- [Narrator] This is a production of South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

(bright music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (lively big band music) (lively big band music continues) (lively big band music continues) (lively big band music continues) - Innoskate has been the best way to share what skateboarding is all about with people that don't skateboard.

- Yay, Innoskate!

- Welcome to "Music Matters," Innoskate edition.

I am your host, Apolonia Davalos.

Innoskate Sioux Falls is a free festival with skateboarding, invention, creativity, and fun.

Lakota skateboarding legend Kyle Mesteth takes us on a tour through the history of skateboarding culture on Pine Ridge Reservation.

We journey through the indoor skate park Ground Control, and then to the outdoor venue, the Toby Eagle Bull Memorial Skate Park.

Together, let's soar with Lakota skateboarding.

- Skateboarding is more than a hobby around here, it's a way of life.

And for me, it saved my life.

And I know for a lot of skaters, it saved theirs.

And it just had such a huge social impact here that you can go down to the park and you can make friends instantly for life.

And that's something that we need around here, you know, us being the poorest county in the nation, you know, you would think we wouldn't have something so amazing like the outdoor skate park or the indoor park.

And we do, and it's all world class and people come around from everywhere to skate our parks.

And we're very humbled and grateful for that.

Our culture and skateboarding seem to go hand in hand because what skateboarding really does is it brings out that warrior side of you.

It brings out this resilience and that's who we are.

We have resilience and we're warriors and we're proud and we're strong and we don't give up.

And all of that is some of the main things that has to do with skateboarding too so it goes hand in hand with who Lakotas are and what skateboarding's all about.

- It's been five to 35 and... Kyle's my son, and ever since he was a little guy, he's always been active, he always wanted to do things.

He always wanted to be in movies and he was always playing like he was a producer of some sort, and he was just a very active kid.

But then when he started skateboarding, I supported him all the way.

My role has just always been that constant support for Kyle and his dream.

And skateboarding is getting so big now and there's so many young ones skateboarding.

And to me, that's a positive move on our reservation and our country.

It just brings good things.

And with having this building now, I know we're at ground zero with Ground Control.

It's just like a shell, but with Kyle's efforts and all the skater's efforts, this place is gonna be big, I think.

- I could give you the history of the building, actually.

What it used to be was a Boys and Girls Club some years back, and then it became a very large file cabinet.

And then realizing that it wasn't being utilized how it should, we forged a plan to build an indoor skate park in here to eliminate the skateboarder's off season when it snows so we could keep 'em skating year round.

How I got into skateboarding is one day, just me and my homies picked up a skateboard and we start skating it, we didn't know much.

Then the Tony Hawk games came out, it was just this whole cool time in the nineties.

And we just all skated and then it just blossomed into Lakota skateboarding over the course of over 20 years, actually.

So now we're here after we got our outdoor skate park built by Grindline Skateparks, just amazing skate park.

And now we got our indoor skate park, indoor mini ramp is huge for skateboarding here in Pine Ridge.

- Years ago, I used to work for the Oglala Sioux tribe as environmental protection director.

And we were having our annual meeting in Rapid City and I just happened to step out of the meeting to go use the restroom.

And I noticed that across the hall, I seen my friend who I haven't seen in years.

We grew up together here in Pine Ridge, Walt Pourier, and we just started visiting and he was there doing an event, I suppose.

He had a bunch of skateboards.

And so we started talking about skateboarding.

Well, to make a long story short, we got together.

We said, we're gonna get together and we're gonna build this skate park in Pine Ridge because it was based on, I told him the story about my nephew, Toby Eagle Bull, whom the skate park is named after, that he and Kyle always had a dream of having a skate park here in Pine Ridge.

So with Walt and I's just conversation, it just, big things happened.

He got with his people and he kept in contact with me.

Next thing you know, they were breaking ground down there.

And here we are years later with this awesome skate park.

- My journey in skateboarding is when I first started, my dad actually built us a quarter pipe, built all the skateboarders.

