As an athlete who spends his days in the mountains, Connor Ryan is always exploring how he can weave together his Indigenous culture and his love of winter sports.
Connor Ryan is a professional skier and proud Hunkpapa Lakota. As an athlete who spends his days in the mountains, Connor is always exploring how he can weave together his Indigenous culture and his love of winter sports. To highlight the relationship between skiing and his heritage, Connor recently made a film with Natives Outdoors and REI Co-op Studios called Spirit of the Peaks. The film is all about the balance between his athletic passion and his cultural obligation.
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Connor Ryan: Those same elements that are present at a sweat lodge ceremony are present when I go out and ski. The intention is to sweat and to breathe and to purify yourselves, and I think that's part of what led me to seeing skiing as a ceremony and a dance of its own for me. When I'm there, I show up with an intention and I breathe and I sweat. That's for me what helped me to understand what it is really that I'm doing as a skier and give me a whole different context for approaching something that to a lot of people might just be a sport, but to me is part of a way of life.
Shelby Stanger: Connor Ryan is a professional skier and proud Hunkpapa Lakota. As an athlete who spends his days in the mountains, Connor is always exploring how he can weave together his indigenous culture and his love of winter sports. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. Connor Ryan, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Connor Ryan: Hi. [Lakota 00:01:14]
Shelby Stanger: What does that mean?
Connor Ryan: That's a greetings relatives in Lakota.
Shelby Stanger: You have a lot of really beautiful sayings in your Lakota. You're Lakota?
Connor Ryan: Yeah.
Shelby Stanger: Hunkpapa Lakota, is that how I say it?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. Hunkpapa.
Shelby Stanger: You have this other saying that I really love that you start a lot of things with "Hoka Hey"
Connor Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. That's a mantra of mine and it's really central to our cultural story as Lakota people.
Shelby Stanger: What does it mean?
Connor Ryan: Hoka hey is ... There's a literal translation and then there's how it actually applies. The most literal translation of hoka hey means today is a good day to die. But I think in colonized Western mindset, that can seem a little morbid. It's a battle cry for us. I'd say for me, the way it most closely applies as a skier would be saying send it. But the reason why I like the original translation and why I think it's so applicable is, as a battle cry in Lakota, it really means you're so centered within your purpose that should you die in the actions that bring you into alignment with your purpose, that would be okay. Because to live life to its fullest extent is the purpose of being here. Hoka hey.
Shelby Stanger: All right, let's get started or, "Send it," as Connor says. Connor grew up at the base of the Rocky Mountains on the homeland of Arapaho, Cheyenne and the Ute tribes. As his mom says, skiing was always Connor's North Star. When life got tough, Connor turned to the slopes and fresh powder to find himself again. Even though he loved to ski, Connor didn't own his first pair of skis until he was 21 years old. Now at 28, he's one of the few native professionals skiers. To highlight the relationship between skiing and his indigenous heritage, Connor recently made a film with NativesOutdoors in REI Co-Op Studios called Spirit of the Peaks. The film is all about the balance between Connor's athletic passion and his cultural obligation. Connor hasn't always been so in touch with his native roots, but as a kid, he felt at home when he was up in the mountains.
Shelby Stanger: How did you find skiing?
Connor Ryan: Well, I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. My mom's Lakota and my dad ... They were never married or together really. But dad's Irish and from Ohio and a skier. It was like those two worlds colliding for me. My mom didn't have a strong cultural connection growing up. Her father wasn't around. He was taken from the reservation to the boarding schools as a kid, and so he didn't have a strong cultural connection to pass on to her. For me, the closest thing I had to a connection to my culture growing up was just spending time on the land. Here where I live in Boulder, Colorado, we're just on the edge of Ochethi Sakowin, the nation that the Lakota people belong to.
Connor Ryan: We're right on the edge of our traditional homelands here. For me, the most indigenous thing I knew how to do was just spend time outside, and skiing was my favorite way to do that and the way that I couldn't stay away from, if that makes sense. If it snowed, I would skip work, I would skip school, I would do anything I could to be out there on the mountain, and that ended up being a major determining factor in who I've become.
