A statewide film tour stopped off this week at the Ute Mountain Ute Community Center in Towaoc, with a screening of two films focused on cultural heritage and the significance of Colorado tribal lands.
The showing kicked off with a documentary made by high school students from the Ute Mountain Ute reservation, followed by a screening of “The Wickiup Investigation,” produced by Rocky Mountain PBS.
The screening was part of the “Colorado Experience” Rocky Mountain Road Show, a statewide tour presented jointly by the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media and Rocky Mountain PBS. At each stop on the tour, presenters show a half-hour episode significant to the particular location, later to be aired on television.
In Towaoc on Tuesday, they also screened the high school students’ film “Mountain Tribal Park: Meditations, Blessings and Prayers,” which was created through a partnership with the Colorado Office of Film Television and Media as a way to expand film education programming on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. The Colorado Film Schools provided a grant for an instructor to work with six students on the piece last summer, Mariel Rodriguez-McGill, deputy film commissioner, said.
“There’s so many studies on how the arts really are a good way to keep students engaged in the classroom,” she said. “Our office is centered around film and television. In addition to helping to create more opportunities for content creation here in Colorado, we also are very much engaged in trying to create more educational opportunities for students.”
Initially, the film was meant to be a three- or four-minute promotional video about the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park, Rodriguez-McGill said, but turned into a nine-minute documentary with music, interviews, and dramatic scenery from the park. The narrative is told entirely using the voices of Ute Mountain Ute community members and elders, as they share the personal significance of the 125,000 acres of Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park lands, particularly in a changing world.
“We’re trying to put ourselves out there, tell people about our culture, that we’re still here,” said 16-year-old Leland Collins, who primarily served as an editor for the film.
In November, the six teens showed their film in Denver as part of the Denver International Film Festival’s Colorado Documentary Shorts Program and were awarded a Special Jury Award by the Denver Film Academy. Another public showing of the documentary is coming up soon for the Durango Independent Film Festival, which takes place from Feb. 27 through March 3.
At Tuesday night’s screening, the themes presented by the students served as a segue into the 30-minute PBS film, which follows a team of archaeologists seeking wickiups, dome-shaped dwellings used by Native Americans in the Southwest and West. The wickiups, which are constructed with a variety of materials depending on their location, offer a unique perspective for the archaeologists on ancestral groups’ lifestyle and, when wood is involved, even timeline – using dendrochronology they can trace age.
However, their work to reconstruct the past does not just center on an ancient civilization, but on the ancestral homes of living people, including the Ute Mountain Utes.
The film weaves together voices far and near, including that of Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, a school board director for the Montezuma-Cortez School District Re-1 and a former Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council member. Archaeologists, Lopez-Whiteskunk said in the film, needed to acknowledge that they weren’t the ultimate authority and look for less-invasive manners of conducting their research.
The film will be aired on Rocky Mountain PBS on Thursday, Jan. 31 at 7:30 p.m.
ealvero@the-journal.com