There was no ramps around here so he was like the first ramp builder.

And then my dad taught me how to build.

And then in like 2002, who I skateboarded with was one of my cousins.

We lost him in a drinking and driving accident.

So we hosted a skate competition in his memory, his name's Toby Eagle Bull, and the skate competition is called the Toby Classic and we host it annually.

And that went on for, this is actually gonna be the 20th annual this year.

And my dad actually built the ramps for the very first annual and we just actually lost my dad in 2020.

And so what happened was, I took the skills that he gave me of building and then I built ramps for the skaters now, the new skaters in our community.

So it's basically in my DNA, skateboarding, 'cause since I was a kid, my dad was building me ramps 20 some odd years ago.

Fast forward, 20 years later, I'm building ramps for the community, getting them involved so they have ownership of these ramps, so they care about them.

- During school, right after school, you see these kids heading to the skate park.

So until it's dark and then they have to go home.

But in the summertime, it's a lot more, that park's always busy, always busy.

So it's an impact and it's a movement that I know that on the rez, on our reservation, it's going to grow and grow.

And then we're expanding with Innoskate so big things are happening and it's not going to stop.

Would like to see our economy grow because of skateboarding.

- People just come up and they ask if I have a skateboard for their kid or how their kids can get involved.

And that's one of the main things that we focus on is getting the youth involved and keeping them busy all day until they have to go home and go to bed, and they just wake up and they're excited to come back to Ground Control or go to the park or be involved with something that we're doing.

And another one of the key players in what I do is the childcare program here in Pine Ridge, is they've been super, super instrumental with the work that I do and supportive of what I do, and I'm just so grateful for them.

- [Suzy] I just think it's amazing and I can't believe these people take interest in what we're doing here, you know, 'cause we're just a small reservation that sometimes gets unnoticed.

But to be a part of this big movement, this Innoskate, it's amazing.

I can't believe we're actually being able to go to Sioux Falls and take our skaters and show them off and show 'em their talent.

And I hope everybody watching that sees this just gets on the website of Ground Control and watch and just see how talented our young skaters are, from young to people Kyle's age, I'm not saying Kyle's old.

- People my age, I'm 36, we're absolutely willing to work with everybody.

- [Suzy] He's like a legend, he and a few others, we call 'em the legends 'cause they're a certain age but they're still skateboarding.

And then these little guys look up to 'em.

- [Kyle] Doesn't matter your age, we'll get you on a board if you wanna skate.

Baby Thrasher, he started when he was like nine months.

So I mean, under a year, we could start your kids skateboarding if you want.

- So it's great that we get to be a part of Innoskate.

I'm honored to be a part of it and I'm anxious to see where it takes us after this.

(Suzy laughs) - I could burst into tears right now because I'm just so mind blown by what's happening here today.

It's just, everybody comes together and we're making this happen.

It's a beautiful thing to see come into fruition after a whole year's worth of work, sitting there on Zoom calls.

And now we're finally here, we're in Pine Ridge.

So it's great that we're doing this.

- [Announcer] Here we go.

- What we got going on here is what we do every Sunday down here at the skate park, it's the skate comp, but it's a little bigger today 'cause we got the Levitt and the Smithsonian, USA Skateboarding, all kinds of folks involved, South Dakota Public Broadcasting.

So it's a pretty big event going on right now, but usually, it's rocking like this with the skaters, the Lakota skaters are always down here holding it down, skating, shredding hard like the modern day warriors that they are.

(upbeat music) - Our choices plant seeds for the future.

Do you remember an action you took a decade ago that is making an impact today?

After a 10 year gap, Innoskate is introducing, for the first time in person, Kyle Mesteth and skateboarder Miki Vuckovich.

Let's hear from Miki why he'll remember this moment forever.

- I was one of the individual that helped organize Innoskate for this year in 2022, originally for Sioux falls.

And then we added Pine Ridge as a stop.

