Provide Showcases Reciprocity to Land through Beautiful Imagery and powerful storytelling
Photos by Micheli Oliver
POW Creative Alliance member, Micheli Oliver has a special relationship with the outdoors. It’s a place for her and her family to create a bond of reciprocity and gratitude with the land they live, play and provide for themselves on. In Oliver’s new film Provide, we’ll follow her family as they journey back home to northern Colorado to learn from their father, uncles and cousin in hopes of healing their relationship with the natural world.
We chatted with Oliver to learn more about the film and her relationship with the outdoors.
POW: To start off can you give a brief background of yourself and how you got introduced to POW?
MO: I was born and raised in northern Colorado and my family has lived here for several generations. I’m a photographer and new filmmaker and I do most of my work in the outdoor industry as well as working with Tribal Nations, nonprofits and passion projects that surround human connection to the land. I got connected to POW through the outdoor industry and social media. POW wanted to work on bridge building and I was ecstatic to help create stories to do so.
POW: Where is your favorite outdoor playground and how do you connect with the outdoors?
MO: I actually don’t view the outdoors as a playground. I intentionally create relationships with landscapes in a way that values reciprocity and gratitude. I believe to “play” outside is to nurture a relationship with the land, but it must be sought after from a place of respect, stewardship and creating something mutually beneficial.
POW: Without giving too much away, what is Provide about?
MO: Provide tells my family’s story and my story of coming back home to them.
POW: What was your main inspiration behind the film?
My main inspiration is bridge building and finding Common Ground. I have always been inspired by my family and by my dad’s relationship with his brothers. They have always found a way to walk in between worlds.
POW: How has climate related impacts affected hunting and fishing for your family?
MO: I remember growing up in Colorado and seeing the forests I grew up loving die from beetle kill and then burn down. My dad and his brothers have also watched many areas that they hunted in and around be clear cut and devastated by other human impacts.
POW: Why do you think it’s important to engage more hunters and anglers with climate advocacy work?
MO: I think it’s important to engage more hunters and anglers because it’s their funding that keeps a lot of the public lands protected and taken care of. According to several different sources — license sales, including trapping licenses — generates $1 billion a year nationally. 100 percent of that money goes toward conservation and restoration. Additionally, through the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937, which charges hunters a 11 percent tax on purchases of firearms, ammunition and archery equipment, billions of dollars have been collected and used for wildlife conservation.
This is all to say that hunters and anglers are already contributing more than any other outdoor group in conservation and restoration. Their care and love for the land is already there, and so in two parts, educating the rest of the Outdoor State on their contribution is really important to me, as well as reminding hunters and anglers that there is more to do to protect and steward our homes.
POW: What do you hope people will take away from watching this film?
MO: I hope people simply take away that we have more in common than we do different, and at the base level, we are all humans who need to steward and love our earth.
Join us for the public premiere of Provide by watching the film below!
Author: Stacie Sullivan
Stacie always knew she wanted to pursue a career in the ski industry from a young age, having first clicked into skis at the age of 4 and writing her 8th grade career project on being a professional skier. While her dreams of becoming a professional athlete didn’t quite pan out the way she planned at […]
