The Power of Storytelling

by Bowman Leigh

On a chilly evening in mid-November, Lara Tomov climbed on stage at Missoula’s Roxy Theater in front of a sold-out crowd. Tomov, a 37-year-old cinematographer and founder of the media company Stories for Action, was at the Roxy to screen one of several films she’s directed as part of Life in the Land, a multimedia project that documents collaborative conservation work across Montana.

Tomov held a microphone and addressed the audience while moving slowly to the side of the stage and out of the spotlight. “I’m behind the camera for a reason,” she joked.

Before playing the documentary, she introduced the concept behind Life in the Land, a project comprised of six films and 31 podcast episodes. “What we’re doing tonight is exactly what Life in the Land is about,” Tomov began. “These films are meant to be watched as a community.”

The films and accompanying podcasts, which Tomov started producing three years ago, are intended to elevate stories of collaborative work across Montana. But at their core, Tomov explained, they are about relationships, capturing the ways in which groups with varying perspectives are tackling complex challenges together despite their differences. “Community connectivity is a superpower,” Tomov told the audience. “Every day we have the opportunity to expand our worldviews.”

The night’s featured film, Upper Yellowstone River, focuses on Paradise Valley where pressures including increased recreation, population growth and a historic flooding event in June 2022 have impacted the river and surrounding community. The film shares the voices of ranchers, watershed advocates, local business owners and tribal members, and also spotlights the work of the Upper Yellowstone Watershed Group, a coalition of local stakeholders who are working to preserve watershed health and support the area’s economy.

“Community connectivity is a superpower. Every day we have the opportunity to expand our worldviews.”

– Lara Tomov, Director, Life in the Land

In addition to the Upper Yellowstone, the Life in the Land series explores five other locations where collaborative efforts are taking place: the Big Hole Valley, Blackfeet Nation, Seeley-Swan Region, Central Montana Plains, and most recently the home of the Mighty Few, a district of the Crow Nation in southeast Montana. Since the project began in 2021, the films have garnered more than 45,000 views online and an estimated 4,200 people have attended screenings across 15 states and 10 countries.

In an effort to get the most out of the project, Tomov is putting Life in the Land content on hold for the next year as she and the steering committee focus on outreach. The group is raising money to fund more screenings and panel discussions, and to keep the films and podcasts accessible for free. To amplify the project’s impact, the Life in the Land team is also developing free educational resources to prompt more dialogue. The newly-created curriculum includes a general lesson plan for any of the six films, and will also offer three location-specific lesson plans that highlight the Blackfeet Nation, the Mighty Few of the Crow Nation, and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Following the screening at the Roxy, Tomov stood to address the audience once more before moderating a panel discussion with representatives from the Clark Fork Coalition, University of Montana Native American Natural Resources Program, Pintler Mountain Beef, and Thunder Hammer Fly Fishing.

“We don’t need to know everything about each other—that’s impossible—but I do think it helps to get a window into what we’re up against and the pressures we face,” she said.

In contrast to what Tomov calls the “louder narrative of divisiveness” often seen in the media, the Life in the Land project aims to remind its viewers of the possibilities that exist when community members come together and take part in collaborative, locally led approaches to stewardship.

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Long before she began working in film, Tomov grew up in the small town of Stevensville in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.

Tomov recalls being raised in a family that valued travel and learning about other cultures and perspectives. She was also influenced by her late grandfather, Joseph Epes Brown, who worked as a professor of religious studies at the University of Montana and wrote several books on Native American spirituality. Brown, who passed away in 2000, was white, but Tomov says he was a strong advocate for Native communities and left a legacy of “being in close relation with, and in support of, Indigenous folks who were in his life.”

After high school, Tomov moved to Boston to study documentary film at Emerson University and then, at 22, relocated to Los Angeles to break into the film industry, eventually finding her “niche” as a camera operator for Travel Channel and Discovery Channel. While the work enabled her to visit more than 35 countries and document unique, often remote places, by her late 20s the job had lost its appeal.