Shelby Stanger: How did you break the barrier of entry because skiing isn't the most accessible sport for everybody?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. I had to work really hard and save for basically a whole year to get my first set of skis and ski pass and things that. For me, I was 21 at the time, and I had one of my first real good jobs and felt a little bit adult and independent in that way. Choosing to overcome that financial barrier of skiing for me felt like an assertion of independence, and it felt like an assertion into a space that I didn't necessarily feel welcome in. For me at that age and that time, I got a lot of joy from that. It felt almost like a rebellious act to me as an indigenous person to go skiing, because it's like, "Ooh, this space isn't for me, but I've worked hard enough now that you can't stop me from being here."
Connor Ryan: That was something that I drew a lot of inspiration from and is part of what motivated me to get better at skiing quicker too, was that I didn't have anyone to coach me or really tell me what to do. I did it all by feel. I would just look down the hill at someone who had probably a lot more privilege and better gear and all these things that I didn't have at the time, and just try to be faster than them and just try to beat them down the hill. Applying that over and over until I got better is something that really pulled me into the sport in that way. Then as I fell in love with it in that rebellious need to get into it at first, then I got hooked on skiing powder, and it was just one of those things where if it snowed, I had to be at the mountain.
Connor Ryan: I couldn't say no to that, and that was something that was really helpful for me in ... I guess there's a part of me as an indigenous person that always feels separated from the land by history and colonization and all these things that stand between us and what our way of life once was. It was so nice for me to have something that just gave me a reason to be on the land no matter what, to be outside no matter what. Skiing was that for me. It was just this magnetic pull to be on the land that I couldn't resist.
Shelby Stanger: Skiing was Connor's rebellion and his remedy during tough times. In his teen years, Connor struggled with drugs and alcohol, but skiing gave him a place to redirect that energy, and he poured himself into it. Spending all that time outside also got Connor thinking about his heritage and connecting with his Lakota roots. But it wasn't until an eye-opening trip to South Dakota that Connor started learning more about the Lakota people and traditions. Tell me about how you related your love of skiing to your native culture. How did you connect the two?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. I think for me, it started with ... My whole life growing up, I had an awareness of knowing we are Lakota, knowing my family comes from the Standing Rock, Sioux tribe, and not really knowing what to do with that. A lot of that is just like living in Boulder, Colorado, and the fact that indigenous people have been removed from here, systematically by the governance of this state of Colorado long before any of us lived here, before it was called Colorado. But there were no other indigenous kids in my class.
Connor Ryan: There were no peers for me to look up to. I was raised for the most part just by my mom, and so she was the only indigenous role model I had and she taught me a lot about her strength and perseverance in that way and the resilience of indigenous people in that way. But she didn't have the ability to teach me about language and culture and things like that. When I was 21, about the same time that I bought my first pair of skis and my first ski pass as an adult, I went to the Black Hills, and when I was-
Shelby Stanger: What's the Black Hills?
Connor Ryan: The Black Hills are the most sacred, traditional place for Lakota people in what's now South Dakota. It's a small mountain range there. I went there to just go to a concert, and when I was there, I met a group of activists from Boulder and they essentially obligated me, upon introduction, into coming to sweat lodge with them and to getting introduced into my own cultural ways, which was pretty cool that I traveled to the most sacred place on our homelands to try to connect with some part of my culture and it turned out that they're right here in my own backyard, who really brought me in and accepted me and said, "Okay, it's okay that you don't know your own culture yet. We understand the history that created that boarding schools and those things. Show up, we're going to teach you the songs, we're going to teach you the language, we're going to teach you the ceremony." That place where I first went to sweat lodge was maybe five minutes, 10 minutes down the road from Eldora, the ski area. For me-
Shelby Stanger: Wow.
Connor Ryan: ... those things became really connected in that way really quickly, because it was in sweat lodge that I learned these things like my connection to the water and the fact that it's the most basic and necessary element of life. When I was gathering water for those ceremonies to learn that about water, I would fill up the bucket at the creek, and if I looked up the creek, it led right to Eldora where I was skiing. For me, those lessons became really obvious really quickly, and I felt bonded in a deep way to the landscape.
Shelby Stanger: How beautiful to be able to connect your heritage with something that you love to do. For those people who don't know what sweat lodge is, can you just tell me a little bit about what sweat lodge is and what you do in one?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. A sweat lodge is, for us as we call it is like [Lakota 00:11:55] ceremony, and it is essentially a purification, and the literal translation is making of a new breath. It's just you take those simplest elements of life, fire and water and things like that, and you spend your time and you learn from them. I think that's why there's such a resurgence of these cultural traditions around the world, especially a newfound, in a lot of ways, value for indigenous traditional ecological knowledge that comes from these ceremonies, is because when you're there, it's a reminder that we are water and air and the food that we eat and those things at the most simplest level, and no matter who you are as a person, that's an inescapable thing.
