[Theme music playing] Hi.

I'm Carlos Santana.

Welcome to "Global Spirit."

I'm very excited to share with you a spirit of commonality, healing, and joy.

[Drumming and chanting] Cindy and I, we believe that music has the power to change the mindset of skeptics and unbelievers to a place where they remember the sacred.

Anything that is sacred and repeated brings the supreme revelation that distance and separation is an illusion.

I think the American Indians say, the Native Ones, they say, "Take the high road, look at the aerial view, and see the big picture."

Phil Cousineau: Over 200 years ago, this part of Northern California was settled by the Spanish.

Into this so-called New World the conquerors brought with them a philosophy of complete domination of man over nature, which, in turn, has led to a relationship with the Earth that is not sustainable.

Welcome to "Earth Wisdom: For a World in Crisis."

Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco, has been a sacred site to the Ohlone and Miwok tribes for over 5,000 years.

I've heard from my Native American friends that there is a small shrine here which honors the spirit of the Earth and the tribes who lived here before the arrival of the white man.

[Drumming and chanting] The shrine honors Sitting Bull, a visionary chief of the Dakota Sioux.

Sitting Bull was admired for his eloquent speeches defending his people and their profound love for their ancestral land.

Inscribed in a plaque and set in stone is one of Sitting Bull's prophetic warnings.

[Drumming and chanting] Man as Sitting Bull: Behold, my brothers.

The spring has come.

Every seed has awakened, and so has all animal life.

It is through this mysterious power that we, too, have our being.

Yet hear me, people.

We have now to deal with another race.

They claim this Mother of ours, the Earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away.

They deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

That nation is like a spring that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.

Cousineau: In the winter of 1890, two weeks before the Lakota massacre at Wounded Knee, Chief Sitting Bull, the great Lakota chief and spiritual leader, was killed at his home a few miles from here on the Lakota Sioux Standing Rock reservation.

Today, over 125 years later, members from over 200 North American tribes are joined by tens of thousands of non-Native water protectors in a coordinated, nonviolent action to stop the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline.

If constructed, this multibillion-dollar project would carry half a million barrels of oil a day, passing under the Missouri River, which is the main source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux and for millions of people further downstream.

Reaction to the pipeline has made history, generating the largest gathering of the Lakota tribes since the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

[Man chanting] We are Oceti Sakowin!

Our ancestors stand with us!

Cousineau: There is an ancient Lakota prophecy that warns of the coming of a giant mythical black snake which carries a darkness and a sickness that will stretch across the land and bring sickness and death to all in its path.

To the Lakota, the snake is the Dakota Access Pipeline, the zuzeca sape, the manifestation of the long-prophesized destroyer of the Lakota people.

[Shouting] The BBC reported that the 6-month-long protest at the camp of Oceti Sakowin is the site of the largest gathering of Native Americans in more than a hundred years.

I'm here because we're in prayerful union with everybody.

There's prophecy saying that the Rainbow Tribe was going to come together to save the Mother Earth, and the Rainbow Tribe being every race, every nationality, every tribe that's coming together, and it's happening right now.

Cousineau: The Lakota are one part of a larger global indigenous movement that has been struggling to share its knowledge and its ecologically sustainable Earth wisdom to the global environmental crisis.

Almost 2,000 miles from Standing Rock, I'm here on Manhattan Island, which was, as the story goes, purchased by a Dutch trader for the equivalent of $24 from the Lenape, a Native society that had no concept that land was a commodity or something that could be traded for money.

Today, on one of the most expensive pieces of land anywhere, the United Nations has invited over 2,000 indigenous people from all over the world to share their Native insights and offer their possible solutions to the global environmental crisis.

We have really done a lot of mess with our...with our Earth.

Yeah?

And I think it's payback time.

We are paying.

We are paying because of this.

You see the tsunamis.

You see, like, in Kenya, sometimes there's mudslides, and you see that we have earthquakes.

So we are paying back for the destruction we have been doing to the Earth.

[Speaking Spanish] Cousineau: On my first day in New York, I'm very curious--is the U.N. actually ready to listen?

