Native People in Communication Part I with Pam Belgard

My dad was in the army for 21 years he was career army he was a Korean War vet and then when he was 17 he joined and then I think when he was 18 or 19 he went to Korea for a year he survived he went in as a pv1 private for you know private one at the bottom and he came out a master sergeant you know and eventually kids came along I was born I was born in Germany in Frankfurt Germany and we went back and forth to Fort Leonard Wood Missouri a few times and I lived in Korea several time I mean for several years because he was a member of the it’s called Kmag Korean military advisory group and because he was so high-ranking the family got to travel with him so we were very fortunate we saw the world as young children and I wish I could have done that for my son because it was such a gift to see the world beyond there’s more than one way to look at things and if we don’t get that if we don’t understand that you know we’re gonna destroy ourselves because that’s happening now you know it’s happening now in current world politics and so on but anyway that was a real gift and then when my dad retired we were in Minneapolis for about seven years so I spent some of my time in Minneapolis little and then he retired again from civilian world and then he decided he just wanted to it was his dream to raise and race quarter horses with his brothers he had two brothers and they wanted to do that and they were all excellent horsemen and they rode you know what is that Harley phrase ride to die or something like that well this is them on horses and they all rode you know up until they absolutely couldn’t write anymore so that had a strong influence on my life because my dad and I shared that passion for horses and their medicine horses our medicine all our four-legged sand wingers they’re all you know they’re they’re all medicine let’s see so then I went I attended school at UND and earned my degree in production media production it was a communications degree with radio TV production emphasis and back then it was very different then than it is now back then only rate only TV stations or production houses had production equipment and the production equipment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars so you had to pretty much work for them or get a project for them today anybody can produce really it may not be the greatest production you know they need to still learn how you know the what you need to do to make a good production but today you know we can use our phones now and produce and but it wasn’t like that when I started so when I was in school the college students all worked at the local university TV station you know and they’d give up you know they’d have a anchor and people would run cameras and you know the people you know in the control room and so on and all the people in front of the camera looked the same you know they kind of had the same hair you know you have to have a fit a certain mold well that wasn’t me and I wasn’t gonna cut my hair so I could be on camera which at that time you had to fit that mold and I wouldn’t do it and I’m kind of an independent person so I liked radio so I went into radio production because and it was all my all my work has pretty much been in public radio or public television and so I went into radio and I really enjoyed it in fact I actually started my career in radio on our here in our community with keye I was I enjoyed our speech class and speech we would do speech contests and go out and compete against the schools in the state and we had a great time doing that and then I took a radio production class in high school I loved it so I started doing a little bit of production then and so what I would do is I worked summers at our tribal radio station and then I went to college and worked at the college radio station while I was there and then come home and work at the tribal radio station in the summer and then a friend of mine well she’s now a good friend of mine she’s I call her my sister she approached me when I was I had just graduated and I was kind of I a was floundering a little bit you know I just didn’t really know which way to go in production because you can’t just produce you have to work somewhere where did I fit in you know I didn’t know where I would fit into that and she was working on a documentary called warriors and was about Native American Vietnam vets it was a 30 minute piece she did for Prairie Public Television and she asked if I would help and so I did and that opened my eyes to the world of independent television production and that was like a whole new world but still then she still had to use station equipment we still didn’t have access to you know you still had to write grants and oh you know it’s just it’s not just producing there’s so much to it and even today it’s that way but it was worse then because you know you really had to deal with equipment issues and you had to find a shooter you had to find somebody you know who knew how to use those great big hundred thousand dollar cameras you know and there the station’s not just gonna let anybody take that equipment and produce with it so anyways so that was a big change in my life and that was a big what would dr.Phil call that you know one of those moments in your life that you know changed your life and that was learning about independent tell production