Connor Ryan: That's what our cultures are centered around and our priorities are centered around as people, and I think people want to get back to that. Sometimes it's nice to just remind yourself that you are a human being and every molecule of your body was once a part of Mother Earth, right? That's a beautiful thing to feel spiritually, but it's also a scientific fact from biology and chemistry that we can embrace and apply to how we view ourselves and our actions within our ecosystem. Yeah, it's a really grounding thing and just an opportunity to sweat and sing songs and breathe together and make those connections with our community, not just as people, but all of the other related organisms that make life possible.
Shelby Stanger: Is a sweat lodge like a natural sauna?
Connor Ryan: Yeah, that's a way you could put it. It's like a sauna or a steam kind of thing.
Shelby Stanger: What does it look like? Is it a cabin?
Connor Ryan: Well, you build it. You build it out of willows. It's a simple little dome. It's a real humble ceremony. It's a simple dome made out of willows. You cover it and holds the steam in that comes off the rocks you've heated in the fire. There's something about the fact that it's made out of such simple elements, and that you've built it together as a community. That's definitely a unifying factor of it. I think in the simplest way, the intention is to sweat and to breathe and to purify yourselves in those ways, and I think that's part of what led me to seeing skiing as a ceremony and a dance of its own for me and a prayer in those ways, is because those same elements that are present at a sweat lodge ceremony are present when I go out and ski.
Connor Ryan: When I'm there, when I go to ski, I show up with an intention and I breathe and I sweat. That's for me what helped me to understand what it is really that I'm doing as a skier and give me a whole different context for approaching something that to a lot of people might just be a sport, but to me is part of a way of life.
Shelby Stanger: Okay. You have this strong native culture and heritage that you only found pretty recently, and then you have skiing. At times these worlds have felt really polar. Talk to me about this and then how you found a bridge that really has become this beautiful bridge between these two worlds and given you the career that you have today.
Connor Ryan: I think for me, the polarity between being indigenous and being a skier is rooted in this one particular moment I can remember, which is when I would go to sweat lodge, it was right there by Eldora. But nobody that I went to sweat lodge with skied, and nobody that I skied with was indigenous or did these cultural ceremonies. It felt like this definite division in myself. I remember specifically this day talking to one of my uncles at sweat lodge and he showed up in a jacket, a ski patrol jacket, and I was like, "Whoa, wait! Do you ski? Hold on. How have we never talked about this?" He had the jacket because at the end of the day when they were switching over to new jackets for the resort staff, they donated the other ones charitably, and through one of the charitable organizations that my uncle worked with, he ended up with one of these coats.
Connor Ryan: I was like, "Man, that shouldn't be the way that indigenous people have our experience of the mountains. That division there has to be crossed in some way." It was definitely something that I wrestled with a lot, and it was really those moments of first stepping into the backcountry, I think, for me that really helped absolve some of that barrier that existed inside my own mind when I had to really start reincorporating my personal ability to listen to the place that I was skiing in. Because to ski in the backcountry, you have to have this understanding of avalanche conditions and slope angle and the directions of every aspect that you're facing and the wind directions and all those things. For me, one of the most central things that I'd learned in my culture was about the four directions.
Connor Ryan: I knew songs to converse as an individual with the winds and the directions that are out there. It became a thing for me to go out on a ski tour and sing songs to the four directions. (singing) I'd start in the west in our traditional Lakota way, and I'd just say to the west direction, "I'm sending my voice." (singing) For me it's about making sure that as I'm experiencing a place, I'm understanding of the fact that the place is experiencing me as well. I'm taking that time to introduce myself in every direction and just ask that ... I don't know. You wouldn't go into a space full of people, right? And take some big action without introducing yourself. It's just like having that same respect for our non-human relatives. (singing)
Connor Ryan: That really became one of those moments where I was like, "This is all the same thing," and this need to know essentially ecological and navigational knowledge and hold it sacred in our cultures as indigenous people, it really helped me redefine in that moment what sacred means. It is not that just something that's sacred is this ununderstandable, mysterious, powerful force. It's that things that are sacred are vital to life and to living, and knowing the directions is something that's sacred because it is something that will keep you alive when you live on the land. Knowing the direction that I was facing, the aspect of the slope that I was on and where the winds were coming from was information that was going to keep me alive while navigating in avalanche terrain.
