government left us behind.

- These big problems sound so impenetrable, really.

And so we brought together young people from different backgrounds who are trying to help their communities.

- So long as the younger generation can find something that they in their own personal lives can rally behind, then that will not only make them better, it'll make their communities better.

- What I hope to learn is what kind of a society and country do they want to live in?

What do they have to tell us about what needs to be done in order to move us along that path?

- [Sam] We need to make sure that our community's values remain intact, while we also are moving forward with the larger world.

- As Americans, all power comes from the citizen.

And so it is absolutely incumbent on every citizen to figure out, "Where do I fit?

What are my skills?

Where can I make a difference?"

- Almost done.

- If we do that, then the future is enormously bright.

(grass rustling) (water whooshing) - [Sam] I saw that (indistinct).

Three, four, five.

(waves whooshing) Our people, we are Kahtnuht'ana Dena'ina, which means the people of the Kenai River.

Our existence revolves around the salmon.

- Oh!

- You got it.

- Us young people are charged with providing food for our elders.

Even if it's a two in the morning tide or a three in the morning tide, we have to wake up and come out here and fish for those who can't fish.

Let's pick some of this stuff out of the net.

When you come here and you fish this net, it isn't only for yourself.

It isn't only for your family, but it's for our entire tribe.

(net whirring) Not only does this instill a real applicable knowledge to young people, but it also instills a sense of community and identity.

Pull that thing into you.

Keep going.

Without these things, our young people are not grounded.

We fought for a long, long time to be able to get this educational fishery and now we have it and we're not getting rid of it anytime soon.

We're not gonna allow it to slip away from us.

(waves whooshing) (birds chirping) - [Family Member] Now this is a very old picture.

- Mm-hmm.

And where was that at, her place?

- Her place right in the head of the holler.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I love that seating in there.

- Yeah.

It's really beautiful.

- Yeah.

- You can tell that's just an old Kentucky home.

- Right.

Nobody had anything better than anybody else.

Everybody had the same thing.

- I believe this is one of the most beautiful and special places on this entire planet.

I'm not even sure how to word it, but something special is cooking between these hills and you just lose that sense of that, the second you leave, the second you hit flat earth.

This is home.

This is the only home we've ever known.

- And we had these triple seven rock trucks.

Right there, Miller Brothers Coal.

I worked for them six years, and altogether had about 35 years in the mining.

- Everybody has something they lean to in terms of their culture and where they're from.

And for us, other than faith, I think that coal is just sort of that second thing we've always leaned on.

For a very decent chunk of American history, coal powered almost 100% of this country and most of the world.

That's dead and gone now.

- We built this house.

There was people all up and down the road here and now there's nobody until way out there and way down the road, there's not another house that anybody lives in.

(soft music) - [Debra] Fire Island is right there, where my other aunt fished.

My grandmother fished on this beach.

- [Sam] Since Alaska became a state, we have been confined to fishing in specific areas.

The fishery that we have right now is just for education, and so there isn't enough fish being caught to feed all of our people.

- You just can't go out and fish and put out a net.

You have to have either a specific permit.

- We're not allowed to buy the permit.

The tribe isn't allowed to hold the permit.

- State law.

We are specifically excluded.

Right now I cannot go on the beach in Cook Inlet, where my grandmother fished.

She fished out there and then they'd have a supply of fish for the winter, which is core to our traditional ways.

Those are the healthiest foods you can eat, fish.

Now we can't do that.

So the educational fish permit is what we now operate under and we are limited to maybe 100 to 200 fish.

- That's one fish per tribal member.

- Yeah, and that's... What is that?

What keeps me up is that in 10, 15, 20 years, are we gonna have any fish left?

Are we gonna have any tribal rights?

That scares me.

My mom and her mom, they carried the tradition and I'm hopeful that I can do the same thing.

(birds cawing) (soft music) - I want to go back to the so-called founding documents.

All men are created equal.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To make a more perfect union.

And a lot of people retire to those ideas to establish the fact that there are values that make this a viable society.

- And I believe in our Constitution, I believe in our Declaration of Independence, but those ideas have been eroded and people have been taught to not trust those documents.

In order to remediate that harm that's been done, some of the actual issues that are present need to be addressed head on.

- My own view, I think that it should have always been the goal, what was written down.

They wrote it pretty good, you know, but coming from Southern Appalachian and impoverished communities, it's hard to feel equal.

(soft music) (gravel crunching) On this flat part of the mountain, everybody knows what happened here, and this is a way to quite literally see the impact of what happened to the area.

They would find this good coal that they wanted and they would shave off the entire mountaintop to get down to it, and then they'd leave, move on to the next.

- This really reminds me of the sacrifice that my uncles and cousins and some of my friends from high school had to make in the past and still have to make to make a living.

- I've always been told that coal runs throughout my veins and just trying to break the mold from being underground, trying to make a life on top of it.

- We're kind of at a pivotal turning point now to where something has to give.

(soft music) (insects chirping) - All this stuff over here used to be that fertilizer plant and the Tesoro refinery that loads all their boats over here.

It used to be- - It closed?

- Yeah.