Almost 3,000 indigenous people have traveled here at great effort and expense to make their recommendations on some of the major environmental issues of our time.

Each representative has 3 minutes to make their case.

[Speaking Spanish] [Speaking French] Cousineau: Christiana Saiti Louwa is from the small El-Molo tribe in Northern Kenya.

During the lunch break in Central Park, I wanted to know what she came all this way to say to the United Nations.

First of all, my major concern was to bring my people into the picture of the world so that we can be recognized as a people both locally, regionally, and internationally and put the El-Molo people on the map of the world, where they belong, with the other tribes of the world.

And the other thing is to ensure that we are included in processes of matters affecting us.

Is the United Nations helping you feel more visible?

Yes.

That is, in fact, why we need to participate in the forum, because here we have a voice just like any other government, any other community.

So here, we feel we belong.

Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha!

Cousineau: Belonging and being heard are key, not only to the El-Molo, but to all indigenous peoples, who have historically been marginalized and made invisible.

Ironically, now in the midst of a growing environmental crisis, they are finally being recognized by the U.N. as having something to offer.

The United Nations estimates that there are approximately 370 million indigenous peoples in the world.

They represent about 90% to 95% of the human genetic diversity of our planet.

Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga tribe in Upstate New York opens the proceedings with a welcoming speech.

Lyons: Now I ask all of our indigenous peoples from the 4 corners of the world to stand with me now and give you our profound thanks and appreciation for the adoption of the declaration of the indigenous peoples, the rights of the indigenous peoples of the world.

It represents 30 years of work.

And so, all of our indigenous people, raise your hands.

And we give you our profound thanks and appreciation.

[Applause] Cousineau: Chief Oren Lyons is a modern-day Sitting Bull.

Oren is an inspirational tribal leader, an orator, as well as an historian.

What I see lacking in the world today is a lack of ceremony and specifically the lack of relationship.

People just don't understand their relationship to the Earth.

They are related closely.

We all are.

We're all the same, except they don't... they don't even think about it.

And, uh, religions have a lot to do with that, Christianity in particular.

Nature has always been a problem with Christianity, this attitude towards nature.

"Don't go to the mountains because that's where all the evil spirits are."

Christian doctrine.

The Earth is alive, Earth the mother.

You have to...you have to comprehend what it is.

It's not an intellectual thing.

It's...it's a living thing.

It's really alive, and people don't understand that.

And all the life that comes from the Earth, it should be obvious.

Cousineau: I'm interested in Oren's historical account, how the world view of indigenous peoples first clashed with the world view of their European colonizers.

The Pope from Portugal issued a statement, and he said, to paraphrase the Papal Bull-- they call them Papal Bulls-- if there are no Christian nations in this new land that you find across this dark sea, then I declare the land to be open...

Empty.

Terra nulis, empty land.

Old Roman law.

I declare the land to be empty and open to colonization by Christian nations.

Further, if there are people there and they are not Christians, then they do not have a right of title to land.

They have only the right of occupancy.

So we're saying now to the Holy See you have to do more than disavow or rescind this racist doctrine.

You have to be proactive.

You have to come forward, and you have to confess to the American Indian people and all native peoples in the world that you were wrong, terrible injustice.

[Indistinct voices] Cousineau: Oren's point underscores the historic shift in approach towards indigenous peoples, from outright extermination to marginalization to having a voice here at the U.N. to finally state their concerns.

[Speaking Spanish] [Applause] Cousineau: Humanitarian organizations are trying their best to help.

They often provide a bridge between indigenous peoples and their national governments.

Brian Keane is an advocate for indigenous peoples and the cofounder of a nonprofit organization called Land Is Life, which helps to bring indigenous peoples to New York to speak at these U.N. meetings.

Though indigenous peoples represent probably 90%, 95% of...of the human diversity-- So every time an indigenous people disappears, we all lose something.

We're losing huge volumes of pharmacological knowledge, ecological knowledge, spiritual knowledge, knowledge that is key to helping us find a solution to the problems that we're facing today.

