Welcome to Into The Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice.
This season, we’re swirling up inspiring stories from progressive heroes. People who didn’t set out to be activists, but found themselves stepping up for something bigger than themselves.
You'd never expect skateboarding to be a growing movement amongst indigenous communities in the US. For generations, the story told about reservation life has been defined almost entirely by what's missing: by poverty rates, by unemployment, by absence of resources. What rarely makes the headline is what people are building on their own terms, with their own hands, for their own communities.
Kyle Mesteth grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, sovereign Oglala Lakota land in so-called South Dakota. After experiencing devastating loss, he turned to the one thing that kept him going, skateboarding. What started with a borrowed building and a stack of donated skateboards became Ground Control: a skate park, a recording studio, a film set, a music stage, and a garden where Lakota youth can create, compete, and see themselves as the main characters of their own story.
Kyle joins Ashley C. Ford on Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice to talk about community, creativity, and what it looks like to build hope from the ground up.
Want to support Ground Control? You can follow Kyle and all things Ground Control here.
Music provided by Shearaton Carter: Slow Season, Epidemic Sound. Custom Music by: Rondell Patterson.
