- Hi.

- This is quite a meeting.

- Yeah.

- Look at this, I didn't fall.

- I know that was a really good stop.

- Thank you so much.

I'm Baratunde by the way.

- I'm Mick.

- Nice to meet you in person.

- Nice to meet you too.

- Yeah.

(gentle music) Mick found roller derby while working as an organizer in the indigenous community and looking for a physical outlet.

They had always loved rollerskating and here was a way to skate as a part of a team, a new ready-made community.

Mick has brought me to a skate park in eyeshot of Mount St. Helen's, or Loowit, its native Cowlitz name.

I just want to start by acknowledging your roller skates.

- [Mick] Yeah.

- They are fire.

- Thank you.

- You have these blue suede pink wheeled sparklies.

And you know, there's a whole look going on here, so well done.

- Thank you.

- Now roller derby is a full contact sport.

It's not just a casual skate around town, which is a lot different from my experience rollerblading around Boston in my college days.

Yep, that's me, age 19, with a pager.

But Mick wasn't scared of getting a little rough in the rink.

- I wanted a team sport 'cause I played sports growing up.

So I bought some really terrible skates from like a, you know, a department store.

And I showed up and I tried out and halfway through my tryout, this person came up to me and was like, "Hey, are you a skin?"

And I was like, "Yeah."

Which means like native.

And she's like, "Your skates suck."

And I was like, "Yeah, I know."

And she's like, "Come to my car."

And gave me her skates to wear for the rest of the tryout.

- Awesome.

- Yeah, and she helped me found Team Indigenous Roller Berby.

- What is Team Indigenous Roller Derby?

- You know, I played roller derby for lots of years.

I rose in the ranks, so to speak, and then I played on team USA.

- Team USA?

- Yeah.

- Like you were representing America.

- Yeah, and there weren't many people of color on that team.

And so that felt really isolating.

And when we got to the World Cup, I saw all of these teams from other countries that had skaters of color and I was like, ah, I want that.

Like I wanna come back and represent with other native people and just like be in our culture, be who we are, and feel proud to be here.

- After reaching the heights of the sport with Team USA, (uplifting music) Mick met numerous indigenous roller derby players when they played in Australia and New Zealand.

After feeling bullied, ostracized, and just not part of the US team, they formed Team Indigenous, the first team to reach the World Cup while representing borderless indigenous nations.

What have you gotten out of being a part of and a leader of Team Indigenous Roller Derby?

- I mean, roller derby brought me to land work.

- Like many Native Americans, Mick felt the loss of traditional lands.

With fellow teammates, they began to look for a place in Portland that could be their own.

- So I was meeting indigenous skaters everywhere I went.

What I found is that intergenerationally, everybody wanted to be on land and have access to land.

Land work, for me, it's redeveloping my relationship with land that is reciprocal, where I'm caring for land, where I'm caring for water, where I'm caring for animals, and in return, a lot of that means that I am healing myself in that process.

And our community, as we do that together, we're finding so much healing in land and we're finding so much healing in ourselves.

What we ended up doing was starting a garden.

(upbeat music)