Storytellers Summit Day 1 | National Geographic

Hello everyone. I'm here to tell you a story today. It was the Ramadan of 2017 in Johannesburg, a few months after I started working as a photographer. I pitched the story to an editor, saying I would like to photograph the taraweeh as a contemporary look at Islam in South Africa. He replied, "Nobody cares about Muslims in South Africa. If we want something, we'll take it from Saudi or Turkey."

I am South African. I am Muslim. I am also a woman of color who grew up in a little town called Ladysmith M lambda T in Kwazulu-Natal during the dying years of apartheid. So, I knew very well what it was like to live in a society that treated people as less than human, or worse, to be invisible. I was not going to act like we did not exist anymore.

How many of you here know that the first Muslims in Southern Africa, some of my ancestors, were taken as slaves and political prisoners from Indonesia by the Dutch in the 1600s? Because of this history and in later years, the forced and voluntary migrations, South Africa has one of the most diverse Muslim populations in the world. In the slave communities, it was Islam that became a rallying point to build unity around, and Muslims were prominent in the anti-apartheid struggle.

So, I photographed the taraweeh anyway and put up the picture that night on Instagram. Another editor saw it and called me, asking if I would photograph for the entire month, and we would do a double-page spread on the day of the Eid celebration. It was also around this time when a Dutch ambassador saw my work and said, "Oh, I didn't know there were Muslims in South Africa. How did they get there?" There were shocked faces in his delegation which mirrored my own, but still, not my heart, when he remarked about the white domination and said, "Oh yes, we did a lot of mischief back there." Mischief he called it.

It is not just ignorance; it is irrational. We never truly saw ourselves in our own history books, and this is why the work we do now is so important. With this project, I hope to create something that generations to come can look upon as a source of history and memory. I've barely even scratched the surface so far, mostly exploring spaces of worship, of prayer, and observance together and in solitude. With the embodiment of connectedness, rootedness, and reminiscence is visible even so, and already I am so grateful and so proud to say that in 2019, this work was acquired by the South African Easy Core National Museum and Gallery to be part of the archive and permanent collection and will now form part of our country's historical visual memory.

Thank you. For me, this is a testament to how hungry we are to see ourselves dignified in these public and institutional spaces. Everything that I do with my work, and the people who I photograph for stories and themes of social justice, paid access to water and sanitation, or safe housing, food safety, and gender-based violence, gives an equal education, plastic pollution, climate change. Everything is inevitably and inextricably linked to the structural and systemic legacies of our colonial and apartheid past.

Every single day I see resilience. I see strength. I see dignity and pride. The industry of photography is not separate from the industry, to the world which we photograph. Not only are so many of us here from these very disadvantaged communities, but the question of what story is yet to get told, who gets to tell them, and how still remains linked to a legacy of access, of privilege, and of power.

Still, in the field or in this room of narrators, I see stories of triumph and people who are here achieving things despite our odds. This is the story of the majority world.

A favorite verse of mine from the Quran can be translated with the meaning, "O humankind! We have created you from male and female, into nations and tribes so that you may know one another." So that we may know one another. To truly know one another, we first have to see each other as equals, even if just in our own humanity.

To see each other well, we first have to care enough to want to do so. Since that Ramadan in 2017, one of the things that gives me purpose in my work is to never again be faced with the statement that nobody cares about the people. Because to care, well, that is the least, very least that we can do.

Thank you very much. [Applause] [Music] And now please welcome to the stage journalist, author, and 2019 National Geographic Eliza Sitmore awardee David Kwan in conversation with visual storyteller and National Geographic fellow Erica Larsen.

"I’m the bull rider for this segment and I am the rodeo clown, but I'm really glad to be here because I love her work, and she’s a friend of mine. For more than 10 years, Erica has been going to some of the most remote places on the planet, cold places and hot places, and paying careful attention to some of the most remote people in the world and the cultures that they live in. You're gonna be seeing it. We're gonna start with a little bit of the mundane and personal, and then we're going to move toward the magical and universal."

"Do you remember the first photo you ever sold?"

"I don't remember, but I remember the first photo I ever saw or that meant something to me, which was what? So it was a picture from the Hubble of Saturn. I remember holding it in my hands and in that moment you realize that everything that's so far away is so close to you and you were above it and it is of you and it existed in a photo. Then I thought that photo, that photography is magic, and magic can remind you of who you are and then who we're gonna be."

"How old were you?"

"I don't remember, but maybe I was 11, something like that. I don't remember."

"When you remind me, where you grew up?"

"I was born here, just right here on stage. No, I was in DC, but I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland."

"When you were in high school and finishing high school and going to college, what were the expectations of your family and your friends about what you were going to be? What did people think Erika was going to become? What was the pressure or the expectation?"

"Oh, I know that my mom said to me that she said I could be my mother was a cook in the home and I could be a teacher and you can, she said, you can do whatever you feel in your heart and I will support it with everything. And I said I want to be a part of this photography magic, and my father went and got some kind of camera, some DSL or whatever or SLR camera, and put it around his neck and that was that."

"Again, how old roughly?"

"17."

"Okay, and you went to college and majored in photography, right?"

"I did."

"Finishing that, when did you reach the point where you could say, 'Now I am gonna be a photographer and only a photographer. I can give my life to photography. I can afford it. The world is letting me do it.'"

"Well, I never looked at it that way ever. I think there's something about, you know, when you realize that it does exist and that you're a part of this collective idea of how we can translate the world. It's not about that's it, then you just are. I think it's like, once you know something, you can't un-know. And so that was it. So I'm not even sure it was about photography or not in that regard, whether oh it's something that I can continue to do or not do. It's just that now it is and you'll have to do it, so it's um, I don't, it just is."

