A source mentioned to me that they’d been going to meetings with a man who saved trees. Three years later I pitched it as a story on preservation. After researching and reporting I discovered the piece was bigger than my pitch. The real story was the removal of Indigenous people from their land and the ingenuity that was lost in their absence. It had so many elements I used my wall as a storyboard to map out the layers.

“Everyone wants us to provide answers for how to save the land without us having a relationship on it. That is irresponsible. We need to return -- we need the return of our lands so that we can build a relationship with the land, so that we can come out here and harvest the land.” -Chanel Keller