Connor Ryan: That was just this transcendent switch for me of seeing everything in my culture a little bit more that way and understanding, okay, wait, water isn't sacred because of some woo-woo mysterious spiritual thing. Water is sacred because I'm mostly water as a human being, and every other living being that I'm going to interact with also is mostly water. The origin of most all the water that's keeping every organism in every ecosystem that I interact with a lot is the snow pack. All of a sudden, this whole thing just unraveled for me where I was like, "Oh wait, everything I'm doing as a skier suddenly feels really indigenous."
Shelby Stanger: Before that trip to the Black Hills, Connor was a skier and he was Lakota. But as he learned more about his native roots, the songs, the ceremonies, the values, he realized that the two identities were intertwined and informed each other. Being a skier brought him closer to his indigenous culture and being Lakota gave Connor an even deeper connection to skiing mountains. When we come back, Connor talks about his movie, Spirit of the Peaks, what it's about, behind the scenes stories, and what he hopes audiences will take away.
Shelby Stanger: As Connor became a pro skier, he would often post pictures from his trips in the mountains. Each post would include a land acknowledgement sharing what native territory he was skiing on, but at a certain point, that just didn't feel enough. As a Hunkpapa Lakota, Connor was aware that he was often skiing on Ute land. He wanted to talk to Ute people and even get them out on the slopes with him. This pursuit led to a film called Spirit of the Peaks, which came out in December of 2021. The film explores the reciprocity between the Ute people and the landscape, and it features talented guests like pro skier, Cody Townsend, and Ute musician, Bird Red.
Shelby Stanger: REI Co-Op Studio just released Spirit of the Peaks. What is this film about?
Connor Ryan: Essentially, Spirit of the Peaks is my journey as a Lakota who skis on Ute land, how to take my values as an indigenous person and apply them from learning from another tribe and their land and all the amazing relations that are out there to inform me. Yeah, it's been my process of feeling those big peaks looming over me on Ute territory. I took the time to get connected with them and really figure out how to apply what they know and what they feel to my experience as a skier, and hopefully let that inform my environmental perspective of the landscapes that inspire me.
Shelby Stanger: How did the film come together? What was it like making it? Any stories that you can share from just the making of the film?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. It was a really ... It was this interesting layer of double informative experience, if that makes sense, in that we set out to tell a story in particular, right? You have these themes that you think you are going to try to present to an audience. In a way, one of the biggest characters in our cast is the mountains themselves, and there's no way to interview the mountains about how they feel about climate change. There's no way to interview the mountains about how they feel about how you should approach them. Instead, they spoke to us through their actions, and through our experience there, we set out to film all this amazing skiing at the same time as these scenes, skiing with Ute folks and talking to Ute folks and environmentalists and whatever.
Connor Ryan: But we had experiences like the days that we have set aside to film with Cody Townsend in the backcountry or these days where we end up having an all-black avalanche danger rose, and we have extreme avalanche danger on every aspect and every elevation. Then it's Cody Townsend and I out there literally like, "Okay, how do we approach a day this? The mountains, if we don't listen to them today, can charge us the ultimate cost of admission." Then we set aside a whole other month later on to try to shoot big mountain stuff, skiing these huge mountains in the San Juans of Colorado, and we thought, okay, typically the month of April is when you'd want to do that kind of thing. That's when the snow pack solidifies and hopefully you're still getting some pretty good precipitation throughout the month.
Connor Ryan: We showed up to film in April, and for the first two weeks of the month, there's a crazy high pressure system. It was 60 degrees in town, in the mountains, below the places where we're supposed to be skiing. We're like, "Okay, well, this film is in some ways about learning how to better show up for landscapes as they're in the face of climate change," and here we are literally like, "Are we even going to be able to make a ski film? What does it look like if we're going to have to film this whole ski film without ever skiing on powder?" It really forced us into this position of having to sit back and learn to listen and be like, "Okay, well, this whole film's about learning to be in reciprocity and appreciate these places in a different way."
