A 'Cheyenne Creation': Montana State graduate's senior film to screen at international Indigenous festival

Nellie Whiteman tended to sit in the back of the classroom in Montana State University’s Visual Communications Building.

The film student worried that because she felt different from her classmates, having come from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, they wouldn’t get along. Whiteman, who is Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota, was the first in her family to attend a four-year university, and she experienced culture shock when she moved to college from Lame Deer, where she was surrounded by family and people who looked like her.

But she took the leap to direct her first film at MSU during her junior year, then another, titled “Cheyenne Creation Story,” in her senior production class. She believed the stories were important to tell, which propelled her to pitch them and lead student crews