A Ranch Built on Native Heritage

My name is TJ Virgil. I am a sixth-generation Coloradoan, mixed Navajo and Apache, and this state has been home to my family for as long as anyone can remember.

My grandfather Zacharias was a corn farmer. He aged out of the land he worked, the way farmers do, not always by choice, but by the passage of time and the weight of years. My grandfather Orlando took a different path: he moved to Lakewood to teach Spanish at Denver public high schools, and he farmed corn right alongside it until the day he passed. Two men, two ways of holding onto the land. Both of them taught me that you do not have to choose between your community and your roots.

I spent 15 years as a hospice nurse. I sat with people at the end of their lives and learned what mattered: not things, not titles, but roots. Connection to land. Connection to family. Connection to something that will outlast you. I left nursing and became an agribusiness student at Colorado State University. From death to regeneration. My elders taught me that we are only as alive as the land we steward.

"Bison are the first natives to this land. They are sacred to my Navajo and Apache heritage. And right now, there is not a single mixed-Native woman-owned bison ranch in Colorado."

Ancestral Range is being built from zero: leased land, a small herd, a skincare line made from whole-animal bison tallow sourced from Rocky Mountain Natural Meats and beeswax from Bee Squared in Berthoud, and a CSA that asks its members to stand with us before the harvest exists. This is the way it has always been done. You plant the seed. You tend it. You trust the land.

And we are planting more than one seed. Rabbit meat will be available before the bison herd takes its first step on Ancestral Range land. Blue corn and Hatch chile will grow on the same Colorado soil where my grandfather grew corn. Ranch workshops will teach the next generation what a self-sustaining, Native-rooted ranch looks like. Every ingredient we put in our products, bison tallow, raw beeswax, hand-harvested herbs, will have a name, a county, and a story attached to it. That is not a marketing strategy. That is the only way we know how to live.

I am building this ranch for my children. For my community. For the land that six generations of my family have called home. For the bison who were here before Colorado was Colorado.

Ancestral Range is more than a ranch. It is a return.