A group of Montana teens who had never picked up a camera a year ago are now national award-winning filmmakers and they did it with a story about what it means to grow up Native in a city where their roots stretch far beyond the skyline.
The documentary, “Walking Between Two Worlds: The Urban Indigenous Youth Experience,” produced through the MAPS Media Institute with students from the Billings Public Schools Indigenous Education Department, won the National Student Production Award for Non-Fiction – Long Form from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in November. The honor, drawn from more than 1,700 entries nationwide, recognizes high school creators and comes from the same organization that oversees the Emmy Awards.
For Executive Director Clare Ann Harff, the moment the win became real was less about trophies and more about teenagers who were stunned to learn they’d even been nominated. They were even more shocked to learn they were going up against programs out of New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco.
“They were in total disbelief,” Harff said. “They’re out of areas that have a lot of money and a lot of resources for young people. Some of those studios are bigger than the ones in, like, university-level in Montana, you know, just because they have that base that supports youth in that way.”
The film grew out of a summer workshop in Billings, where MAPS was invited to work with students on the urban Indigenous youth experience. It details the lives of young people who either moved off reservations into town or grew up in Billings but still carry deep cultural ties. The idea came from the district’s Indigenous Education Department; the students, Harff said, took it from there.
“They were so honest, so vulnerable,” Harff said. “The list of people that they generated to interview were just powerhouses across the spectrum from educators to artists to community leaders to grandparents … This phrase that they often use, ‘We’re still here and we matter and we want people to learn about us.'”
In the film, students sit down with knowledge keepers, elders and community leaders to talk about history, identity, and what it means to belong in an urban setting while staying grounded in culture. They also turn the camera on themselves, filming scenes around Billings that bring their daily lives into focus: walking city streets, laughing together, occupying spaces where both basketball hoops and beadwork feel like home.
Behind those shots is a crash course in the craft.
On the first day of the workshop, MAPS Productions Director Dru Carr remembers facing a roomful of teenagers who weren’t quite sure what they’d signed up for.
“The first day they’re nervous, maybe they’re not even sure they really want to be doing it, and by the end of the week they’re all in,” Carr said. “By day two, by day three, it’s a whole different crew.”
Carr and the MAPS team ran the students through the language of film: frame, focus, composition, angles. Every participant got their hands on a camera, and the more technically inclined grabbed gimbals and experimented with motion, learning to float shots through hallways and across sidewalks.
Audio became its own discipline.
“We always tell them if there’s no good audio, you don’t have a good story,” Carr said.
Students learned how a creaky floor could ruin an interview and practiced standing absolutely still once the red recording light flipped on. Lighting and interviewing were their own tracks, and over the week everyone began to find a role: camera, sound, directing, asking questions.
The documentary they built is roughly 25 minutes long, and came together in about a week, from early interviews to the final establishing shots around town. For high schoolers with no prior production experience, simply finishing the film would have been a feat; winning a national award for it felt almost surreal.
“It opened a door that I, like, thought I would never experience,” said senior Kolbi Johnston, part of the student crew. “I honestly had never picked up a camera before the summer workshop.”
Johnston’s grandmother signed him up, and he walked into that first day not knowing the other kids and not knowing what “aperture” or “gain” meant. Within days, he was managing audio, helping frame interviews and sprinting through a shot list that had to be completed in just three or four days of filming.
The floors, he remembers, made everything harder and funnier.
“Learning the audio because it’s, like, so sensitive,” Johnston said. “The floors were creaky, so when we would start recording, we couldn’t move at all. Then when we would stop, it felt like we could finally let out a breath of air.”
He talks about grandparents and community members invited in to share what it was like to grow up Native in Billings or on nearby reservations with the kind of respect that only comes from hours spent listening. The best part, he said, was hearing what had changed and what had stayed the same, then layering his own generation’s voice on top.
“I hope people keep in mind how much effort we put into getting these shots and how much time it took to really put it all together,” Johnston said.
Away from the camera, the project pulled Johnston’s life in a new direction.
He spent his early years in Montana before his family moved to California, where he said he was doing stuff he wasn’t supposed to be doing. When he moved back to Billings a couple of years ago, he didn’t know anyone and spent his first month eating lunch alone in the school library.
Slowly, the circle widened. Johnston joined the Billings Student Tribal Council, began doing better academically and started to find his footing. Then came the MAPS workshop, where cameras, lights and the simple act of working together changed how he saw the place he’d returned to.
“It really helped me, because it got me out of my comfort zone, working with the cameras and being in front of the camera as well,” he said. “It, like, changed my perspective on how I saw living here.”