"You weren't always a photographer of remote places and remote people. You won a World Press Photo Award for sports photography."

"Mm-hmm."

"What was that about?"

"Well, you saw some of it. It was actually the young girl standing there, I don't know, the little girl there in the... She had the camel on in the woods. So it was about children and hunting and the idea was to understand why children that didn't live a subsistence lifestyle wanted to be engaged in hunting. And so I think the world, I didn't enter in the sports category, I think somebody put it in the sports category. I'm not kidding. I think at the time world press kind of, I might have entered it in portrait and I think they put it in the sports category. But the idea is so I didn't really think of it my wasn't about sport, but it was about, you know, why we wanted to connect with nature when maybe and all the reasons you think you don't need to. So that was the exploration."

"And then somebody else related it to sport."

"But okay, even even then that theme was there."

"Mm-hmm."

"The Sami people for years, you lived with the Sami people as a a viga."

"Big."

"Mm-hmm."

"Tell us what that was."

"So biga is, well traditionally, there was a woman that would come in from maybe a family that wouldn't have had as many resources, meaning at that point reindeer, and so it would go to another family and help and do things. And so that could be from cooking to cleaning to helping with the children. But ultimately that, one of the most important things is that you would, you know, travel with the families on tundra and then also, you would, you would slaughter the animals. And so you would, and so Amin when you think about that, if the bigger gets to slaughter the animal is the most important part of that connection to these cycles of life and death and they celebrated that."

"So it occurs to me we should add, in case anybody doesn't know, the Sami are the reindeer herding people of northern Scandinavian."

"So the animals that you're slaughtering?"

"Yeah, means that they were taking care of the reindeer."

"You've said on tape about that that four-year project you learned the language, you lived with them. You stay... and you said, 'I came here in search of silence so that I could begin to hear again.' This is a journal entry that you've read on tape, a journal entry while you were there."

"I came here in search of silence so that I could begin to hear again. I am now more a stranger in my own home than I am here."

"Help us understand what led you to do that. I'm gonna go spend four years with the Sami in northern Norway. You were in your early 30s about that point, right? You had been a photographer; you had been a professional photographer. Did you come to some sort of a crisis point or a point of discomfort with your own life in the South?"

"I was in New York City at the time. So I think there came a point, I had been working a lot on, doing a lot of editorial work but really amazing work, but kind of going in and out of families. It sort of existed on two levels. I was working with a lot of, you know, maybe in our demographic of like 60 and over and a lot about how we and that age group deal with what it is to get older, our relationship to family, our relationship to landscape, our relationship to death, but also how we perceive the world. So dementia, Alzheimer's and these. So I was doing a lot of stories on that and then I was also working a lot with adolescents."

"And so things around, you know, what it is to be a teenager mostly in society in the United States, the whole range of it. And I said and it was amazing but I realized that for my own eye, so I think I was constantly dealing with themes of life and death but in these situations. And I had begun my personal work exploring hunting to take a different look at life and death that was removed from the human or what I perceived as the human because it actually isn't. But what I perceived is the human emotion around it."

"And then from that it was getting these glimpses of seeing when I would go on these hunts. I would realize spending time kind of deeper time in nature away from a place like New York City and even away from these sort of familial situations that I was living in these homes. I mean, I could feel like this kind of beginning of like a fine-tuned instrument starting to happen and as I would see animals, maybe I could begin to see these ancestral stories and then I realized it's our story, like our human story, and you could see that through."

"I thought my goodness, if I... It's not that you're telling stories; you're remembering them. And it was really strong, and I said I have to learn to hear again because I have a glimpse of it but I need to so I needed to break all the parts and begin to hear again."

"And then I thought, okay so where can I do that? Moon?"

"So I first went to the Amazon. I don't know why, but that's very one and I realized in that time it wasn't where I was meant to be. It was like going into this dark, dark, dark ground underneath but that's where I found my son and I found my husband. That wasn't time yet. And then I said, what's the opposite of the Amazon? And I'm sure scientifically it's not this, but I thought, what is it? And I said that's Arctic."

"And I went to the Arctic and I... that was... and you just everyone just got to see genja, so maybe from what you underfoot which she just translated. The Arctic, it's... there's something right, it's something that this land holds."

"And so that's why I went..."

"For years, you had found your husband, you had your son."

"Not yet. I had found them both but had we started this, he started this afternoon with oceans and you have to understand that this woman is as deep as an ocean."

"Let's talk a little bit about ritual. You've said that ritual and you've put it on the slides, an exploration of ritual, it's sort of the overriding theme of your collected body of work and the grant work recently, ritual especially in the lives of remote peoples. What do you mean when you say, as you've said to me and I think you said in other places, ritual allows us to explore time?"

"Well, I'm still learning what that means and perhaps I always will be, but I have a belief in so for my life that, you know, as we're trying to understand. So, I believe we're remembering who we are to be humans, right? I think that's what for me that's what this journey's about. It's this process of remembering who we are, and so in that we have to—we get confronted with our perceptions of time. And you know, on the most basic level, right? Every culture holds a different understanding of what time is and how to express it and how to teach us about that."

"So I've... I've gone through different phases of watching time be one thing and then become another and then I realized that in order for us to understand the next sort of level of high I'm experienced in time, I need a place of liminal space. And the mental space is this moment when you know everything is but isn't. It's the time of before but after. And I think it's also a really difficult time, but within that, that's when you can sort of like break the concept of what you had perceived the moment before."