Connor Ryan: We started skiing while the conditions were bad and found a way to still appreciate it, and somehow we were like, "Okay, we're out here and this is still beautiful and we're getting so much from this and singing the songs and still being in appreciation of the mountains," and just suddenly the last two weeks of the month, the weather just changed and it seemed just like every other day, we'd get three, five, six inches of snow, whatever we needed. We'd wake up at 3:00 in the morning and try to be on top of the mountains by dawn so that those snow wouldn't get too hot throughout the course of the day. We'd be skiing all these mountains super early in the morning, and suddenly we were just doing the best skiing of our lives and getting it on camera, and it was just an absolutely beautiful experience.
Connor Ryan: It just really reinformed us about this feeling of, okay, you have to be patient with these places, you have to listen to these places, you have to take what they're going to give you and learn to embrace that they are their own personality. Yeah, it was a wild ride where it's like you've set out to make your first ski film and you think, "Oh, we're just going to show up and ski powder day and get it on camera. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be easy. We've got funding, we've got all the right people," and really there's one more final character, and that's the peaks themselves, and they have much more power to tell the story than any of the rest of us. We had to learn and be reminded of what we know about respecting them and listening to them.
Shelby Stanger: Any highlights that you wanted to share, just your favorite part of filming the movie? Any funny moments, any outtakes that we might have missed?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. It was a blast to make the whole film. For me, obviously, a lot of the highlights as a skier are particular lines and particular moments, and getting to ski deep powder with Cody Townsend in the backcountry is I think something that every skier can pretty much appreciate how cool and unique and awesome of a opportunity that is. But for me, really, my favorite, favorite part of the movie is the part with Bird. Bird Red is a kid from the Southern Ute reservation and he's extremely talented musician. He makes hiphop music, but he also sings traditional Ute songs at ceremony and stuff like that. (singing)
Connor Ryan: We got to take him skiing, and he's just a hoot. He's just so funny as a person, and that really shines through in movie. He went, at the beginning of the day, from never having stepped into skis to fully cruising down blues by the end of the day, and that experience for me just gave me so much hope and confidence in the kind of work that we're doing. I just love the way that his personality shines through in the movie, and I hope that seeing that kid of experience will show other people what the value is at the most simple human level of bringing indigenous people into these spaces. (singing)
Shelby Stanger: What do you hope people will take from this movie?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. I'd say my biggest goal is I want everybody, whether they're an indigenous person who already comes from mountains and places like this, or they're a skier who's moved to a beautiful place that inspires them recently, I want them to see themselves as related to the place, and see that from the scientific perspective of, okay, my water, my life, my purpose streams from these mountains. But at the same time, these places that give us these experiences, they expect something of us. You know what I mean? There's something more of what we can do to show up for them. I think we've been falsely led into this way of seeing our relationships with the mountains is transactional, or they're places we need to conquer, they're peaks we need to bag, and that there's some sense of us overcoming them.
Connor Ryan: In reality, there's nothing really to overcome out there. It's much more of a learning to do this dance with them. You can't do a dance without the participation of your partner. I think that's a huge part of it. I want people to feel the way in which their relationship with a place obligates them to greater action. Because that's something to me as an indigenous person that I think feels obvious, but it's clearly something that's gone and forgotten in a lot of these places, and it's really easy to just go out, have your experience, ski your powder, come home and close the book on that. I just don't think that's going to be enough if we want skiing to exist for future generations.
Connor Ryan: I think a big part of caring for the land is people learning to respect and show up for indigenous people. That to me is because the way we get to appreciate the land is because of the actions of indigenous people. These places aren't ... Nature doesn't happen by accident, right? Nature's the participation of a bunch of organisms within an ecosystem, right? The nature you love wouldn't be the same maybe without Aspen trees or Ponderosa Pines or blue spruces, right? It wouldn't be the same without a big horn sheep or an eagle flying by. Well, similarly, a species that belongs in these places is human beings, and our actions are a big part of what shape these ecosystems to be the way they are for better and for much, much worse, and that's really easy to see in the mountains of Colorado where there's this legacy of extractive and damaging action by mining and extractive industry. Right?
Connor Ryan: On the other side, there's the Ute people who have a history of knowing how to care for these places, who invented concepts like leave no trace long before there were words for that, who knew how to use fire and game management to take care of a place and steward a place. I think we have to bring them back in as people who are recreating in these places, and make sure that their voices are heard and are central to the solutions for us all moving forward as we continue to steward them on the small level of these immediate ecosystems, and then we need to make sure that when it comes to the global level of how we handle the systemic change that needs to happen to address climate change, we need to integrate indigenous values into how we see that.