About 10 years ago, I was executive director at the Tony Hawk Foundation, which is an organization that helps build public skateboard parks in communities around the country.

And at the time, we awarded a grant to a skate park project here in Pine Ridge, knowing what the impact could be and hoping obviously for the best.

And the results were beyond belief in terms of what they were able to do with our support and with the combination of support from a number of other individuals and organizations.

And collaboratively, we were able to achieve this amazing facility that everybody came together to create, the local community, the people they reached out to abroad, and the results have just been phenomenal.

The amount of kids that this park has reached, the statistics on the kids who have been using the parks compared to the general population in Pine Ridge is like night and day.

It's done immense good, and skate parks, we know, everywhere are a benefit to kids and it's especially so in communities like Pine Ridge where there really aren't a lot of other opportunities for kids.

And it just shows what a small investment in kids, in communities that don't have all the resources that some of us have can do and the good that it can do.

And it just shows the importance of really looking beyond your own local sphere and seeing where you can get involved and contribute and really make a huge difference for kids and for people everywhere.

10 years ago, when I helped raise some funds for the skate park, I really never imagined actually being here, but here I am.

And this has been the most amazing day to finally meet the skaters of Pine Ridge and to see what they can do and what they've done with this park and how it's integrated into their lives and what it's giving them and the things that they're now, the skaters that are now a little bit older who were younger skaters when this opened, they're now passing on those lessons and those gifts to the younger generation, you know?

And you're seeing, as you saw today at the contest, a new generation now excelling and beating the older generation, and that's just the cycle, and you come up and you learn to skate and you become the best in your local area.

But then you learn from those mentors who were a little bit ahead of you.

And then once you grow into that role, you then mentor the younger skaters and you pass it on.

It's a generational thing and it's beautiful.

That's what skateboarding is.

It's about sharing, it's about community, and it's about experiences.

And like I said, for almost all of my life, I've been a skateboarder.

And literally everything I've done in my life has been through the perspective of a skateboarder and it's benefited me in every way, every way possible.

(upbeat music) - Thank you, Miki, for highlighting the efficacy of mentorship.

Fellow Lakota legends who are paving the way for future generations share their reflections and life lessons learned on Toby Eagle Bull Memorial Skate Park.

- Advocacy, it means a lot to the community and all the little homies under me.

And that's what I like about it.

It's mentoring us and it's not even like a living form.

I got involved just by hearing the skate park being built and seeing it all the time, just driving by and figured, try it out 'cause I used to ride down the road in my neighborhood, ride down the hill, go fast on a skateboard.

And I figured come try it out.

Wrecked a few times, hit my head, but didn't scare me away and just got right back up and got back on, and it's kind of what it taught me too.

You fall, you can get back up, you'll be all right.

Just gotta ride it out (laughs).

- I grew up here being mentored by the older skaters and ever since then, they took me in, they took me under their wing.

They taught me everything that I needed to know.

They looked out for me as a family, as a community.

And over the years we just created a bond that's inseparable.

It's definitely an exciting day.

This is my first time out in a while.

I've just been focusing on school and work and home life so it's great to be out in the community again, great to see all the younger skaters, great to see all my mentors here as well and to have new company around, make new friendships, create new bonds.

Kyle was actually the MC from way back in the day whenever I first started skating.

So I looked up to him because I was like a little, I was doing performing arts, I was doing dancing, hip hop and everything.

So he taught me a lot that I needed to know to be able to have a stage presence and basically be myself.

(upbeat music) - Let's dive further.

What is Innoskate?

Why are we here?

Next up, the Smithsonian defines how our American history, innovation, and skateboarding relate and characterize our cultural identity.

- We are here to celebrate the connections between innovation, creativity, skateboarding, history, and everything skateboarding touches, from technology, art, culture, and community.

- We're here to talk about how we got here today from a roller skate, right?

Very common toy in the first half of the last century here and the boys would take the girls' skate apart and they'd make a skate crate, right?

