Tim Giago: Remembering the lives of great Native news reporters

Opinion

Monday, August 9, 2010

Many Native Americans that have spent their lives as newspaper reporters, editors or publishers, whether in the mainstream or at Native-owned newspapers, are wondering where the world of journalism is headed in Indian country.

Some of the really great Indian news reporters, and I am referring to those who actually worked as news reporters for respected newspapers, have retired for personal reasons or have been forced out because the newspapers they worked for closed.

Mark Trahant of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe of Idaho was one such reporter. He started with the tribal newspaper at Fort Hall, the Sho-Ban News, and went to several major daily newspapers including the Arizona Republic where he was on a team of reporters that nearly won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Indian issues, and ended up at the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, a great newspaper that just could not survive the Internet assault and folded a couple of years ago.

Laverne Sheppard, also a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe and former editor of the Sho-Ban News, was another great and gifted Indian journalist. The last editorial she wrote for the Sho-Ban News was a classic that moved me to tears. In it she told of how she felt seated at her newspaper desk for the last time and it was written with passion that only one who has smelled the ink of a freshly printed newspaper can understand. The old saying that the printer’s ink gets into your blood is so true.

Lori Edmo, another Sho-Ban editor is still in the fight for Indian rights as is Lisa Snell at the Native American Times in Oklahoma.

One of the truly great contemporary news reporters was, Jodi Lee Rave, from the Three Affiliated Tribes at Fort Berthold, N. D., who decided to retire to write a book. Ms. Rave started out as every cub reporter should, at an Indian newspaper in Montana called “The Head of the Herd.” At the same newspaper was a man named Ron Holt, Nez Perce, who went on to become the first, and I think only, Native American to ever own a commercial television station. His FOX-TV station was located in Billings; Mont. Holt is now retired and raising mischief on his home reservation.

Not to be overlooked as great Indian news reporters and editors are Avis Little Eagle, now a member of the Standing Rock Tribal Council and the current owner and publisher of the Teton Times in McLaughlin, S. D., and Amanda Takes War Bonnet, former managing editor of Indian Country Today. While Ms. Little Eagle is involved in tribal politics and running her own newspaper business, Ms. Takes War Bonnet is doing consultant work for various Indian education organizations and is semi-retired. Ms. Little Eagle gave the name “Indian Country Today” to my former newspaper.

And up in North Dakota, a wonderful lady that should not be forgotten, Harriet Skye, a Hunkpapa from Standing Rock, is still lending her reportorial skills to students at the United Tribes Technical Institute in Bismarck. She was the first Native American to ever host a weekly television show in North Dakota. At the same Indian college is Shirley Bordeaux, a Sicangu, a former managing editor of the original Lakota Times, and a great news reporter in her own right.

Richard LaCourse, Yakama, now deceased, can probably be called the godfather of all contemporary Indian reporters. Other names that follow are Tom Arviso, Editor of the Navajo Times, Minnie Two Shoes, now deceased, formerly with the Wotanin Wowapi Newspaper at Fort Peck, Montana, Gemma Lockhart and Shirley Sneve, two Lakota women and former print journalists, who breathed Indian life into South Dakota Public Radio and Television, life that was soon snuffed after their departures, Adrian Louis, teacher, author and former managing editor of the original Lakota Times, Tom Casey, non-Indian, who has gone through heaven and hell to keep KILI-FM Radio at Pine Ridge on the airwaves, but he also founded and edited the Eyapaha, the Oglala Lakota College newspaper 30 years ago. I close with Loren Tapahe, who was publisher of the Navajo Times when it became the only Indian newspaper to ever go daily. I am sure I may have left out some great ones and if I did, forgive me.

There are probably 300 Indian newspapers in America that are still publishing, papers that have to fight tribal politicians every day, papers that struggle to get funding every year, but papers that are so important to the people of the Indian reservations that they serve.

With the advent of the Internet, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Tweet there is no chart to show where newspapers or news reporters are headed. Many of us Native journalists still feel that there is a place for our reporting and for our newspapers. Time will tell.

In the end I doff my hat to all of the Native reporters, editors and publishers, living and dead that have given me and my colleague’s giant shoulders to stand on.

Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the editor and publisher of Native Sun News. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1990. His weekly column won the H. L. Mencken Award in 1985. His book Children Left Behind was awarded the Bronze Medal by Independent Book Publishers. He was the first Native American ever inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2007. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com.