"And then I realized that, you know when I'm watching ritual and whatever ritual is, whether it's washing dishes, whether there's a prescribed ritual that's been going on for thousand years, but when you're watching ritual, it is a time for this liminal space to exist and within them in all space we can all begin to have that moment to connect to what it means to be human."

"So, liminal space, transitional space?"

"Yeah, I think it's transitional space. I think it's the green room space."

"There's a line from William Faulkner that you just put me in mind of from his book Light in August. Think it starts the fifth chapter. He's telling these deep stories about some really troubled, fraught people. And the chapter begins, 'Memory believes before knowing remembers.'"

"Does that make any sense to you in terms of what you're thinking?"

"Yeah, absolutely. And I've heard it different ways that the future is the past but yet the past is the future. I think I was talking to someone last night and my doings gonna block it out, but they said, and it's... but we're always in contradiction. We're in contradictions as to what we think, so then you have this and it's going to like, you know it's contradictory over here. So yes, I think it makes a bit of sense but I think the fact that it doesn't make sense is what keeps us on the exploration."

"Yeah, let's look at and talk about some of these particular images."

"Okay, yes if I can find the ones that I went to ask you about. Excuse me if we just..."

"Okay, so this is probably the end of that loop and now we're starting. Okay, let me just ask you about that. Why does a hunter collect bear feet?"

"I don't know why."

"Why we collect anything?"

"But I think collection is... I believe in that the things that we experience there's many levels of it in there. One level is our physical manifestation of, and the Earth's physical manifestation of all of these things so therefore it becomes our collection. I don't think all hunters collect. I think many do, and all don't. What I think is that hunters guide us, many guide us to look at the one thing that's difficult, right? We are looking at our death and we're looking at what it means to bring death. And because there's a part of it also that we feel, there's the idea of sustenance and so how we live and how we take is part of the sort of larger ecosystem of life and death and what we need to live and survive in so there's many things that we're questioning. So I see the hunters less as collectors but guides into that. But I think many collect."

"This photo is also part of your hunting group. This is the one that won the sports thing."

"So this is a North American girl?"

"Yes, it was part of a hunting family. Her name's Mary; she's from Georgia and she's probably in her 20s now."

"Okay, well the thing that I want to ask you about is what might connect this photo with some of the later photos, and I'm going to jump ahead to them, but freeze this photo in your mind, this photo of Mary in her camo. Mary in full camo, and why does a person wear camo? Because it's a pattern that connects you with nature, right?"

"Is that fair?"

"I think that's very fair."

"Okay, there we go."

"Okay, the lady on the right and that pattern. So this is stuff that I'm very... I don't know, but this is what my exploration is trying to understand. So I think that we are interpreting the world around us, right? I believe our journey is that nature, because by remembering, we are all remembering that we are nature, I believe. So we are of nature. It's exactly what you're doing in your books, in the way that you do it, we're remembering this and as we remember it we need to put it out there; we need to physically manifest it in these different ways. So, you know, Realtree did it for Mary and this woman here, she's wearing the her acardo's or her songs of her interpretation of her landscape and in the rainforest of Peru. But it was interesting, and again this is my interpretation of the understanding of it. This is not her words or who she is, but as I am."

"But right? So it's the patterns of actual the physical nature we see the patterns we see on the animals, on the snakes. It's the patterns that she's able to verbalize through her voice and then it becomes a physical pattern. But then at the same time it's actually the internal pattern of our DNA makeup as well. So it's all of these things put together and it's just one translation and we all have our translation of that."

"We're all translating this. This is the people who have that idea of ken a which is the pattern and they, you call them, people have Ronan the great serpent. It's an important animal for them, the Anaconda, yes, because the Anaconda has all of the patterns, all of the patterns of the world, of their world, of their translation of the world, of our world, of the collective world."

"And so the snake has it; there's ever-changing patterns and there's never—it never ends, and it never doesn't end. And here, you can hear singing, singing the pattern. Do I need a good time?"

"Okay."

"The woman on the left, that's Emma Full Moon. What is she thinking?"

"I don't know what I was thinking. These are the people who live with and from salmon, yes?"

"Yeah, so this is, um, here we're in Alaska with a community of Yupik."

"I don't know what Emma thinks, but what I can say is that she expresses herself by the things that she does. By opening the door and just cleaning the berries, by letting me see this moment, by a gesture that she’ll do."

"Okay, this is a seal."

"Yeah."

"I want to bounce a... well, let's listen to this."

"Okay, so I can't vomit my balls."

"What was that?"

"So in this village, the story goes and devout Allah say, yeah, okay, there Yupik in the... over the past 80 years they, because of the Christian missionaries that went in, they stopped dancing and they stopped relating to their natural world in the way that they always had, in the way that they would translate it. And one of the big things was dance. They didn't stop hunting but they stopped describing the hunt in the same way. And so, we're in the Western southwestern Alaska and we're also right on the Bering Sea and so as we're seeing this permafrost melting happening, you are watching the land come up, things mountain. You're watching these rising sea levels. And so this goes down and so in this huge transition that you're seeing go on, you're also seeing these huge cultural transitions. And who are the people explaining the cultural transitions? The ones that are there."

"And one thing that happened, so there's this old village that's literally coming out of the ground, that maybe it be—can say for sure, 600 years, I'll let the archaeologists say maybe it's even more than that, maybe closer to a thousand years old, but this old Yupik village is coming out of the ground called new knowledge or the old village. And as the old village is coming out, you're literally a year in there and this has been going on for over 20 years, year after year the history and the stories, all the oral stories are physically manifesting itself again. So it's the past and that the future that is the past, or the pasta is the future, but it's all coming back."