And that's basically how we got the skateboard is basically the crate would come off the board and then they'd just ride the board 'cause you gotta get home, right?

So it's pretty crazy 'cause this whole thing is about innovation and the innovation that took originally from a roller skate to make a skateboard.

It's just the start of it, right?

It just keeps on going there, a little bit of chaos control, but fun at the same time.

A lot of great stuff going on here.

- What we see in skateboarding is an amazing analogy for how inventors think and work.

You try things out, you experiment, you fail, you pick yourself back up, you try it again.

And that's something that we see skateboarders do.

It's something we see all inventors do.

So we like to take skateboarding as an inspiration for other forms of invention.

A lot of places, skateboarding is seen as threatening.

People are afraid of it, they ban it, they prohibit it.

What we see here is really a community that has come together to build a park, thriving, vibrant in an amazing place.

- So Innoskate is always surprising me.

I mean for one, it's the interconnection between people, how a piece of laminated plywood with four wheels can connect people across time, space, and distance.

No matter the language, they're all able to communicate because of who they are as skateboarders.

And I'm just so amazed at how many different connections skateboarding and skateboarders have with every aspect of life.

But what I'm not surprised at that now is how giving the community is, how interested they are in sharing their ideas, in pursuing new avenues of personal expression.

(upbeat music) - As you can see, skateboarding is both fun and smart.

It is also without limitations.

Have you seen chairs in bowls?

Olympic hopeful and WCMX adaptive skateboarder Tracie Garacochea shares her awe of skating alongside Kyle Mesteth and his Lakota athletes.

- Oh my gosh, this was a blast.

These kids, I wish for them to go to parks with some of the pros because they were taught by this amazing man.

And I have so much respect for this guy to do what he's done, first of all, and to coach these kids to the level that I have seen, it would just blow me away to see them skate one of the parks that we have just so the pros can see what's happening.

- [Kyle] Shout out to the Lakota skaters.

Without you guys, I wouldn't be here.

And what I want the world to know is this is only the beginning.

(upbeat music) - Traveling the farthest to experience this one of a kind program, research fellow in skateboarding Sam Buchen-Watts joins us from the UK to delve deeper into the unique lens of skateboarding.

- Skateboarding is a way of activating the built environment.

So when you learn to skate, you learn how to move.

You learn how to read at the same time.

So skaters look at the landscape and they see a whole different city.

They see the cracks on the payment differently.

They look at the handrail differently.

It's a way of having a different way of reading your environment, your culture.

And there's also something about skateboarding, there's so much, but there's something about the fact that you can't do it tentatively.

If you do it nervously, you fall off.

You have to step into it with your full personhood, your full energy, and that's hard.

Skateboarders spend more time falling over, failing, getting up again, trying things out than they do landing.

That's why it's so triumphant when a skateboarder lands something and the whole skate park kind of gets behind it.

'Cause somebody is always trying to exceed their own threshold of what they can do.

And that does seem to be something quite singular about the kind of communal element of that and how that interacts with skateboarder's performance, so yeah.

(upbeat music) - I know what you are wondering.

Why was Sioux Falls, South Dakota chosen to host this significant and historical event?

The Genesis of Innoskate Pine Ridge and Innoskate Sioux Falls is revealed by the one woman who initiated and orchestrated a collective collaboration of talent across the nation.

We welcome Nancy Halverson.

- So in 2015, I had the opportunity to direct an Innoskate program at a museum where I was executive director in Greenville, South Carolina.

And it was an amazing experience, but it was a one day event and it was all about invention and innovation, which was so exciting.

But what struck me that day is that music was a huge part of skateboarding and a huge part of the skateboarding culture, but we weren't yet having that conversation.

And so now fast forward, I'm running a music venue.

So I called my friends from Innoskate, from the Smithsonian, and USA Skateboarding and said, "How about we do this again?

But this time, let's make it a festival and let's bring music and let's make it a three day extravaganza."