Switching gears, she enrolled in a sustainability-focused graduate certificate program at UCLA and found a job working for the southern California chapter of The Nature Conservancy. One of Tomov’s projects at TNC was rewilding the Los Angeles River, an effort that required collaboration between multiple stakeholders and ultimately led to a lightbulb moment for her.

“That was where I really saw the power of collaborative approaches and was like, ‘oh, this is where it’s at,’” Tomov said. “I talked to folks at The Nature Conservancy who were in policy or science, [asking] ‘where are the gaps that need to be filled?’ And more and more they would say, ‘we need storytellers.’”

The Life in the Land films have garnered more than 45,000 views online and an estimated 4,200 people have attended screenings across 15 states and 10 countries.

By 2017, Tomov had moved back to Montana and was working as a freelance camera operator while dreaming about a future media company that could use storytelling to create a bridge between those working in environmental sectors and communities on the ground. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she officially launched Stories for Action in the summer of 2020 and began producing a podcast that fall.

Then, in 2021, Tomov connected with a group involved in collaborative conservation in Montana. Informally known as the Montana Working Group, its members had initially met through the “Confluence” conference put on by the Western Collaborative Conservation Network, a program of the Center for Collaborative Conservation at Colorado State University.

The group, which was made up of agricultural producers, natural resource managers and other conservation professionals, wanted to elevate stories of collaboration rather than division, as well as draw attention to Montana’s long history of community-led work. Tomov had also been wanting to produce a mini-documentary series about similar concepts across the state. Realizing their shared interests, Life in the Land was born.

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Once the project was greenlit, an offshoot of the Montana Working Group formed the Life in the Land steering committee and initially selected four locations to highlight. This first season of Life in the Land centered on the Big Hole Valley, Blackfeet Nation, Seeley-Swan Region and Central Montana Plains.

Due to the project’s small budget and short timeline, Tomov’s aim was to touch on higher-level themes, while also honoring the distinctive aspects of each location.

“You’re potentially reaching somebody who has no knowledge or context of Montana or what rural communities are up against—what if this is the one chance you have to get their attention?” Tomov said. “It was a struggle to not be too much at once, but also to show all these concepts that are interconnected.”

While the films can’t include every issue in the state, Tomov says the overall goal of Life in the Land is to plant seeds that can kick off a deeper dialogue. First and foremost, the project is meant to serve the communities featured in the films by sharing the work they’re doing. From there, Tomov hopes viewers from other areas can relate to what they’re seeing on screen and feel inspired to take action, or at least have a window into people and places they didn’t know about.

“There’s all kinds of groups that are realizing that when they leverage their resources and their skillset and their experience, they can really get stuff done in a very adaptive environment that’s being imagined and created at the local level,” said Bill Milton, a cattle rancher based in Roundup who has been on the Life in the Land steering committee since its inception.

Milton has received national recognition for his holistic approach to rangeland management, and is actively engaged in collaborative efforts across central Montana. “By seeing the story,” he said, “[viewers] become educated to possibilities that they might generate in their own communities and realize this is something that can be done.”

After releasing season one, Life in the Land was awarded $17,000 through the Big Sky Film Grant, which provided enough financial support to produce two additional films: Upper Yellowstone River and The Mighty Few.

In the second season, Tomov’s approach shifted. Where season one stayed high level, these two new films focused on the link between community and landscape health.

The Mighty Few, which debuted online in March, documents grassroots efforts by the Mighty Few District of the Crow Nation to strengthen community bonds and use those connections to create economic opportunity in the town of Wyola, build infrastructure, and establish a renewed sense of cultural identity and self-determination, Tomov says.

Crow tribal member Lesley Kabotie, who is featured in the film and sits on the board of the Wyola Development Fund, says that seeing the community’s work reflected in The Mighty Few has had an impact.

