(birds chirping) - As a natural dyer, one thing I've always really wanted to make is a true American flag.

It was important for me when making the flag that the dye for the red and the dye for the blue were grown from plants in North America.

(firetruck horns tooting) Because we do love our country and I love what my ancestors have like, stewarded and worked so hard for.

I think that would be a lot of fun (sewing machine humming) and something just really wonderful to create.

(birds trilling) Today we're going to be planting indigo, and that's a fun day because all your seeding from the winter months is gonna be put in the ground.

When we think of indigo, we think of the color blue, but indigo is more than just the color.

We're gonna dye this whole entire thing.

Put your hand in that slowly.

It does take a skillset to grow and extract the blue pigment out.

Keep your hand and then hold this.

I love to educate people about that tradition.

That looks good.

We got all these beautiful varieties of indigo, but wherever we're at, wherever you're located, it's nice to find the indigo that's gonna work well with your climate.

Here in Oregon, we have a climate where it can get cool.

We have a heavy influence of moisture that's very similar to Japan, and so we love to use Japanese Indigo.

(gentle music) Here in America, the beginning of our knowledge of indigo came from Africa.

West Africans have been cultivating indigo hundreds of years before the transatlantic slave trade.

When they were kidnapped, they brought all that knowledge of growing indigo with them.

And a lot of people don't know that our American flag, the blue color was actually made and stewarded and the color extracted from a lot of indentured workers in slavery.

It's kind of, it's a very interesting thing when we start thinking about that beautiful blue, that's ours.

(Elan laughs) (wagon wheels rumbling) - [Kara] Let's bring this one.

- [Elan] I love being part of this crew here, I just like helping out with production.

Anybody who, pretty much, works here is able to be part of this farm.

All right, we're doing it.

Having access to land is just wonderful.

I come from a background where my mom did not have a car and a vehicle for me to be able to escape out into nature, but I was lucky enough to have neighbors who like, showed me how to garden.

And a lot of the skills that I've learned have been purely because women have seen that joy in me and to like, have them support me was just amazing, honestly.

And that's what built me.

Coming to the farm, brother.

We all come together and learn and teach and just share, share, share, share.

(birds chirping) - [Kara] All right.

Should we harvest some of this?

- [Elan] This is where the pigment is.

The pigments are in the leaves.

(blade chopping plants) Best thing about indigo is that this isn't going to kill the plant.

We're gonna get multiple harvests off this exact same crop.

When I was younger, we did not have social media, but now we are able to see people who look like us in different spots.

It does take some bravery when you have never seen yourself out there, and social media has just like busted that open wide for me.

(stems crunching) It'll be slow and dramatic.

I'm putting the leaves that we just harvested in a vessel and then we're gonna allow this to sit here and kind of just like get a little rotten, as I call it, have the color kind of extract out of here.

Extracting indigo takes lots of knowledge.

In America, we lost this knowledge of tending to the indigo plant.

Both Kara and I figured out indigo, trial and error.

(liquid splashing) This looks good and ready to go.

Yeah.

- All of that pigment right now is floating in the water and we need to add the flocculent, which is the calcium hydroxide to attach to it to sink.

(container tapping) (liquid splashing) - [Elan] It's doing its thing.

- [Kara] Yeah, it's starting to fall.

- [Elan] And then what's at the bottom is the blue.

Pure pigment.

- This is the real blue and this is, we said, the blue in our American flag was.

Isn't that beautiful?

(birds chirping) - That's nice.

- Once we have the pigment extracted, we then put that pigment into a vat and that vat will be used to dye many items.

(birds chirping) So, I did this mushroom one during our lunch break.

Indigo Fest really touches on the community piece of indigo dying where people can get together who have the same common love for natural dyes.

I have the opportunity to go back later with some pigment and add some design.

As a Black woman from Oregon.

There are those areas where you're gonna go into and you're like, man, everybody in the field that I really like and I love does not look like me.

And that's hard.

It smells like a good vat to me.

It smells like a good indigo.

That's what it smells like.

Just put your face in there.

And so, there are those hurdles, but I am so lucky that I've been, like, encouraged by my family and my peers, that we can be in all these spaces together.

It's just a human thing.

I'm gonna drop it in and you're gonna massage it.

(rubber squeaking) Let's take it out and take a look at that and see if we're getting, ooh, that's nice.

What's gonna happen is this is going to be fully blue and then you're gonna see if that's the shade of blue that you want.

Because if you wanna go darker, you're gonna do this again.

- Do the same thing again.

- Yeah.

When they open up their pieces of fabric that we've learned to dye, to watch that unfold and like the stars that come in the eyes, - Oh yeah!

- this is why I do it.

- Beautiful.

Thank you Elan.

- Of course!

I have just a strong love, and that strong love is just like my guiding light.

It truly is my guiding light.

(truck engine roaring) So this is my flag, what I would call, like, my true American flag.

This is a wool cotton blend from Pendleton and locally grown indigo.

This is the red dye that I made my flag, American grown madder root.

Cutting my first piece, and it was a little bit crooked and I was like, oh, let me fix it.

It got even more crooked.

And then I was like, oh my gosh, they're not lining up perfect.

I'm not gonna have a perfect American flag.

All these edges are gonna be so frayed and awful and I'm gonna have to redo them.

And then I started just laying them on top of each other, just organically, and I started liking that.

It just started coming together and making sense that it needed to be this way.

Because it is hand-crafted and our country, we are tattered right now.

(sewing machine humming) Oh, you hear that?

The string broke.

This piece is showing me what it wants to be and it looks a little ragtag, and I'm okay with that.

I'm okay with not being perfect.

Don't stress yourself out, right?

Just do the rag tag flag.

Looks like it's coming together.

(birds chirping) (gentle music) Making this American flag is definitely showing my passion.

My love for indigo, my love for farming, my love for sharing, like, the Black indigo story, and like, imagining like what my ancestors must have done.

It's all, like, wrapped up into this.

I have to show people who think different than me, who were raised different than me, that this is mine as well.

That's it.

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