Students honored for documentary about life on reservations

RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) – Three students at a Rapid City high school have been honored for their short documentary about life on South Dakota Native American reservations.

The Rapid City Journal reports Cassidy Stratman, Shannon Duffy and Maria Wilson, who are seniors at St. Thomas More High School, were named honorable mention winners in C-SPAN’s national 2016 StudentCam competition for their documentary “Native Lives Matter.” It won a $250 prize.

“It felt pretty good,” Wilson said. “We worked very hard on it, and hopefully our message gets out there so more people become aware that Native lives matter.”

The students made their video as part of the network’s “Road to the White House” theme, with students making documentaries on a policy issue they want discussed by presidential candidates in the 2016 campaign. Out of 2,887 video submissions, 150 videos were picked as winners or received honorable mention.

The three St. Thomas More students took part in the competition as part of Advanced Placement classes in English and government. They started by writing papers about reservations from three angles, about positive elements of reservation communities, problems, and how reservations affect the rest of the Black Hills region.

The students initially set out to find if reservations were needed, but instead the product that resulted in the end looked at how to make them better.

“I don’t think any of us imagined the project we came out with,” Stratman said. “We went in pretty blind, but the papers gave us a foundation for the video.”

The conclusion that the video comes to is that more attention is needed on Native issues nationally.

“I wish they’d give it more attention,” Duffy said. “If they’d focus on it, more solutions could be reached.”

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Information from: Rapid City Journal, http://www.rapidcityjournal.com