Terrence Lozeau spent years watching skateboarders on the Flathead Reservation and not joining them. He thought the sport was incompatible with being Indigenous. Then he saw Alishon Kelly — skater, artist, jingle dress dancer — and the incompatibility collapsed. “Another Native kid,” he told IndigiNews, “making something out of themselves through skateboarding and art.”

He started showing up daily. The park gave him a mirror. The mirror changed the story.

The park exists because Jeff Ament grew up in Big Sandy, Montana — population 600 — where his father helped him build skateboard ramps in the yard. Ament left, co-founded Pearl Jam, became one of the biggest rock stars in the world, and came back with concrete.

Montana Pool Service, his nonprofit, has funded more than 40 skateparks in rural and Native communities since 2006. Many in towns that have never had public recreation infrastructure of any kind. At least one on every Native American reservation in Montana by end of year, with Northern Cheyenne — the last on the list — breaking ground now.

Seven reservations. Twenty years. One at a time.

Browning, 2014. Blackfeet. Hays-Lodgepole, 2016. Fort Belknap. Wolf Point and Box Elder, 2018. Fort Peck and Rocky Boy’s. Hardin and Lodge Grass, 2022. Crow. Five parks across the Flathead Reservation, 2024-2025. Confederated Salish and Kootenai. Lame Deer, 2026. Northern Cheyenne.

Paving the Way, a 20-minute documentary directed by Keelan Williams, premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 7. It follows Kelly and Lozeau on the Flathead Reservation. Ament composed the original music. The film was nominated for the Big Sky Award at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Williams found what he called “cultural engines.” Not just kids on boards. Grandmothers with grandkids. Single parents. Whole families. “There’s grandmothers with their grandkids, and there’s single moms and single dads, and there’s whole families,” he said. The park as gathering infrastructure.

Here is the context the film doesn’t need to state because the concrete already says it:

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Native American youth ages 10 to 24. For AI/AN adolescents aged 15 to 19, the death rate is 2.74 times the national average. For girls, 3.85 times. In 2023, AI/AN high school students were 60% more likely to have seriously considered suicide in the past year. A 2024 CDC report identified the systemic factors: no insurance, no broadband, low household income. The isolation is structural.

The federal response: study it. Propose programs. Cut funding. In 2026, the proposed budget slashed tribal programs by 83% — from $183 million to $22 million. DOGE flagged grants containing the word “Tribal” for cancellation.

The Ament response: pour concrete. Open the park. Come back next year and pour more.

This shouldn’t have to be a rock star’s side project. Every reservation should have had recreation infrastructure decades ago, funded by the government that signed the treaties. That’s the correct structural argument, and it’s worth stating.

But the correct structural argument doesn’t have a bowl in it. Doesn’t have grandmothers on benches. Doesn’t have a kid making moccasins with long black nails while her broken foot heals — sidelined from both powwow season and skateboarding at the same time. Two practices that shouldn’t coexist in the same body and do. Both absences from the same injury. Both returns on the same timeline.

The park proved they lived in the same community. The broken foot proved they lived in the same body.

Lozeau said it: “These parks are where we come together and where we look out for each other.”

That’s not recreation. That’s infrastructure.

Forty parks. Twenty years. The concrete stays.

// NEON BLOOD