Traditionally, indigenous peoples are seen as obstacles to development and what we consider in the West, we consider progress.

Uh...and it's really the opposite is true.

Indigenous peoples have knowledge.

They have ways of living that they've practiced for thousands of years, which aren't based on profit or competition, but are based on reciprocity with nature.

And so when we hear these problems of global warming, of biodiversity loss, um... what indigenous peoples are saying is that, "If you really want to find solutions, "you're gonna have to work with us, "because we know the environment better than anybody else, "and we have our own technologies "and our own knowledge and wisdom as to how to adapt to these changes that are happening."

If you look at a map of the world where there's biodiversity hotspots, where there's clean riverine systems, where there's old-growth forests, that's all in areas where indigenous peoples have managed to maintain control of their lands.

Cousineau: In late November of 2016, in subfreezing temperatures, North Dakota sheriff deputies and police officers deploy rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and water cannon to disperse the Standing Rock water protectors.

[Shouting] [Bang] Lyons: Well, you know, you're dealing with military police forces, and they're trained and geared to overall combat.

That's not just water in a cannon when the temperature is hovering near zero.

That's an assault.

[Gunshots] It's a crime.

The last time I saw people with water cannon was in Auschwitz.

This is supposed to be America, land of the free.

By early December, the water protectors are ordered to evacuate the Sacred Stone Camp by the North Dakota governor's office and the Army Corps of Engineers or face forcible eviction.

After reaffirming their nonviolent position, the Lakota are joined by over 2,000 U.S. Army veterans, who offer to create a human shield between the police and the water protectors, warriors marching with warriors in an historic meeting and sharing the rallying cry of Standing Rock-- Mni Wiconi, Water Is Life.

I served in Iraq, and... you know, I went over there because I thought I was serving freedom, and when I saw what was happening here, especially over Thanksgiving, and what was happening in our own country, I...thought that we needed to-- I needed to be here.

Corporations just making money off the land... causing damage for future generations to worry about.

It's not something I'm interested in having.

That's why I'm here.

Man: Water is life.

Water is in all of us.

Water is in everything.

It's valuable.

It's more important than anything in the world.

You know, it's what makes our living soul, our living spirit, our living body, and it's a part of all of our ceremonies, part of all of our prayers.

So today, you know, we're really blessed with the snow, because that's a part of water.

So we rejoice in it, you know.

It's good medicine.

It's medicine to the land.

Keane: This meeting is very important for indigenous peoples.

It's a forum where they can make recommendations to the world's governments and to the United Nations.

We bring indigenous peoples from around the world to participate, and we put on a training every year before the forum begins, first so they can participate effectively in the forum, they know how it functions, to really take advantage of their two weeks here in New York.

Can you expand a little bit on "Land Is Life"?

It's a provocative phrase.

What does that mean to you and to the people you're working with?

It means exactly what it says-- land is life, for without land, indigenous peoples will not survive.

The land is the basis of their spiritual sustenance.

You know, it's where they get their medicines, their foods, their building materials.

They have a connection with the land that goes back millennia, and that's our work, is to help them to be able to continue on as cultures with that knowledge, and the only way to do that is to really secure the rights to the land.

When they are removed from their lands, they end up migrating into cities, and when they arrive in the cities, they live on the outskirts, they live in the slums, or they live in the street, and there are no opportunities available for them.

They often don't speak the language of the dominant society.

So they are forced into slave labor, prostitution.

There's hunger.

People die from hunger.

When they're removed from their lands, that's the final death toll pretty much for a culture.

[Drumming and chanting] Cousineau: The struggle for land rights involves indigenous peoples everywhere, including the United States.

During my week in New York, I decided to attend a Native American celebration held in Inwood Hill Park, the last patch of old-growth forest on Manhattan Island.

An old friend of mine, Chief Jake Swamp, a member of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, is being honored today for his environmental work.

Jake is a spiritual leader as well as a man of action.

He started a movement which became the Tree of Peace Society, which has generated the planting of millions of trees throughout the world.