"And so something that happened is some of the youth there I think go through transitions of how they identify with their landscape and who they are and one boy, Michael, walked out to the new knowledge, the old village, and he sort of maybe, if my words tripped over an artifact, but I think that's my words, I think in his words he found his ancestor. And he went back to the village that had really been in debate about whether they would actually archaeologically dig this site and preserve it. He went back and he said, 'It's time to do this.' And then other children said, 'We can hear the voices, and we're going to dance again. We haven't danced in 80 years.' And the elder said yes, they began to work with other people to what do you want to say, sort of birth the village again, this old village. And now I went to Mike, that's the boy you saw, and I went over there and he said, 'Do you want me to show you the seal hunting dance?'"

"And it was right after, it actually was probably the same day. I think it was the same day that Sarah, who I stay with when I’m there, her son Jared, brought home the seal, and she opened the seal like this and I'm looking at her and there's so much ice you can see—like you can, for me, you see the transitional time of relating to the seal."

"And later on that day, we went over and Mike said, 'Let me show you the seal hunting dance.'"

"And so that's what..." [Laughter] [Applause]

"So ritual, you've seen ritual change over time, oops. And maybe, is it fair to say that ritual helps a culture deal with change? We tend to think of ritual that's frozen, this is this frozen culture, but is ritual a tool that helps people endure change that comes to their landscape and their culture?"

"I think we are change, so therefore it's a way to express who we are."

"Who is this? Who do you think it is?"

"I think it's, well I've got a sad answer and a happy answer to that. I think it's a dying culture looking to the gods for help."

"But I don't know, maybe it's also..."

"Erica, do you think?"

"Yes, tell us what it is and is there a ritual use of it?"

"So okay, on this um, so in this journey, this is a weapon bear in mind that it has to happen in 25 seconds. Well, maybe I'll just leave you guys can maybe figure out who it is. I don't know if I could do that in 20 seconds. I'm really good."

"I can't. I can't. I guess that's a good place to stop; it's inexplicable."

"Thank you." [Applause] [Music]

"Please welcome photographer and National Geographic Explorer, Onus Babajanian." [Music] [Applause]

"On October 23rd last year, I was standing in the middle of a cotton field near the town of Margolin in Uzbekistan, photographing the people around me. Myself haven't picked about a kilogram of cotton by then. And I was thinking to myself, yes, this is how I'm going to photograph the story of water in Central Asia. This is going to be part of a chain of visuals that will bring my story to a conclusion."

"On another day, I was standing in front of the Tuyuksel glacier, a few kilometers away from Almaty in Kazakhstan, and that's me. And I was thinking to myself again and even pronouncing, 'No, I don't know what I'm doing. Why again am I photographing this glacier?' I was lost. Not only was I lost, my drone was also lost, but in fact, I was happy about this feeling, about this state of mind, because I had that feeling that very soon I was going to find myself. And the first lucky sign of that was that I found my drone."

"Now, that question I kept asking myself was how do I choose to tell a complex story, one that includes layers of history, human interests, the environment, and the changing climate, culture and beliefs, enveloping this the all-important resource of water. Years ago, when the countries of Central Asia were part of the Soviet Union, a system was implemented to share water. After the system collapsed, after the Union collapsed, the system also called and now there are more issues than solutions to water management in these countries. The population of Central Asia is increasing; it will grow by 20 million in the next 20 years. With the rise of population, there is more demand for water. Global warming is causing longer irrigation periods and the retreat of glaciers on the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains. It is estimated that there will be 30% more need for water and at the same time, 30 percent less water by 2030 in Central Asia."

"Now visualizing this was and remains a continuous process of searching and making connections. For me in Gazakhstan, I photographed at 30 Octi, a railway station where villagers took water from a wagon cistern that arrived to the village every day and that was the only source of water for this village, both drinkable and irrigation. By the RLC, I met women washing in warm spring water fountains that appeared as the sea began to retreat. I photographed along the river Amu Darya in Uzbekistan, it is one of the two main sources of water in Central Asia along with the Syr Darya."

"The more I photographed, the more I studied and realized for myself how this story was not only about water at all but also about people, culture, survival itself in this region. These are women returning home after a day on the rice field very close to where Amu Darya begins. 18-year-old De Nada on her wedding day in Munyak, a former seaport in Uzbekistan. During the days of roaming around the deserts of the RLC, I got to know Artemia Salina shrimp farmers. This brine shrimp is so tiny; it is like it appeared here only recently as the sea retreated and salinity increased."

"On our second day by the sea, a sheep was sacrificed in hope for the population of Artemia Salina to rise. I took a number of photos and then I saw this scene: the brown liquid like Artemia, the blood of this sheep, and all around the receding water of the RLC. The human interests, spirituality in our environment were all in this image. This photograph was nothing I had imagined would happen; it did not even include people and I think of myself as a people photographer. But I leaned into this image, into this visual feeling that it mattered as much and that it was as a life. And for that moment, I felt I had one little answer for myself."

"I believe each story needs an individual approach but also a photographer's own search through layers and complexities. And as true authors of our work, we need to allow ourselves to give justice to our findings with the realities and the revelations of our stories. And this I say mostly to myself of course because both mentally and spiritually, and in fact also physically, having two more countries yet to visit for this project and many more stories hopefully to tell, I'm only just beginning this journey."

"Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. There will now be a 20 minute break." [Music]

"Oh." [Music]

"[Music] Stephanie's doing a mighty testing mic 1, 2, 3, 4 testing 1, 2, 3, 4 testing 1, testing two microphone 12 testing 1, 2, 3, 4."

