I feel blessed, or at least energized, by the knowledge that the next generation of Native media producers is steadily coming along. That there are outlets for them to exhibit their wares, as it was once described to match customers and brands, makes me happy. As a greater population of Native peoples, we deserve to commentate on the world around us, large and small. Yet, at the root of such an expressive exercise, is the local origination of understanding that any story conveys.

The Indian Country Today Media Network provides such stability as a platform to journalistic voices such as me and many others. When I started to write on the Oka Incident in 1990 and the Columbus Discovery events in 1992, there were very few media outlets that I could hope to see that information published in. During my undergraduate years as a Communication major student at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, I had the pleasure of visiting two notable Native North American Haudenosaunee publications during the summer of 1992. My unofficial advisor and canoe partner Dr. Arthur Barlow encouraged me at each step of the journey to make those connections far from our rural Pennsylvania campus roost.

First on my list was Akwesasne Notes. I had to ask for directions from three NY State troopers sitting at the famous Four Corners of the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, where I was to drive to, on my last leg of the journey. ”Just down that way, a few miles down, take a left and look for the antenna,” I was told. Starting with the female trooper who answered, all of the uniformed police wrote down an entry into their small black notebooks, I guess with the update that some outside dude was spending some time at the venerable international newspaper located there.

Who knows? When I got to the destination, I was passed by a slow driving First Nation police car, watching me as I pulled in with my mother’s 1987 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, looking like “Thunderheart” in my black flat top military hair style just weeks after that movie was theatrically released. A long passenger van was parked, with one of its windows damaged, next to the media center building. I was soon informed that the damage was believed to have occurred overnight by way of gunfire. There was no sense of distress in the newspaper workers that I met either. They all smiled at me when I entered their work area.