[Drumming and chanting] I am eager to show Jake something I discovered earlier that day in the park.

This rock lies on the very spot where the Dutchman Peter Minuit supposedly purchased Manhattan Island from the local tribes for a handful of trinkets and beads worth about 60 Dutch guilders.

I really think it's a bad deal, if it was illegal at all.

I wonder if anybody's got the receipt.

Yes.

Ha ha ha!

If nobody has a receipt for it, then maybe it's not legal.

Can you get a refund?

I hope we can get it back.

[Drumming] And we're told here this little slice of land is the last 160 acres in Manhattan of natural-growth forest.

This is it.

Well, that's indicative of what's happening around the world.

We're running out of resources and places where we can, uh... reach out and go back to ancient times, to have a connection.

If we followed the teachings of the ancient ones, they knew that their lives depended upon nature, that everything they derived from nature supported their lives, and...and somehow throughout history, somewhere, somehow people went astray, and they forgot their original teachings.

Cousineau: Gloria Ushigua, from the Ecuadorean Amazon, has a direct profound connection to the land.

As a child, she was identified by her tribal elders as a shaman, a visionary.

Gloria is well-known throughout her territory and internationally for helping to halt the plundering of her people's land by foreign oil companies.

Gloria Ushigua is here to represent her people at the U.N. [Gloria speaking Spanish] [Chainsaw whirring] Cousineau: Many indigenous peoples see Gloria as an inspiring example of using shamanic powers against the environmentally destructive actions of outsiders.

[Gloria speaking Spanish] Can you tell us what spirits are in the Earth?

Can you describe them for us?

Cousineau: The world view of indigenous peoples like Gloria's is often difficult for people in the industrialized world to fully understand.

For centuries, the same has been true for the Earth wisdom of the Native peoples in the United States.

Because when I first started out, at white universities, we were kind of made fun of, you know, the way we were talking about Mother Earth.

They say, "Why don't you stop talking about "old wives' tales, and why don't you get yourself an education and be with it?"

Ha ha.

What was your response?

What did you say to them?

Well, inside, my stomach was just turning.

But I can't show it.

I have to take it, because I know they don't know.

[Indistinct] They asked me one time, "Well, what's your bottom line?

What's your bottom line, Chief?"

I said, "I don't know."

They said, "Everybody's got a bottom line."

"Really?

Gee.

Wait.

Let me think about this."

I said, "I don't know."

Nobody ever asked me that question before.

What's my bottom line?

So I thought about it.

I said, "I've got to be careful with this answer."

Serious question, because bottom line indicates economy.

Basically, it's an economic statement.

You know, bottom line is profit or loss.

After all the figuring and the figures, you come to the bottom line.

And I thought about it, and I said, "Well... "prior to them coming over here, we didn't have a bottom line."

And I said, "We don't have a bottom line."

So I said, "That's my answer.

We don't have a bottom line."

He says, "Well, everybody has--" "No, no, no," I said.

We live in a cycle-- spring, summer, fall, winter.

Spring, summer...

There's no bottom line.

[Man speaking Spanish] [Drumming and chanting] Swamp: When people forget the original spirit or the teachings, what happens is, uh, we have a... a breakdown of society, because the feeling we had with nature is normally feeling good.

But when you divorce yourself from that feeling-good feeling, then what happens is you start feeling sad and lonesome, and you're craving to find that again.

[Speaking Spanish] And this is the cycle, the sacred cycle of the water.

We cannot interrupt this cycle.

Lyons: There is no alternative to water.

None.

And that's the key issue here--survival.

Woman: Criminals!

You guys are criminals!

Go get your money somewhere else!

Cousineau: The oil pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, resumes their digging in defiance of a pending court decision which would protect the Lakota cemetery grounds and sacred sites.

The sound of the bulldozers brings out the nearby Standing Rock community in force.

Security police unleash their attack dogs and pepper spray against the water protectors.

[Protestors shouting] Lyons: Yeah, we know that dog, know him very well.

Our Conquistadors, they hunted our people the same way.

And so here we are, some 450 years later, and... nothing seems to have changed.