"And now please enjoy this short film by National Geographic Explorer Ismael Vasquez." [Music]

"[Music] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the National Geographic Society Senior Director for Latin America, Kyle Amida." [Music]

"Ismail was born and raised in a small indigenous community in the southern part of Mexico that is called sample Ramos. The video that we just saw is in his native language amused oh and one of the main characters is his mother. His Maya's goals as a storyteller is to really portrait a new image of indigenous communities that can help them overcome stereotypes and be more truthful to what they are and how they live. Ismail got in December the Sundance Institute grant to finish the production of this short film and he's here with us; so I want to ask him to stand up so that we can give him a round of applause." [Applause]

"And now to continue with our program, please welcome conservation photographer and expert Ronan Donovan." [Applause]

"Hello everyone, I'd like to start with a quote. This is a quote by the late John Berger. He was an English novelist and art critic. John said, 'With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange—different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness as man as a species.'"

"So to help illustrate John's point, show of hands: How many people have ever lived with an animal in the same house? Fish, dog, cat? Yeah, it's most of us, right? There are scenes like this that are familiar to us. A large animal in a vehicle. This is actually my brother Eamonn with his dog Willem and Willem was a very clever dog. He figured out really quickly that he could get out of the vehicle. He could just open the doors. He'd get my brother's truck and he would jam screwdrivers and different tools blocks of wood in the door frame so that Willem couldn't open it up."

"And so we domesticated this animal—the wolf. This is an image by Robert Clarke's story about the domestication of wolves. I think the agent for this Maltese is going to get some feedback here. The Maltese doesn't look too excited to be standing under that big animal but there's an archaeological dig site there in the corner that shows a skeleton of a 12,000-year-old man clutching a puppy."

"So it's this idea that we have this connection to this wild animal different than any other. It's the first animal we domesticated some thirty, or forty thousand years ago in Eurasia. And so just a quick overview of the gray wolf in North America—this is a map of their current and historic range. Historic range is the light orange and the darker is their current range. So I live in Montana; we have about 800 gray wolves which is considered a success. Just last week was the 25-year anniversary of the wolves being brought back into Yellowstone National Park. There are, as I said, 800 but in the late 1800s, from 1888 onwards, every year on average, there were about 5,000 wolf pelts submitted for bounty claims in Montana alone. There are 5,000 wolves total in the lower 48 now and why is that?"

"Why was this eradication of this animal so prevalent whereas now we love it? We got rid of the wolf and we replaced it with the Maltese and various other things it's because they, the same thing as we do, and we fear them. This is an image I made in Yellowstone my first project for National Geographic in 2015 and this image is of wolves that are scared of people, right? As forward-facing, they're kind of fearful of us, and we feel that. So they were absent from the landscape before they were brought back into Yellowstone."

"As I said, 25-year anniversary bringing Wolves back to Yellowstone was last week. The issues around Yellowstone are with the lifestyle that Westerners brought to and imposed on the landscape of the West, ranching, raising very dumb animals. Really we dumb down the wild counterparts in Eurasia; we brought them to Europe. And so, they make for easy prey now. And then for wolves, on average in Montana, they lose about 50 cows a year to wolves. Last winter, they lost 30,000 cows to weather."

"It's important to realize that Yellowstone was created for the geothermal features, features like this the Canary Springs and Mammoth Hot Springs so the borders were drawn, not for what the wildlife needed, what the ecosystem needed but for what was convenient to preserve those geothermal features. Yellowstone is a massive supervolcano. Average elevation of Yellowstone is above 8,000 feet, so it means it's a very harsh place to be at winter and so the idea of Yellowstone is a blueprint of habitat for the rest of the West isn't necessarily accurate because it's this unique place, this volcano."

"But Yellowstone and the wolf relationship there is about research and about tourism."

"And so this is a research helicopter that is being flown over a pack of wolves to put a collar on it, a tracking device on the animal. This is Doug Smith hanging out the helicopter on harness trying to put a dart in the rump of that wolf. Once they get them down, they go through a protocol of general health checks, DNA samples, and they put those collars on. These are newer GPS tracking collars so they can figure out their movements, are they leaving the park very often, how big are their home ranges, how are the packs interacting and what are they mainly feeding on?"

"And so this is a diorama or a piece of art from a National Geographic magazine article in early 2000, showing the difference in habitat from the wolves being brought back into the landscape, showing that they have a huge impact on the success and the health of the landscape. One, you have too many elk, and the other, you have a more balanced ecosystem."

"When you replace just a single animal, known as a keystone species. And so in Yellowstone, I spent much of my time failing as is the case with things that are scared of you. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to try to chase people down that were scared of you and trying to take their picture would be a challenge. And your images would reflect that."

"This is a remote camera; this is a motion-triggered camera. So the animal is aware of the camera, they're scared of it, they're seeing and hearing the noise—click, click, click—of this tool. And so after this project ended I really felt a need to understand more about the real wolf, the wolf that is not afraid of you and try to tell a better story about them."

"I never saw wolf pups; I never saw much socialization going on in Yellowstone. They just weren't relaxed. Whenever I was within a couple hundred feet or even a quarter-mile, once they would smell me, it was game over. And so I knew, as many of us did, of this place. This is a cover by Jim Brandenburg, the photo, and National Geographic sent Jim Brandenburg and a biologist named David Meech up to Ellesmere Island. It's the furthest northern landmass in Canada; it's about 700 miles from the North Pole. And this was a place where the Wolves there had never had a negative encounter with humans. There were no humans living there permanently; there was no livestock, no competition with humans."