And then we decided to also extend our trip and spend a day on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The Pine Ridge skate park was actually built with the help of the Tony Hawk Foundation.

So we said let's go.

So we put everybody on a bus, we drove across state, we did lots of sight seeing, but we spent really a life changing day with the young people at the Pine Ridge Reservation.

They have a group there called Ground Control that is truly making a difference in the life of their youth.

And we wanted to lift those folks up and get to know them.

And so after a day at the Pine Ridge Reservation, we asked them to load themselves in a van.

So now they have come across state and they are joining us for the weekend, and it is just a blast.

(upbeat music) - As Nancy said, Levitt at the Falls is a music venue.

There's still more to learn about how and why music and skateboarding go hand in hand.

USA Skateboarding representatives advocate the case.

- I think music and skateboarding are a perfect marriage because it's just, one, they bounce off each other.

And for me personally, it was really like, with filmmaking and video editing with the skate part, the right music is essential and very pivotal to the skateboarding and the tricks and just the style and the persona that that skateboarder wants to display and convey with their video part.

So music is very important in that regard.

And really, just for me personally, it's just a hype up thing.

I can't skate without music.

So, you know, you can't have one without the other.

It's like PB and J, you can't have one without the other so that's skateboarding and music.

- Skateboarding and music really go hand in hand and hand in foot because anytime you're dancing or you feel this choreography happening between how you feel and what you're thinking and what you're about to say, there's this enhancement in which you can really feel how everything doesn't just come in one, it comes in two.

So when you have skateboarding, there's this musical background that you feel as you're skateboarding, like there's some sort of tempo or lyrical poetry that's kind of like intermodal in skateboarding and it makes you feel how you're feeling while you're hearing it.

And all these different senses kind of like character who you are and what you'll be.

And also, skateboarding, it is music.

Music is skateboarding in a way which dancing is singing and singing is dancing.

There's really like, there's no barricade between anything if you don't let it be there.

Because when you're singing, you could be skateboarding in your head.

When you're skateboarding, you're thinking of your songs.

There's always some sort of crossover that happens between two disciplines and two things that are so beautiful.

There's a crossover between music, skateboarding, and everything that you love, and skateboarding and music again.

Just nothing ever stops crossing over.

It's beautiful.

(upbeat music) - After Innoskate, what is the future of skateboarding in Sioux Falls?

Walter Portz has the answer.

- I think that this event is a watershed moment for us.

We've been building towards having a skate park.

We finished our fundraising goal a couple of months ago, and adding this event and the visibility of this event and the community involvement in this event from the businesses and everything else, really sets a bar.

And what I've kind of been saying to folks as I've been here this week is like, this is evidence that Sioux falls is now a skateboarding town.

And a premier skateboarding town, not just a town that is skateboarders, but I think people will come here to skateboard.

I think that this is definitely a new and interesting time for skateboarding here.

(upbeat music) - History was made in Sioux falls, South Dakota on the Levitt Shell Sioux Falls stage.

STEREO Skateboards co-captains Jason Lee and Chris Pastras donated two of their personal skateboard decks, a 1989 issue of "TransWorld SKATEBoarding," and a DVD and promotional poster of "A Visual Sound" to the sports history collections of the Division of Culture and Community Life at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Innoskate Sioux Falls engage with South Dakota to embrace the positive impact skate culture has and how it builds community through invention, mentorship, and music.

Thank you Pine Ridge Reservation and Kyle Mesteth and all your relatives for an epic tour of Ground Control and the Toby Eagle Bull Memorial Skate Park.

And big shout out to the Lemelson Center for the study of Invention and Innovation, and USA Skateboarding.

And of course, thank you to our sponsor, the Mortimer and Mimi Levitt Foundation.

Our next episode of "Music Matters," Innoskate edition will feature all the artists of Innoskate Sioux Falls.

Stay tuned.

I am your host, Apolonia Davalos.

I love you, mwah!

(upbeat music)