Native Journalism On the Cusp Of Something Big

By: Commentary: This editorial appeared in the June 17 issue of E&P.

The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) convenes in San Diego this week for its annual meeting at an interesting moment in the short, 18-year history of the organization -- and the long tradition of American Indian newspapers.

Like their black, Hispanic, and Asian-American colleagues in the newsroom, American Indians find their numbers virtually frozen at daily newspapers. Native American daily journalists are so few -- just 307, according to this year's American Society of Newspaper Editors survey -- that some say, in all seriousness, that they know every American Indian working at daily papers. (Some add, too, that probably only half or fewer of those 307 recorded as Native Americans are actually on the rolls of federally recognized tribes.)

Yet there are many good reasons to believe that NAJA, and Native journalism in general, is on the cusp of something big.

The first sign comes from the reservation. Tribal leaders have long viewed Native newspapers warily, in a pattern set 174 years ago with the very first Indian paper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Founding Editor Elias Boudinot survived attacks by Georgia militiamen and white vigilantes only to be assassinated by fellow Cherokees because he supported the forced migration west now known as the Trail of Tears. Today, tribal governments own most Native papers. For too long, too many of them ignored the tradition of fearless truth-telling and created a parallel legacy of censorship and timidity.

But journalists on the rez persisted, risking and sometimes losing their jobs as their reporting became more aggressive and more professional. Along the way, the value of unfettered reporting became increasingly evident to a Native population grappling with issues of sovereignty rights, casino and other development options, and, most recently, the revelation that the federal government cannot account for billions of dollars deposited in the Indian trust fund.

Tribal government is beginning to come around, too. The most striking example came last summer when the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council, having already guaranteed the editorial independence of its Cherokee Advocate newspaper, unanimously passed a law opening the tribe's financial records to the public.

Now, mainstream newspaper organizations are recognizing the invigorated Native press -- and their own poor job of recruiting American Indians. For the last couple of weeks, the Freedom Forum Neuharth Center at the University of South Dakota has been training 25 American Indian college students as newspaper reporters, editors, and photographers. At NAJA's convention, the McClatchy Co. and Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education are sponsoring a media-convergence project to cross-train students to prepare stories simultaneously for newspapers, broadcast, and the Web. And Knight Ridder is funding a kind of Native American 101 to brief mainstream reporters on Indian Country issues.

As the Cherokee might say, to-hi-du, NAJA. Good peace in San Diego.