Man: Look at this.

Yeah, the dog did it, you know.

Look at this.

It's all bleeding.

Cousineau: By the end of the nonviolent protest, 30 water protectors are immobilized by pepper spray, and 6 are reportedly bitten by the private security dogs.

[Protestors shouting] Second man: No one owns this land.

This land belongs to the Earth.

We are only caretakers.

We're caretakers of the Earth.

[Protestors chanting "We are not leaving!"]

So when you grow up with the idea that there's always a better place, always another place, and this place here suffers the consequence of that kind of thinking, and now not only this place, but everybody, all humanity suffers the consequence of that thinking today.

Now we're facing a reality and a consequence of our disregarding the laws of the Earth.

[Man speaking Spanish] Man: Where they have the capacity, include young indigenous people... Keane: It was a very long struggle to get the "s" onto "indigenous people" within the U.N. system.

What does the "s" mean?

Well, if you talk about indigenous people have rights, then it would be like, you know, individual indigenous people have rights.

They can...

They have the right to a nationality.

They can become president of their country.

They can own a business.

They can... You know, they have rights like everybody else.

But what we're talking about when we put the "s" on the end is collective rights.

It's basically indigenous peoples' rights, is self-determination and collective ownership of lands, resources, and knowledge.

They need to have collective ownership of their lands, because if it's divided up and given to individual indigenous people, then it can be bought and sold and divided, and little by little, they will lose their land.

If they have collective ownership of the land, that can't happen.

The same with collective ownership of knowledge.

Cousineau: Viktor Kaisiepo is from the Biak tribe of West Papua and reports on how Biak Earth wisdom gets converted into intellectual property.

Kaisiepo: Kava is a plant that you can drink and that can relax your system, and when you're relaxed, then you can get into communication with your ancestors.

On the island, people drink kava just to relax.

But in this country, in the U.S.A., they make a pill out of it, and they call it kava kava.

They patent it, and they earn the money.

So sometimes indigenous peoples, with the technology, tend to... not to protect them, and that's why here, we are talking about intellectual property rights, to ensure that whatever is coming from our collective... collective intellectual property, that should there be any gain, then we would like to have part of that.

Woman: We, the indigenous youth of Australia, believe there is no one solution to these issues facing our communities, and we need and require a holistic approach from all levels of government working in partnership with our communities.

Cousineau: The hope of many indigenous peoples who come to New York is that the U.N., along with their own national delegates, will take their recommendations seriously and adjust their laws and policies.

Saiti Louwa: But, you know, sometimes the expectations are too high and, you know, the special reporter can only make reports.

It cannot, like, really force the governments or the U.N. to do something.

So this, in fact, leads me to say that, despite the fact that, um, for the last 7 years, the permanent forum has been on, so many communities have made their recommendations, and they appeal to the U.N., to the governments, and all, but so far, nothing has been done, really.

You see?

It feels frustrating.

We come talk, talk, talk.

Sometimes I really feel it is just going to be some empty rhetoric and nothing be done, but we still have hope that something will come out of this.

Yeah.

Cousineau: Talking with Christiana in Central Park makes me wonder if all the long journeys, all the high hopes and heartfelt testimonials are actually making any difference.

Are the government delegates really listening?

It's interesting to me, you know, listening to the conversations of states responding to the indigenous discussions here, and the states are saying, "Yes, we're concerned "about how you're faring and, you know, your poverty, "and we're gonna try to help you, you know, in this crisis of global warming," as if they were exempt, as if they were somehow gonna be in another world.

They don't seem to realize how democratic this event is gonna be.

You're gonna see democracy at work here.

There's no place to run.

There's no place to go.

And what you have is one Earth.

If you don't take care of that, you suffer the consequence.

Kaisiepo: Let me put it this way-- if I want to build a canoe, I just need one tree.

I wonder why 10,000 hectare of forest need to be cleared.

So where are these other canoes being built?

Now, this is the way of life that we have in our relationship with the land, with the sea, with the rivers, and all living species in there.

The forest, so to speak, is our grocery store.