Now a senior, Johnston isn’t quite sure what comes next, but he knows college is in the picture and that the MAPS instructors have told him to reach out anytime. He finds himself pitching the program to other kids.
Harff hears that kind of transformation often and says it’s at the heart of MAPS’ mission.
Founded in the Bitterroot Valley in 2004, MAPS, which began as “Media Arts in the Public Schools,” has grown into a statewide nonprofit offering free, professional-level media arts education to young people ages roughly 13 to 24. What started as an after-school class tucked into a borrowed closet at Corvallis High School now includes year-round “brick and mortar” studios in Ravalli County, Lewis and Clark County and, as of 2024, the Fort Belknap Indian Community, plus traveling workshops under the MAPS Media Lab.
The curriculum covers filmmaking, graphic design, music production, podcasting and digital photography, all taught by working artists and career educators whose lessons align with Montana’s Indian Education for All standards. MAPS prioritizes low-income, rural and Native Indigenous communities, often driving long distances and working through local leaders and tribal councils to build trust before a single class begins.
“Empowering and inspiring and preparing young people through hands-on learning and community service and compassionate mentoring. That’s what we do in a nutshell,” Harff said.
That mentoring runs both ways. Harff describes MAPS as a place for “round pegs and square holes” — young people who may not quite fit into sports or other traditional activities but find belonging behind a lens or in a recording booth. The studios are intentionally nonjudgmental spaces where students are reminded to “catch yourself” before a flippant comment shuts down someone else’s creativity.
“This beautiful concept that is, an odd word to use, but is sacred or holy to me and that is the creative process,” Harff said. “When any person has a courage to walk through the doors into a studio, that’s a really special moment for me because we have an opportunity right then and there to positively affect everything moving forward.”
Harff sees art as more than expression; she sees it as protection of self, of mental health and of culture.
“Art protects culture,” she said. “A lot of the work coming out of Fort Belknap and projects like ‘Walking Between Two Worlds’ is about current issues for Native youth, and that’s driven by the young people themselves. It’s tied to identity and that phrase they often use: ‘We’re still here.’”
She draws a line between the creative process and mental health, noting how making something tangible, such as a film, a song, a poster, can help teens navigate emotions and feel seen. Each project, she added, is a chance to move students from being pure consumers of media into becoming creators who can imagine the world they want, rather than just accept the one they’re shown.
That shift, Harff said, is as important as any statuette.
Awards do matter, though, especially for a small, rural arts nonprofit trying to cut through what she calls “the noise” of modern media.
The National Student Production Award sits alongside another major recognition: in 2023, MAPS itself received an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its long-term commitment to youth, especially in rural and tribal communities, and to keeping arts education alive during difficult times. For Harff, the hardware translates directly into opportunity.
“What external awards can do for a small nonprofit like MAPS is get us into doors, including this interview, and that’s something I take very seriously,” she said with a laugh. “When someone notices this and then it gets them in there to watch it because we’re all having to get through the noise. What do you want to do with your time, right? Do you want to watch a 20-minute documentary or, you know, scroll on media social media?”
It matters for the students too. A national win becomes a resume line, a scholarship talking point, concrete proof that the long days and late-night edits added up to something real. Harff calls it guaranteed help for community service hours and future applications, even for those who never work in film again.
“Some of them might go into other fields – that doesn’t matter. If we can help them learn how to do this, show up on time, do your best, be accountable to your teammates, like, that’s when we know we’re doing good work,” she said.
Behind every student crew is an adult one. Harff is quick to credit the MAPS staff, including the productions director, IT director, lead teachers, outreach coordinators and administrators, who design curriculum with school districts, haul gear across the state and, in at least one case, stay up until 4 a.m. to finish sound editing.
“It’s a full-court press,” she said.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement of “Walking Between Two Worlds” came not from an awards jury, but from the invitation that followed. The Billings Indigenous Education Department asked MAPS to return for a second summer, working again with many of the same youth on what Johnston describes as a “part two” to the film. That new documentary is scheduled for a “dinner and documentary” premiere Jan. 15 at Skyview High School.
For Carr, the project reaffirmed something he sees whenever MAPS rolls into a new town with a van full of equipment.
“There is just a crazy amount of talent in this state,” he said. “In places, you know, that a lot of people never go to in rural Montana and just every time we go to a new place and meet new students, I’m always surprised by how much just raw talent and skill there is all around the state.”
And for Johnston, it means that the next time someone in Billings wonders what it looks like to walk between two worlds, there’s a film, made by teenagers, for their community, ready to roll.
“It’s a great place to make friends and just get out of your comfort zone, really,” Johnston said.