- I was wondering, 'cause growing up, it would be smelly, super smelly, and now it doesn't smell no more.

- Always smell like sulfur down here?

- Yeah.

- All of our family worked up on the north slope on the oil fields up there, and then we had some that worked out on the platforms.

Our economy's mainly extractive.

Many tribes are oil producing, mainly because we're not allowed to fish as much as we need to be able to provide for our community.

And so our rural communities were forced to choose whether or not they were going to be left behind.

They didn't have any other way to make money.

We are confronted with the reality that, while we support ourselves economically, we also are damaging the place that we live.

- The oil, like the oil spills and the contamination, the toxicity of the water, that affects the toxicity of the fish, and then we eat the fish.

- And then we eat the fish.

- Which is bad.

- A lot of our food comes directly from the land and like you've seen it, like our fish get sick.

- Yeah.

- [Sam] Our fish are getting smaller, you know?

- Way smaller and they're getting tumors.

- They're getting tumors.

- There's lots of tumors and skin diseases.

We get a lot of fish with like zombie looking skin.

- Do you see the seal right there?

They just pop up.

There's a jumper too.

- A jumper?

- Yeah.

Oh, you see the seal, he's got a fish.

- Not uh.

- Right there.

- [Julianne] Oh, right there.

Yeah.

(Julianne laughs) - Being an American, there's this idea that wilderness and nature is separate from people.

And when it comes to our tribe, we don't think that way.

The land always takes care of us and we always take care of it.

We have to integrate our traditional knowledge and Western science together, you know?

- Yeah.

(footsteps crunching) (glass squeaking) - [Jonathan] So how classes has been going?

- They've not been too bad.

You'll always have your struggles in something, but all in all, they're not bad.

- How's work study going?

How's everything with your crew?

- [Student] My crew is, well, I can't ask for a better crew.

- [Jonathan] We are definitely living in a time when a degree means much more.

Many, many years ago, you didn't even have to have high school.

Now you can hardly hold any job without a bachelor's degree or at least an associate's.

(traffic whooshing) - How do you see the challenges and solutions of your families when coming to access educational and economic opportunities?

- Poverty strikes this area harder than most other areas in the country, and I think that a lot of people can't afford college, and I think the solution to that is institutions like Alice Lloyd that allows people in the area to get an affordable education.

(machine whirring) - The student work program here at Alice Lloyd has always been an integral part of our model.

Students work up to 20 hours per week to pay for their educational bills.

As an incoming freshman, my first work assignment was on the grounds crew.

Everybody have a good morning?

Within a semester, I was in a supervisor position.

Because, you know, on grounds, if you'll come in consistently, you don't have to have a schedule.

- Right, right.

- And he said he needed more structure, so we gave him a consistent scheduled time to work.

I was at one point overseeing the operation of the majority of 500, 600 students on campus.

So this gave me pretty much upper tier management experience as a 18 to 22 year old.

Anywhere else I would've been just another number in a freshman class of thousands.

Here, I was someone.

I personally know several people who walked onto our little campus in Eastern Kentucky with all their worldly belongings in just a few Walmart bags, and now see those same students about ready to graduate medical school.

A lot of what Appalachia lacks is the access to opportunity, but when that opportunity can be provided, I think that our first generation, low-income students are a little hungrier to see success out of that.

- So I want to ask you a little bit more about values and how in the work that you do, you try to draw on values.

- For us, what that looks like, is our traditions imbued into our children.

Our highest goal is to make sure that our people, although we may be monetarily poor, are not in poverty.

In order to be not in poverty, you need to have a sense of community, you need to have food, and you need to have a place in which you fit in society.

The work with the fish that we've done is dedicated to that.

(singer sings in foreign language) - [Mary] You want to hand me the salt?

- [Sam] Who taught you how to smoke fish?

- Oh, my aunt.

She was well known for her smoked fish.

- Hmm.

- We'll put some garlic.

I like to put honey in the brine because it glosses it up.

- Makes it look pretty.

- Makes it look really pretty.

And I put a little Worcestershire and Tabasco.

They decided to turn the Cook Inlet into a commercial type enterprise, and they took all of our rights to our fish and our land away.

Some of us went to jail, standing up for our rights, and I was one of them that did.

All of these things were handed down by our ancestors.

- Mm-hmm.

- And that's very important.

Those are our inherent rights.

We believe in sharing.

We shared with everyone.

Never once did we ever think they would say, "Okay, now it's ours.

You can't have any."

Just these are kind of small.

So you know what?

Why don't we just- - Six minutes?

Six minutes?

Seven minutes?

- 10.

- 10?

- Yeah.

- We need people who are able to translate between our traditional values and the Western world.

I'm gonna go to law school in order to try and make that happen.

- Sam will be the first Kahtnuht'ana Dena'ina attorney here on our homeland that can fight for our rights.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music continues) - Hello?

- Hey, Ivan, how's it going?

- Good.

How are you?

- I'm doing pretty good.

I take it you saw the letter from NMFS?

- The one that you texted?

- Yeah.

Deb and I had a call with them today about having a meeting with the commission on next Friday.

