Pati Jinich explores PanAmericana

Premieres Oct. 26, 2026, on PBS! Pati begins the next leg of her Pan-American journey at the northern border of the United States, moving south into Montana and Wyoming to explore how change often begins with one person deciding something must be preserved, restored, or reimagined. On the Blackfeet Reservation, she watches the buffalo return to land they were absent from for over a century, sees the foodways coming back with them, and shares a pre-contact meal built entirely from ancestral ingredients. At the Cuts Wood School, students are learning Blackfoot as a first language, bringing back a tongue that was nearly lost. In Missoula, she meets rescue dogs trained to protect crops, wildlife, ecosystems, and endangered species, and visits Soft Landing Missoula, where families from Syria, Eritrea, the Congo, and Venezuela share ancestral recipes as they rebuild life in a new country. In White Sulphur Springs, a town of fewer than a thousand people, women own one business after another along the main street, among them a woman who began sewing work pants in a former saddle shop and now draws the country to a cow pasture every July. The journey ends in Buffalo, Wyoming, where Pati meets the founder of a community wool mill built to steady the shepherding families around her, and finds sheep wagons, lukainka sausage, and the legacy of Basque immigration. Though each story begins with a single person, together they reveal how small actions can create a powerful ripple effect, restoring cultures, strengthening communities, and safeguarding traditions for future generations.