“I do feel like it has made a difference,” Kabotie said, “in the form of the community feeling a sense of pride in being seen and being heard.”

Milton, the rancher in Roundup, echoed a similar sentiment.

“One of the more powerful psychological feelings that human beings can have is when they connect with other human beings,” he said. “Collaboration is sort of a community cultural way of doing that on a larger scale.”

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After releasing the second season and promoting the films, Tomov received interest from high schools and universities looking to incorporate Life in the Land into their classrooms. She enlisted the help of Shauni Seccombe, education and outreach associate for Life in the Land, to produce a general, customizable lesson plan that could accompany any of the six films.

They then submitted the lesson plan to Montana’s Office of Public Instruction and were encouraged to create location-specific lesson plans that highlighted each of the Native communities featured in the films.

Tomov is currently working in partnership with tribal members from the Blackfeet Nation, Mighty Few (of the Crow Nation), and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to create these resources, which also align with content standards for OPI’s Indian Education for All.

“Learning through story is such an impactful way to frame education,” Seccombe said. “People can see themselves in it. They can see themselves reflected in the story and when you can do that, it gets to that deeper level of processing where people’s emotions are triggered, or their imagination, or their curiosity, or their ability to draw meaning from experience.”

In mid-October, Tomov attended the Montana Federation of Public Employees’ educator conference in Bozeman, where she was able to share the Life in the Land curriculum with teachers from across the state.

“You could see that it sparked an excitement [in teachers] to see that it was content from Montana,” Tomov said. “For them to see something that was literally in their backyard region, it was like ‘oh yeah, we don’t have any ways that we can connect the dots for our students in their own community, their own place.’”

At least 10 high schools across the state, plus one each in Idaho and Pennsylvania, have screened Life in the Land films, and the curriculum is also being used in courses and certificate programs at the University of Montana, Montana State University, Salish Kootenai College, Fort Peck Community College, UM Western, MSU Billings, Longwood University in Virginia, and University of Augsburg in Germany. Little Big Horn College and Blackfeet Community College have also hosted screenings.

“Learning through story is such an impactful way to frame education. People can see themselves in it.”

– Shauni Seccombe, Education and Outreach Associate, Life in the Land

Getting Life in the Land content into schools is particularly meaningful to Tomov, who remembers feeling ashamed of her rural Montana roots when she first went to college.

“There’s so many public narratives out there that ‘rural’ is ‘less than,’ and I just want that to be squashed,” Tomov said. “Especially in the minds of those young people who are experiencing that … being in a small community, or all the things that we resent as a teenager, are the exact things you should find pride in and know the value of your experience.”

Both Tomov and Milton also noted the importance of modeling what collaboration looks like for the next generation. “Young people today don’t know that that’s even a concept, to come together with people you don’t agree with,” Tomov said. “They have no examples from adults of that happening, let alone being successful, and so they don’t even know to reach for that as an option.”

For Milton, the Life in the Land stories can remind young people that the future is hopeful, and that connecting with your community is a good place to start. “Throw[ing] yourself into something that’s a little bigger than yourself, or helping others, that helps,” Milton said. “Trying to teach that practice, the collaborative facilitator, multi-partnership, multi-stakeholder approach for human beings to address their unmet needs, is powerful because it works.”

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With additional funding sources, Milton hopes that Tomov and the Life in the Land project can continue producing these stories, ideally giving communities more agency over sharing their work and tracking changes over time.

But for now, Tomov is relishing in the ability to bring these films to an array of communities and have conversations.

“I still love filming and being in the field with my camera,” she said. “But I’m getting more and more excited about being in those physical spaces of just people communicating and connecting. I realize how hungry and starved we are for that right now.

“We are in a state of society where we have so many things out there that are creating our view of the world as black and white. Every time you say something to someone, those are opportunities to build nuance, to show people the gray areas that exist. [To] tap into that and remind people of our human connection: that’s the power of you as a storyteller.”

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