- [Ivan] Well, I think we have to engage.

- I work to try and make it so that the people of our community, their life is better because of my time here.

6:00 PM to 11:00 PM, I'm on the phone, trying to get our tribes and our native peoples access to a larger fishery.

Absolutely, so what, I mean, what have you heard so far about what we're trying to do?

One of the ways that I want to do that is to use American laws to implement Indigenous values, and that's why I'm here at law school.

Under state law, we can't hold commercial fishing permits.

Only these types of permits would really allow us to get enough fish to feed our people.

And so what we're trying to do is get access to the federal salmon fishery of Cook Inlet.

It's a super, super simple regulatory addition that would mean the world to our tribes and our peoples.

So what do you think about that?

(soft music) - As my time here at Alice Lloyd College moved along, I was very fortunate to be employed here in the development office.

Jonathan Blair with Advancement.

How may I help you?

So I basically started out as an assistant coordinator, whatever you want to say.

Not hardly six months in, I found out that our director of foundation and corporate giving was taking an opportunity elsewhere.

Three people in the room making the decision, two of them were ready to post a job.

The other says, "Well, how about that Blair boy?

He ain't afraid to get his hands dirty."

I now serve as the Director of Foundation and Corporate Giving, one of the youngest directors in our college's history.

Well, our number one priority is always scholarshiping our students.

As long as I'm part of this institution, my goal is to see as many young Appalachian men and women walk that stage as possible and with as little debt as possible.

(insects chirping) Is this all Mamaw's family?

Including Carl and Maggie?

- Well, this is Carl's brother right here.

- Yeah.

- And this was his wife right here.

- And then her parents.

- Yeah.

- Our family's been in Kentucky as long as anyone can remember.

- Yeah.

- And then obviously your father worked in coal.

- Yeah.

- And you did.

- I can't imagine, Dad had to walk all the way across the hill from Doty to Carbon Glow and back every day.

Every day.

- Yeah.

- How long that took, I can't.

And I'm pretty sure that my great-grandpa was killed in a deep mine.

I think killed in a deep mine, yep.

- I think we have a tradition of trying to work hard and make things a little better for those who come after us.

- Yeah.

- I see something in the young people here, just like myself.

I'm a product of the same mission I believe in.

They want to do good for their community, and I know that many of these students need me.

They need me raising money so they can have an education.

Not me, but they need someone doing it.

There comes a train.

- There's an empty train.

You going to get coal, empty train.

(train clanking) (insects chirping) - And you come from very different communities.

- Very.

- And yet, I hear some common themes.

Let's broaden it out.

What would you like Americans to know about the experiences that you had, Jonathan?

- I would definitely say that, since this country's founding, each group has had to find their own way out of their circumstances to achieve what they need to achieve.

And I think that what it boils down to is we should all be able to be proud of exactly who we are and engage in that civil discourse and embrace our differences and do so together.

We don't always do the best job of doing it, but I think that it's definitely in the American DNA, so to speak, to want better for ourselves and for those we care about.

And if we could all learn to do that in a positive manner that doesn't hurt anyone else, it would be great.

- So we are asking to be a part of this federally managed fishery.

Things move slow with that federal process, but there are good things coming about.

On the federal side, though, they're worried about, one, if we can actually catch the number of fish that we're asking for, and then two, they're worried that if we do catch that many, we're not gonna be able to process them.

- We can catch a lot of fish and we wouldn't be interfering with the commercial fishery, so I think it's very doable if we can come up with a good number.

- Accomplishing our goal that we've set out on now will mean that our tribes have access to salmon like they haven't had since statehood.

Having access to this fishery will also mean tribes will once again have a role in managing the fish.

This will mean that Western knowledge is informed by tens of thousands of years of experience and can produce a better management system that makes sure that our fisheries do not decline.

It makes sure that the ecosystem is healthier.

(soft upbeat music) (horse whinnies) - I think coal has left its mark on Central Appalachia and it'll be that way for a while.

And I think that awareness of the past there, it's helpful.

There's a really strong push with people furthering your education here in the mountains, making a way for them to have an opportunity to perhaps do more, but I also think it's gonna take some support from beyond the people themselves to, you know, to have sustainable industry here again.

- I mean, for us, we deal with a lot of the same things, but my generation, your generation, our generation is definitely more open to trying new things, to working, to finding solutions.

- Where we come from, the things we believe in, you know, faith, family, our strong blue collar roots that stem straight out of the coal mines.

I think that's very important.

It's also important to open our minds to change, to the future.

- The American ideal is so fragile.

The fragility comes not from the nature of the ideal, but the fragility comes if you stop working at it, you stop trying.

America only works if we as Americans are protecting and pushing forward that great political promise to pursue happiness, pursue fulfillment.

- That's the challenge, is finding the will, the political will, the social will, the moral will, if you like, amongst our people to actually make some progress on these issues.

- What I want for communities like mine is a bright future, a future where there is an understanding that there is always more, that there is a hope that has been robbed from so many re-lit.

- We don't want to leave when the going gets tough.

We want to continue to stay in our home and to better our home.

(soft bright music) (metal clanking)