Among the lineup at this year's Spokane International Film Festival is one film getting it's very first audiences ever: "Reservation Redemption."
It's a documentary that follows Herbert "Chief" Rice, Jr., a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, as he reconnects with his culture after being sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of Mike and Dorothy Nickoloff when he was 17 years old.
Saturday, March 7, will be the film's premiere, and SPR's Owen Henderson sat down with the two directors behind the movie, Brenda Fisher, a descendant of the Yakama Nation of Washington, and Blake Pickens, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: So this documentary follows a Colville tribal member named Chief, who is nearly sentenced to death, and he only reconnects with his culture once he's incarcerated. But Brenda, you have a personal connection to this story. How did you come to start working on the documentary?
BRENDA FISHER: Chief and I went to school together. We started out in first grade together and were friends until he dropped out of high school in his freshman year. And then kind of lost track of him. He got into drugs, had this situation where he committed this crime.
And then I was his only friend to be a character witness for him during his penalty phase. And that's when he ended up one year away from the death penalty.
Since then, he's built this great community. Lots of different advocates. Francis Cullooyah, who is a Kalispell tribal member, was such a huge part of his life and his change in his life and bringing him back to his culture.
OH: And Blake, how did you come to get involved with this film?
BLAKE PICKENS: My connection to it is being not only being Chickasaw, but also just the way I grew up and my family, growing up in poverty and plugging holes in the wall for three months in the winter with stuffed animals so the snow and ice wouldn't come in and getting windows shot out, that sort of stuff.
And a lot of my family was actually—we call it living life on the installment plan—which is in and out of prison. And so I just had a very strong connection to that, both from a culture perspective and from seeing family go in and out.
OH: To bring us back to Chief's story for a moment, he made this decision through his interactions with Francis Cullooyah that he wanted to reconnect with his culture as a Colville tribal member. What does that process look like for Chief, of choosing to reconnect with his culture?
BF: Basically, what happened was Chief had been there for about eight to 10 years into his sentence. And Francis Cullooyah came into the prison as a tribal chaplain. And so he met Chief.
Chief was very hesitant at first, just not trusting. And then Francis wowed him and wowed everybody there with his commitment and how he just wanted to help them. And he said something to Chief that really changed him.
He said, ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up?’ And Chief didn't quite know what to say. He was like, ‘What do you mean? I'm in prison for life. This is it. This is all there is for me.’ And he said, ‘No, who do you want to be?’
And he realized, he turned the light bulb on for him that he could be something bigger. He could be something better.
He could do something with his life, even though he was in prison for life. That just turned into learning from Francis, learning about his culture, doing his research, finding out everything about it. He learned his language. He learned ceremony with sweat lodge. He puts on powwows at the prisons now. He beads the most incredible things.
And he has this patience that he learned from Francis that now he teaches others and tries to help them. So he has been such an advocate for these other prisoners and trying to teach them and also bring them out of the gang life.
That has been a mission for him is to receive the young Native American people coming into the prison and getting them into his circle before the gangs can sway them to go into that life.
OH: And Chief himself—so he's been incarcerated for years. He was originally sentenced to life without parole. But as I understand it, that's actually going to change soon.
BF: Yes. He has been in now for 38 years, and he had the opportunity because of a law that changed in the state of Washington. And it made it cruel and unusual to incarcerate those under the age of 25 without the possibility of parole for actually getting the opportunity.
[It] didn't mean they were going to get out or get resentenced. They would just have the chance to go in front of a parole board, which they would have never had before.
He got to do that in 2023, and he was resentenced. He will be being released in 2028 after being incarcerated for 40 years.
OH: Indigenous people are disproportionately incarcerated in the United States. How did that context inform your decision to pursue making this film and the choices you made during the filmmaking process?
BF: As I was learning about Chief and his story and what he had done with his life, we reconnected. We had lost touch. He moved prisons. Life happened for me. And we reconnected when my son was 17, the age that Chief was when he went to prison. And it was just like, ‘Oh my God, my son would have not survived ever in that environment.’
So once we reconnected and started talking, the more that I learned about him, the more research I was doing, the more I learned about what was going on in Washington State and how Native Americans are the most incarcerated race in the entire state per capita.
And it all, honestly, stems back to boarding schools and when the children were taken away from their families, and—I'm using air quotes that you can't see—“Westernized,” but basically had the Native beat out of them. They lost who they were.
BP: Yeah, I'd say it goes back further than that, right? We aren't in our homes anymore because we were taken from those and put into a place where we wasn't home. My ancestors moving from the Southeast all the way to the last stop on the Trail of Tears was Oklahoma, so that's where we ended up.
All of that to say, a big part of the documentary isn't about how tragic it is to be Native American. I feel like every time people talk about Native people, it's always in a past tense. They talk about us, we're sad to be pitied, all of these things. Everything's a statistic about how bad life is for us.
And that is a part of it, sure. But there's another part of it where our culture is still alive and thriving and our languages are being rejuvenated. And we're doing all of these beautiful things.
And through the documentary, you're seeing the effect of how culture can really shape a community and a person, right? Without culture, Chief is in prison just wasting away. But then he gets this community, he gets this circle.
We're still fighting, right? We're still being arrested by ICE. There will always be battles and we'll always be fighting those, but our culture will prevail and we'll still continue to rise up through all of that.
OH: And if people aren't able to make it to the Spokane Film Festival screening, where can they find the documentary?
BF: We will be airing on PBS by the end of the year.
BP: Which is cool, because that means it's going to be in every home with access, which is basically every home, which is a beautiful thing.
OH: Brenda Fisher and Blake Pickens are the directors of the documentary Reservation Redemption. The film will premiere as part of the Spokane International Film Festival with two showings, Saturday, March 7th at the Magic Lantern Theatre. Brenda and Blake, thank you so much for your time this morning.
BF: Thank you for having us.
BP: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.