Shelby Stanger: You can't do a dance without the participation of your partner. I love that. I watched Spirit of the Peaks, and it opened my eyes. In the movie, there's a snowboarder, Teal Lehto, who goes out in the backcountry with Connor. She said something that really hit home for me. She talked about how the wax on her snowboard gets on the snow and that the snow melts into the river and the water from that river ends up in someone's cup. It's easy to forget that when we're out adventuring, that everything we do, everything we take with us has an impact. Connor's takeaways from the movie are also good lessons for life. You have to show up, you have to be patient, and you have to give in order to receive. This movie isn't the only way Connor is bridging the gap between indigenous culture and the outdoor industry. He also works with NativesOutdoors, a native-owned athletic and creative collective.
Shelby Stanger: What is NativesOutdoors, and how did you get involved with it?
Connor Ryan: Yeah. NativesOutdoors started as a social media community and grew to become an indigenous-owned and operated outdoor media and apparel company. Yeah, we make films, we tell stories, we put indigenous art onto outdoor gear, and I got involved with it ... A handful of years ago, they'd made a post and it said, "Calling all native senders and defenders," and I'd spent a good chunk of time in the previous years working on some environmental activism campaigns, and the other thing that I was most passionate about in life was getting out on skis and sending it. It seemed like this perfect fit for me, and I didn't know how to get involved with an outdoor brand at the time. I sent them what must have been the world's longest email. My whole life story in this ridiculous email about every possible way I could see myself contributing to the work that they do, and it must have took them-
Shelby Stanger: They were like, "You're hired," because it was probably amazing.
Connor Ryan: Yeah. It must've took them a month to read it, because it did take them a little bit to get back to me and they're like, "Wow. Yeah. It seems like you're really passionate about this. Let's go skiing sometime and talk more about it." Yeah, I went skiing with, Len Necefer who's the CEO and founder of NativesOutdoors, and also been a great friend and mentor to me. Yeah, we went up for a day at Winter Park, and it was just a perfect fit. That day we realized it was the first time either of us had gone backcountry skiing with another native person. We were like, "We got to figure out how to do more of this, get more native folks out on skis." That's what we've been up to since.
Shelby Stanger: With NativesOutdoors, you started the scholarship to get more indigenous people on skis. How did you do that?
Connor Ryan: It's one of these things. It's funny, the origin story of it. I reached out to the folks at Ikon Pass, probably a little too late in the fall last year, and just had this inspiration moment of there's got to be some way to work with these ski resorts. They're all on native land. It was just a confusing moment for me, and I just sent them an email and it must have been 4:15 on a Friday, and they replied in 10 minutes and they were like, "Yeah, absolutely. You're right. We do need to work more with native communities and all the Ikon Pass resorts are on native land, and we're not really equipped. We don't know how to deal with this or talk about this at the moment. Let's work together."
Connor Ryan: Last year we made a short film together, built some relationships, and I was like, "Okay. Ultimately what I want to do is figure out how we can get more native folks out on the mountain as soon as possible." Yeah, we started this scholarship program to give away some Ikon Passes, and I got my sponsors and partners involved so that everybody who received a scholarship also gets outerwear and helmets and goggles and skis and boots and bindings and everything they would need to not just get started, but also really feel like they belong out there on the mountain and be equipped to have a great time experiencing skiing.
Shelby Stanger: Connor's work has come full circle. He didn't connect with his Lakota roots until adulthood, but he's making up for lost time. Bridging the gap between his indigenous heritage and the world of winter sports is central to his identity. Now he's helping others do the same. Be sure to watch his film, Spirit of the Peaks, which is available on REI's YouTube channel. We'll link to it in the show notes. Connor, thank you so much for coming on the show. Your honesty and insights about connecting to your native culture and your passion for skiing really made an impact on me. I'm really excited for everyone to go see Spirit of the Peaks and learn more about the work that Connor and NativesOutdoors are doing.
Shelby Stanger: You can follow Connor's adventures on Instagram, @sacredstoke, which is such a cool Instagram handle. That's S-A-C-R-E-D-S-T-O-K-E, @sacredstoke. You can also learn more about NativesOutdoors and the Ikon Pass scholarship on their website, natives-outdoors.com, or on Instagram, @nativesoutdoors. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, written and edited by Annie Fassler and Sylvia Thomas of Puddle Creative, and produced by Chelsea Davis. Our executive producers are Palo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we appreciate when you follow this show, rate it and review it wherever you listen. Remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.