"And so I pitched the project; it was approved. Went up to this very barren, seemingly landscape that is treeless, it's kind of rolling Badlands, prairie-like feel but it's a place that has a lot of life, obviously and the wolves are there and other species."

"And so just a quick overview where we're at: This is 80 degrees north; it's right next to Greenland. And the wolves there, as I said, they don't have any fear of humans. And so instead of using camera traps, you can get in front of them while they're traveling, lie down with a 24-millimeter lens, and they walk past you. This was after spending about three weeks with this pack of wolves. And you could also use camera traps but you could use them in more intimate settings at the den and they ignore it; they urinate on it, it becomes part of the landscape."

"You clean the lens and then you're good to go. And so the pack that I spent the most time with was this pack. This is ten wolves total; there are six adults and four pups. A couple down here, these are the shaggy yearlings. These two are the females; they were two-year-olds, incredibly skilled huntresses. This one won one eye; he had one eye and half a tail. She was quite a wolf, and the two adults—the breeders—on the top there."

"I'll let them introduce themselves." [Music] [Music]

"I named them the Polygon pack because these polygons, Tundra ponds are something unique to the High Arctic that formed over thousands of years and this was very close to their den site."

"So I thought today, in an effort to kind of better introduce us all to the life of a wolf, from here on out I'm going to show you images that were created over the course of two days. This was about 35 to 40 hours that I spent with them, following them while they were hunting and pushing on. They were very hungry and I thought that this would just be a way for us to just dive into a day in the life of a wild wolf. And so the day started; I took about 12 hours to find them and then once I engaged them, they were in the midst of a hunt. They hunt musk oxen, which is a large relative of the goat—males weigh about 800 pounds."

"And it is this long dance that goes on, this process. This one lasted for over six hours where they would push the herd, but the herd also works together to defend themselves. And this is obviously a formidable line for the wolves to try to penetrate. There was a large male that was associated with this pack. And so most of the time, the wolves are unsuccessful here; they're sent packing."

"And it's an opportunity for the Wolves also to learn and to figure out how to hunt these animals. The one of the yearling males, he was the largest wolf by body size but he was not the best hunter; he was awkward. He would get in the way of the other adults; he would kind of stumble around, he would come in at the end when all the work had been done. And so it's a testament to just how much they have to learn. Like human hunters, we are born with physical and mental attributes as humans, but we can hunt many different things but we have to be taught how; and wolves are the same."

"So during these hunts, the pups are nearby. At this time, they were about eight weeks old and so they're kind of still long-legged, gangly-looking things but they're able to keep up and it's an important learning phase for them to watch how the adults move and learn to hunt these animals."

"So this one for a while, and then they took a nap. They slept for about seven hours on and off. I did my best to get some rest as well. And then they're on again, and what they are are coercing predators is what wolves are. Meaning they travel the landscape long distances hoping to bump into some prey. They found these musk oxen again; different herd long ways away, but the musk oxen here kind of had this nice little fortified wall behind them and didn't last long. The Wolves just tested him for about 20 minutes."

"They went down along sea level here; this is along one of the fjords long Ellesmere and they eventually went up to over 2,500 feet, so the lowest point in their home range up to the highest. They bumped into another herd; this one also had a very strong male musk oxen that you'll see down at the bottom."

"And in this next clip, the challenge can be that you really have to respect these guys. They're big, they're quick, and it's impressive to see how much the wolves obviously respected that. This next clip will play all the audio. I should mention is by a Nuke throat singer; her name's Tanya Tugak, and this next clip will just be her voice and music over the action."

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

"So that was one of the two-year-old females; she ended up being fine. They carried on; that was just a normal day for her in her pursuit to try to get food. You know, wolves exist in this strange realm as an animal where they literally have to put their lives at risk just to eat which there are other predators that hunt smaller game than they do."

"And so it's not as much of a challenge but here we are, carrying on our way here. They have these kind of bulletin board sites; I kind of called them where it's an old carcass site that they would routinely visit. Mark it, smell other wolves that have maybe come through the area. It was a chance for the young to be able to figure out—the pups, if they get lost, go to the bulletin board and figure out what's going on."

"Bumped into a lone male; they thought maybe this would be a nice opportunity. But again, these are relatives of goats, the musk oxen, and so they take cover down in anything they can get their back end up against. It was a quick little test, again a couple minutes just to test to see if you had a limp or if there was some weakness they could exploit."

"They carried on, checked the nearby bulletin board and then they went for a different prey that's located on the island, a smaller prey. This is an Arctic hare, and it looks like a lot of effort for potentially just a ten-pound reward. Ten pounds is a large hare, mind you, but as you can see they're much more nimble; they're quicker than the wolves are."

"They did get one, but they were all very hungry, and this is the pups trying to beg to one of the yearlings who doesn't want to share. They go to the old male, try to get him to regurgitate some pre-chewed meal; they broke it up with some play. After they had at least a couple bites of food in their belly, we were at this point at about I think 40 miles of distance traveled over the course of the two days."

"Yeah, relieve some stress, play a little bit and then they were pushing higher in elevation in their home and they were going again for more of these Arctic hares, going higher and higher up along this plateau."