That's where we get our medicinal plants.

That's where our ancestors are living.

That's where we buried our dead.

So it's much more than just protecting a tree.

And that's why sometimes the mainstream society will not recognize us as a contribution to protect the area.

If we say "protected areas," we already protect it by principal because our survival depends on the well-being of the forest.

Lyons: Just 50 years ago, 58 years ago, 1950, there were 2.5 billion people in the world.

58 years later, we've got 6.7 billion.

That's not sustainable.

That's way out of balance.

We're eating the very surface of the Earth.

We're displacing animals.

We're displacing birds' habitat.

Elephants are in a very narrow corridor.

You can count the tigers.

You can count the gorillas.

We've polluted the whole ocean.

Those are big systems.

Once you do that to the system, you're not about to fix it.

Nothing fixable there.

If you just envision 6.7 billion human heads all functioning and all thinking that everything revolves in my head around me, that's your ego, and then if you step back and look at them as a species, you'd say, "That's a problem."

The whole universe is in balance.

It's always in the process of balancing itself.

It's a work in progress.

[Drumming and chanting] Swamp: It lifts the spirit of the people when they dance, especially that drum.

That's what it's for.

It's the heartbeat of Mother Earth, you know.

It goes in relationship with the...with the Earth, and its rhythm.

And so with that drum and song, it's just like the Earth singing, and the people are showing how happy they are to be part of this beautiful nature.

[Drumming] Man: We're gonna do a short thanksgiving address.

Number one, the creator, the one that's in every living thing, including the trees.

Everything that lives in its total is what we call creator power.

That's the one that made the universe where we live.

And so we say thank you to our creator for allowing us a safe journey to share each other's company, and we say, "Creator, thank you, with love," and our mind is agreed.

Also, the creator makes the rivers and the waters, and that "waters" is not just water.

That water has a living spirit in it.

And so this water is moving all the time in the tides of the ocean and the streams of the rivers and the creeks, and it is looking to find our villages and our community where we live so it can quench our thirst every day.

And so to the waters of the world, your human relatives, with love, says thank you today.

Swamp: Thank you, water.

You're still flowing in your different directions.

You did not stop regardless of how...how sad I feel today.

When I look at you, you're still flowing.

I can say to myself, life is continuing, and I can feel better.

Cousineau: After almost a year of nonviolent protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline with world attention focused on the Sacred Stone Camp, the community readies itself for a face-off with the State of North Dakota and the U.S. government.

No cameras.

We'd like to thank each and every nation that has stepped forward from the call that we made here from the Oceti Sakowin Camp here.

[Cheering] Well, I just wanted to make an announcement and let everybody know that it is true.

Today the Department of Army, Jo Ellen Darcy, contacted me and said the Corps of Engineers is gonna deny the easement.

[Loud cheering] They're asking for a reroute and a full environmental impact statement.

[Loud cheering] These are things that we've been asking for from the beginning, and we still have to remain in prayer.

We still have to remain peaceful.

That's what helped us win.

The prayer and peace is what got us here and what... made us victory.

And we were told this.

We were told this by our youth who started this movement, to remain nonviolent.

We were told by our elders to remain nonviolent.

We were told by the spirits to remain nonviolent, and if you remain nonviolent, you will be successful.

[Loud cheering] Mni Wiconi!

We have kept our promise, and we have kept our commitment to our children and our grandchildren.

We are Hunkpapa.

We are Oceti Sakowin.

We are Ahumptawa.

We are the people on the edge.

We are the horn of the buffalo, and we have done our duty and our responsibility.

[Speaking native language] There will be no black snake going through in this territory.

[Drumming and cheering] [Chanting] [Blowing whistle] [Blowing shell] [Clattering] Well, I've been in New York all week at the U.N. at the gathering of indigenous peoples around the world, and I thought for sure that "The New York Times" would have covered this, but there has been nothing, no coverage all week.

I've had a few conversations with people from indigenous countries and cultures, and they're as frustrated as I am.

They have come halfway around the world, certain that "The New York Times," greatest newspaper in the world, would have covered the story, and they're not.

