Imagine a time of great quiet. A time when the biggest threats to connectivity between the muskegs of the north and plains to the south were vast sheets of ice, slowly advancing and retreating. There were people living in this quiet time, following animals and seasons north and south, along the mountain fronts and river valleys. It doesn't really matter where they came from or who, exactly, they were. What matters is that those first people created cultures and ways of life in tune with the rhythms of wildlife and the land. Those rhythms are the spiritual legacy of the First Nations and Native American people who live today in diverse communities throughout the Yellowstone to Yukon region.

Dick Baldes, enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, is as connected to that past as he is committed to the future. Dick grew up on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, which is shared by Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho people. He became a fisheries and wildlife biologist, eventually getting posted by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to a job back home in the Wind River country. Dick approached his job the way he approached his life: with a heart for the earth and its creatures, a head for wildlife management, and an eye for the long run. He helped tribal members fashion a game code that in ten years resulted in a monumental rebound of wildlife populations and long, generous hunting seasons. He helped reestablish bighorn sheep in Wind River Canyon. After retiring from the Fish & Wildlife Service, he helped found Wind River Alliance, a cross-cultural, community-based organization dedicated to the health and protection of the Wind River watershed.

In 2001, the same year Wind River Alliance was formed, Dick was invited to Banff for a meeting hosted by Y2Y in which representatives of First Nations and Native American tribes came together to discuss the relationship between indigenous peoples and the Y2Y Conservation Initiative.

“When I first heard the concept of Y2Y,” says Dick, “I thought, man, these guys are crazy.” But as a person of vision himself, he quickly realized the value of large-landscape scale connectivity - and the importance of articulating a vision as the necessary first step toward its achievement. Dick agreed to serve on Y2Y's Aboriginal Advisory Group, and also became a Y2Y board member.

“First Nations and Native people have to be part of the Y2Y concept,” he says. This was their land, after all, and in many cases still is.

A long history of dire circumstances put generations of indigenous people into a sort of shell, but now, says Dick, Native people are becoming more involved and more vocal in protecting their natural resources. They are not working to preserve simple commodities, but a way of life in which the earth is treated with respect, and all things are connected - rocks, trees, rivers, people.

Dick is helping carry that momentum forward as a clear and consistent voice for the most precious gifts of the planet, like water and wildlife. He is on the boards of several conservation organizations, and is also currently active in an effort to reintroduce bison to his reservation.

“Some of the best fish and wildlife habitat left in this country is right on this reservation,” says Dick. But of course it's far more than habitat. “I look out my window at the Wind River Mountains and that's a part of me and part of my family. That's our home.”