"I'll let this clip play on its own as well." [Music]

"It looks like a lot of energy for no reward. They seemed hopeful in that chase, but it didn't work out. As soon as the hares go up to higher ground, the Wolves just can't keep up. I can't chase him. So fold them up. They crossed over this pass and they dropped down this narrow, basically avalanche shoot, and they all go over and they pile over and I'm photographing and the pups go over and I go to follow them—a machine that I was using as an ATV, four-wheeler, it's just like an off-road motorcycle with four wheels, get off that, walk over this area and it's sheer ice. It just drops off and I see these slide marks of all the wolves and it's too steep. It's probably a 65-70 degree pitch and I think that they are gone, that they must have just poofed off into a bunch of rocks. This was what I thought maybe was the last photo that I was gonna take in relation to these animals."

"It took me a couple hours to figure out a way to get down this steep plateau, hit your point where I can see their tracks traversing down that drainage. And I think, you know, I don't see anything. I see any bodies piled up or anything. And I eventually, an hour later, find them and they were just curled up. This is just a normal day for them in the life of these wild wolves. For me, it was an incredibly challenging experience, all the technology in the world trying to keep up with them. I was wrecked, destroyed, exhausted, been up for 40 hours, photographed and filmed all of this over the course of that time and realizing that these wolves are kind of living these present daily lives in the moment, cooperatively working together to achieve things that they can't on their own."

"And in many ways that's the human happy place as well. And in closing I'm gonna read another quote; this one is by the late Fred Woodruff. Mr. Woodruff was an elder with the quaalude tribe of Northwest Washington, the Olympic Peninsula, and Mr. Woodruff said, 'We learned from the wolf how to survive and how to be more human, how to honor our elders, to protect and provide for our families and we learned from wolves the loyalty you need to really belong to a tribe.' Thank you." [Applause]

"[Music] Please welcome wildlife filmmakers and National Geographic explorers Malaika Baz and Jehovah Bertolli." [Music] [Applause]

"Good afternoon! We're so excited to be here today. My name is Malaika and I'm a wildlife presenter and filmmaker and in the last few years my work is focused on lesser-known critters for television, big cats as part of my National Geographic Early Career Grant. But today I am so excited to be talking about our shared passion for the oceans."

"Yeah, my name is Jerry Bertolli. I'm an underwater filmmaker but also a wildlife photographer. Grew up in Kenya, spent a lot of time out in the Mara with big cats, but my real passion is the ocean and that's what I've been focusing my time on now."

"Malaika, when it comes to marine stories what is your focus and why?"

"I'm always chosen to focus on marine trafficking in the last few years and it's because when I was spending time out at sea on these fishing vessels looking for marine megafauna, I realized that we were treating the oceans as though they were inexhaustible. And when you think of the word wildlife trafficking, it's associated with ivory and with elephants and tigers, but people don't often think about the marine stuff that gets out of our oceans."

"So for the last few years I've been making stories that are focused on marine trafficking in India's oceans, but coming back to you, Jerry, I'd love to understand more about why you do what you do and how it all started."

"Well, I was blessed to sort of grow up in such a diverse and beautiful country as Kenya and we spent time on this little wildlife bit of the coast, and you know, as a child it was the funnest thing—get up early in the morning, run to the beach and go snorkeling and see what was going on or at low tide check out all the little rock pools. Yeah, and it was an idyllic kind of upbringing but as I grew older I realized it was changing when I went out all the little things I used to go out and see were disappearing to the point now it was almost like a barren wasteland. And I was like, what? There is so much emphasis on the terrestrial wildlife in Kenya but no one is really looking at the oceans; huge changes are happening in our oceans but there's also huge amounts of stories to be found."

"So I started looking into oceans and came across this incredible story about a humpback whale migration that comes through the Kenyan coast, and I was like, I have to make a film about this. So with the support of National Geographic we went outside to try and film the first sequences of humpback whales in Kenya. And as all good wildlife does, they didn't show up this year but in this process it's been very exciting because we were working with communities because wildlife is one side but there are people who have been living with these animals."

"And if you really want to find the stories, you need to work with these communities. So we went into these villages, especially La Marca Pedego and we were interviewing old fishermen and we were trying to find out old stories of humpback whales. And we did find some incredible stories, but actually what we found was a much bigger project."

"Mm-hmm, because we found that we could actually tell the story of the changes in the Indian Ocean from the stories of these old fishermen and through their eyes, and it's so important when you go into a community and you want to create educational material, you have to understand this is their story and they're the best people to tell it. So we've been now working on this film, we've been interviewing fishermen and we're now trying to tell the story of the change through the eyes of this really old incredible fisherman and we have a little... it was really quick."

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"Thank you for sharing with back with us, and I'm so excited to see the final documentary once it's done."

"Yes."

"Coming soon. Now tell me, Malaika, was there a moment that inspired you to tell Erin stories?"

"So I grew up in a small coastal village in the place in India called Goa, and when I was younger I used to compete in windsurfing professionally, so I would spend huge amounts of time training in the ocean. And this one time I was all alone, when I was probably 5 p.m. and I saw this enormous ripple in the distance, and it didn't really look like a turtle or a dolphin, so I had to go closer. And when I went closer I saw this humpback whale just by hopping out of the ocean and looking me straight in the eye and in that moment I was blown away because I didn't even know that we had humpback whales in our waters. And in that moment I also realized that I wanted to tell stories about the oceans as a way to understand them better, not just in my backyard but across the world."

"Amazing."

"Yeah, better luck than I did with humpbacks. Now I'm sure everyone here would really like to know what are you working on at the moment?"

"So for the last three and a half years along with my best friend and teammate, I've been working on a film on marine trafficking with manta rays. So we've been following the trade pipeline from India's brown murky waters where people don't even know we have mantas to the Indo-Myanmar border where I've found through in my investigation that there are links between wildlife trafficking and insurgency in the region. And then finally going undercover in the wildlife markets of Guangzhou and Hong Kong in China, pretending to be a seafood trader to understand how much of this contraband is being sourced from India's waters."