Apparently, the desk told one of the representatives at the U.N. that it wasn't a story.

[Terena speaking Spanish] [Voices shouting] Cousineau: When the delegates returned to adopt the final report, something appears to be going very wrong.

Frustrations are boiling over.

U.N. security police are called in to quell the disturbance.

Most of the indigenous peoples here are not in agreement with some of the recommendations... that the forum made concerning climate change, specifically with regard to carbon-trading schemes.

So they're trying to get two paragraphs taken out of the final recommendations.

[Voices shouting] Kaisiepo: They want to speak for 3 minutes, and I think it's right to give them the 3 minutes.

It's...Don't take to the principal.

Just give them the moment to speak.

Cousineau: Time seems to be running out for the conference.

To keep the peace, Madame Chair agrees to bend the rules, and the speech is allowed.

It's a small but important victory.

[Applause] [Indistinct voices speaking Spanish] Silencio, por favor.

Basta.

Basta.

[Speaking Spanish] [Terena speaking Spanish] [Woman speaking Spanish] [Applause] Cousineau: A powerful climax to an amazing week.

The Indigenous Caucus seems hopeful that their concerns will be implemented.

Keane: Before any action is taken, you usually have to get it on paper in the occidental world, right?

So, before there is action on respecting indigenous peoples' rights, you need countries to recognize those rights in constitutions and in national laws.

It's one struggle to get it on paper, and then the next step is to get it acted upon, and that's the harder part.

Cousineau: The diligent recordkeeping of the U.N. is truly impressive.

Every word and recommendation is recorded and published in 6 languages.

The transcripts are available to anyone with the time and the interest to read them.

But what do all the reports amount to, anyway?

Will any real and constructive change come out of these hearings?

And how about the Earth wisdom of these proud and passionate people that we heard from this week?

Are we and our leaders open to receive it?

How can this documentary that we've made actually make a difference?

Here in the United Nations, meetings are closed, but in your media, we can speak to all the humanity.

[Shouting] We're so thankful for all of you.

We'd like to-- In our tradition, we all say, no matter what... like, good or bad, we have to say "wopila."

Thank you, media!

Wopila!

Saiti Louwa: It's good because at least we have achieved something so far.

To bring our community to be known, to be heard, to be seen, that's a step.

So I say, like Yogi Berra, it ain't over till it's over, and I don't think it's over yet.

Man: The pipeline developer, Energy Transfer Partners, just announced a few hours ago that they are going to go underneath Lake Oahe, in defiance of the Army Corps of Engineers denying the permit yesterday.

So don't celebrate just yet.

This fight is not over.

They are still going to try to go underneath the river.

So please stand strong, stand together.

We need to be together right now.

Don't think we're victorious just yet, OK?

We need to keep fighting.

Please.

Thank you.

[Cheering] Cousineau: Whatever the final outcome, the actions at Standing Rock proved that a group of long-scattered tribal nations, along with their non-Native supporters, can come together to take on the most powerful financial interests along with state and federal troops in defense of the Earth.

In the process, they can help us remember one of the clearest and most powerful expressions of Earth wisdom-- Mni Wiconi, Water Is Life.

Back home, I feel the need to return to the Sitting Bull shrine to reflect on all that's been expressed during this past week, and I'm wondering, is anyone listening?

I'm still hearing all of their voices.

Lyons: It's not over.

It's not over, clearly.

The spirit and the powers in that camp was clear.

It's not over.

Nature's on our side.

Kaisiepo: I believe indigenous peoples can contribute to mankind if mankind is open to receive.

If not, we cannot contribute.

[Woman speaking Spanish] Cousineau: As I listen for some message from the great orator and chief, I hear instead the words of Sitting Bull's modern counterpart Chief Oren Lyons.

Lyons: We're in a lot of trouble.

I mean, wake up, America.

Wake up, world.

And then you ask an Indian, "Can you fix it?"

[Laughing] I am Carlos Santana, and I hope you connected and return to this series, "Global Spirit."

Thank you.