"The film is in the sports production stage right now where we have a little sneak peek as well."

"My generation was born at the peak of the world's sixth mass extinction, but for me, extinction is something that's happening in my own backyard. The very first time I saw a Manta Ray was diving off a coral reef in the Maldives. I hadn't seen anything like it before and ever since then mantas have captivated me like no other species."

"I'm heading to the spot where there are large landings of rays. So let's see what we find there and for the past few years I've been seeing too many manta rays where they shouldn't be."

"Yeah, this is what they're after, predominantly. One of the biggest threats to mantas has been these fisheries for them where people are actually targeting animals to be able to extract certain body parts like gill plates out. I've been tracking the straight down, living with fishermen and witnessing the hunt out at sea. My investigation has taken me to places that I could have never imagined. We got our information through a source that there's some contraband items which are being transported in a vehicle."

"I am thousands of kilometers away from the east coast of India where these killed plates were so strong at the Indian border; looking at these bad stats represent 4250 animals. I'm really beginning to understand the numbers and the transnational scale industry. I've been to customs warehouses and remote border towns and track down middlemen and I've gone undercover in the biggest market for wildlife products in the world—China."

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"The deeper you dig, the bigger it gets. This is the heart of the legal wildlife trade and the supply chain points straight—I mean that—that's some pretty incredible stuff and I mean it's hard to watch. But I have a question: Is being a woman in situations like that, how’s your experience been?"

"To be honest, initially, Jerry, I received a lot of opposition for being a woman. I remember being told multiple times by seafood traders that I needed to get out of there or I would be hurt badly. But over time, I realized that when you spend enough time at these fishing ports and going undercover in these different wildlife markets, you become part of the furniture. And I also realized that being a woman is such an asset when you're doing undercover investigative work, because people see you as less threatening, so they kind of invite you into their spaces; they take you into places that some of my male colleagues wouldn't be taken into."

"But more importantly, they trust you with their stories. They will tell you that you can come into their house and hear about how they connect with the ocean and for me that's the most important part of being a woman in the field."

"I can tell you my wife gets a much better reaction than I do."

"Coming to you, is your Howie what are the challenges of filming in the Laminal archipelago and across Kenya?"

"Well the Laminal archipelago is an incredibly unique place. Firstly, because its proximity to Somalia, and so that makes them working in the northern bit of the archipelago quite challenging at times. So you do have security concerns which you have to think about. We generally go up in traditional dows and tend to spend one night and head out and not spend much time there. You never know what's going to happen but the archipelago is where two big currents come through and you've got two big rivers also coming up and we only have such a small window of time when we can get in and film in clear water."

"So on one side it's very special because it's like a window into an otherwise unknown environment but you really have to make sure you've planned out and ready to go when things happen. So it's pretty incredible."

"So I know your work also focuses on policy change. Now do you think that you can actually have tangible change through film?"

"I do and I think that to have tangible change you kind of have to be really, really intentional about the process of creating impact. You can't just create a provocative film and put it out into the universe and hope that you know magical unicorns will help deliver impact; you have to be conscious of it from the get-go."

"And when I was making my documentary, I realized that a film alone wasn't a strong enough medium to push for policy change, so along with a teammate of mine we made a rough cut of some of the footage and we took that to the Wildlife Trust of India which is one of India's best research and advocacy organizations and to Wild It which is an anti-trafficking organization based in the US and last year we actually got India's first baseline data survey on mantas across the Indian coast so that was really exciting."

"And when I was filming in the field in China and in India, we actually had a team of researchers collecting data every single day and 2020 is the year where we're going to use both the data and the documentary to push for policy change." [Applause]

"And Jerry, you know we've been friends for a while and whatever, we've had this conversation about the films that you make. What I'm always struck by is the fact that the films you make are with the people and also for the people. So why do you think this process of making films accessible is important?"

"Well, it really comes down to the audience you want to engage. So we're trying to get people to connect with their ocean, you know. And it's one thing to parachute in and film and go and then come back with a polished film, but really it's their story. We're there to listen to understand how they view their environment and whether it's working on educational films. It's about including the communities you're working in to be part of the process and what that does is it creates a feeling of ownership of this film."

"Yeah, and people get truly excited about it. I mean we've been working with fishermen who've never seen underwater and all of a sudden they see these clips that we show them, they are so excited and we've had now that they'll come back and they've filmed something on their phone and they send us these little clips and they're like, 'What's this? You know, what have you seen?' And through this we got the first-ever footage of Risso dolphins confirmed in Kenya's waters from a fisherman or Flamel."

"That's amazing! So we're making incredible discoveries and on top of that now when we're going into community engagement and through some of the films have done before, we have the actual community in the Laminal Archipelago has come together because they want to set up a community marine protected area of Flamel because they see the benefit of the ocean and they've fallen in love with it, so we're actually seeing communities really taking the step and that is... I mean that creates such hope within me."

"I mean I think it's fantastic."

"That's incredible. And I'm so proud of you." [Applause]

"Now do you have hope?"

"Yes, I do! So I've been around for 22 years and I feel like in the last 22 years alone, so much has changed with our oceans and not for the better, to be honest. But at the same time we've seen so much amazing stuff happening with researchers and scientists and students. There's been a groundswell of support for marine protection in the last two decades, so I am hopeful. But the one thing that I would say is that hope on its own is cute, but hope when married with impact is the dream team."

"Thank you." [Applause]

"[Music] Please welcome to the stage photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer..."