To keep the culture preserved, such speakers had to be observant, accurate, objective, and bear excellent communication skills.

Sound like a familiar job today?

I often reflect on my work as a journalist, and wonder if I’ve some inherent genetic code that comes from this time-honored practice. And while print, television and the Internet have given us more venues to learn of events and culture, I’m still drawn to the spoken word. 

I like to hear a voice, conversational and assuring, as it provides me news of the day’s events or a profile of a compelling person.  I sometimes even wish the walls of my house or car could vanish, and be replaced with a makeshift lodge of deer hide or tule grass, a fire burning in the center like the days of old.

But then a car horn blares somewhere behind me, or the phone rings.  The modern world’s intrusion reminds me of my place and time.  I return to my computer and begin to think how best to share the next story for my audience.

-- Brian Bull, Wisconsin Public Radio

I have had such a rude awakening about frybread. I said earlier that I associate it with tribal meals because it was so prevalent at Swinomish events.

The first time I had it was at the Earth Day celebration in 2003. I wasn’t even there as a reporter. (I so rarely eat when reporting anyway, because it’s hard to eat and write—or talk). A reporter from an area weekly asked if I’d ever had it and told me it was good. I was surprised to see so many people pile more than one piece of the fattening carb on their plates.

It was basically a donut that wasn’t sweet and yes, it was very good.

But since the first day of the seminar, when I so joyfully ate the frybread at the National Museum of the American Indian, not a day has gone by that someone hasn’t brought it up. And not in a good way.

What I’ve learned is that frybread is not part of the traditional diet, but rather a byproduct of colonizing Indians and giving them nothing but flour and lard.

One of our speakers, Suzanne Shown Harjo, wrote about getting rid of frybread in this article, and it caused such a stir, several other speakers have brought it up, not realizing we’d met Harjo.

Harjo was even a speaker on a Native America Calling radio show about frybread.

“Frybread has killed more of my people than the U.S. government,” radio host Patty Talahongva said.

Everyone curious about frybread had their chance to eat it Friday at the Diné Café Quality Inn Navajo Nation Capital (its full name). Our lunch options were mutton stew, beef stew, Navajo sandwich, Navajo taco, Navajo burger and Navajo vegetarian burrito.

“Navajo” meant on frybread.

--Kari Neumeyer, The Olympian (Olympia, WA)

Like many American Indian communities, the Navajo Nation in Arizona does not have an open records law. That makes it harder for the public and journalists, “especially non-tribal members“ to get information about the inner workings of tribal government.

The Navajo Times, with 21,500 paid subscribers, is the country’s largest Indian-owned paid circulation newspaper. Nearly all of its 40 staff members are Native Americans. Yet even they have a hard time getting tribal records sometimes.

“Generally you have to work to get the documents,” Editor Duane Beyal told participants in the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism’s seminar on covering Indian Country.  “Even getting police reports is a tough job. Now we’re getting them.”

Over the years, however, the weekly publication has persevered over many more serious challenges than closed record books.

In the late 1980s, when the paper was still owned by the Navajo government, staff uncovered a shady land deal involving a former Navajo president. The revelations tore the reservation apart, leading to a riot in which two people were killed.

Critics harassed the paper’s staff. They hung the employees in effigy, made bomb threats, vandalized their cars and killed one reporter’s dog.

“We never backed off from covering the issues that were important to us,” Publisher Tom Arviso said.

In February 1987, tribal government closed the paper and reopened it two months later staffed by people handpicked by the tribal chairman.

Eventually Arviso and his staff were vindicated when the former president went to prison. Passions cooled when a new administration took over. In October 2003, the tribal council voted 66-1 to sell the paper to Arviso and make it independent.

“It all comes down to a freedom of the press issue,” Arviso said. “The only way we would be able to get past the censorship was to break away from the Navajo government.

-- Faith Bremner, Gannett News Service

But Thursday and Friday, we met members of the Navajo Nation and Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. On the Navajo reservation, 43 percent of the population falls below the poverty level and the unemployment rate is too high. Homes are overcrowded and lack plumbing and electricity.

Jennifer Watchman lived with her Navajo husband and her two children in a tiny trailer for years, never able to save enough money to buy a home. The Navajo Partnership for Housing helped them repair their credit, taught them about home buying and today they live in a three-bedroom home.

But her husband has struggled with alcohol and abused his wife; he is in a rehabilitation center. This, said Richard Kontz, executive director of the partnership, is a family trying to break the cycle of poverty and abuse.

So how do we make people care about stories like this?

We listen, and we watch mothers like Jennifer Watchman tear up when she talks about finally owning her own home. Kontz was emotional, too, saying he hoped her husband eventually becomes a leader in the community.

Too many times our stories are so full of comments from officials and experts that we forget the real story _ the people. It’s up to us to find them, no matter the topic, and tell the larger story through them. And next time someone asks me what story I’m working on and I tell them it’s about Indians, I hope they’ll say ‘’Wow. What a great story.’’

-- Angie Wagner, The Associated Press

McAuliffe said William Claiborne, a former reporter for The Washington Post, had these suggestions:

--Be absolutely straight with Indian sources.
--Know the subject and do your homework to avoid asking stupid
questions, which turns Indians off.
--Don’t be patronizing.
--Don’t sound overly sympathetic. (Indians can spot a phony liberal a mile away, he said.)
--Don’t overpromise. Educate your sources that stories get edited,
cut, etc.
--Cultivate your sources and call them from time to time just to
schmooze.
--Don’t be formal, pompous or self-important.

Claiborne’s full list can be found here.ClaiborneTips.doc

One of our fellows, Brian Bull, assistant news director at Wisconsin Public Radio, encouraged colleagues to meet with sources to break down what can be an inherent mistrust of media and to review appropriate and inappropriate behavior on the reservation (such as checking when, where and if cameras can be used).

--John Stearns, The Arizona Republic

Her final word of advice – not to refer to an Indian “nation” as a “tribe”—clearly demonstrated the need for better communication between the tribes and the media by raising what I consider a minor distinction born of understandable sensitivities that have developed during the media’s strained relationship with Indian country.

Although Harjo said the distinction marked a sign of respect, I see no harm in referring to an Indian nation—on second reference, of course—as a “tribe,” a widely accepted term (which to my knowledge has no derogatory meaning) used to describe the country’s 560-plus federally recognized tribes.

Of course, specific first references – as in all cases – should use a tribe’s formal name.

That said, I have begun several stories, “Maine’s two largest Indian tribes …,” and have never received negative feedback from the Penobscot Indian Nation, one of four Maine tribes I cover. Nor have I been challenged when referring to the Aroostook Band of Micmac as a “tribe” rather than a “band.”

But Harjo’s advice, although I question its premise, will make me ask tribal leaders for their perspective when we next meet.

This is not to say I will change what I believe to be the sound journalistic practice of using general terms on second reference. I will, however, explain it.

Regrettably, such explanations have not always been so readily offered to Indian country.

-- Jeff Tuttle, Bangor (Maine) Daily News

Maine is the only state to allow tribes – in this case its two largest tribes – to send representatives to the state legislature. While tribal members have won legislative seats in other states, Maine is the only state to guarantee them a seat by allowing those tribes (whose reservations also lie within legislative districts) to choose what amounts to an extra representative to the State House.

Because of issues of proportional representation, those two Indian delegates cannot vote on the House floor. However, they can vote in committee and sponsor legislation.

Back to the subject of education, it was a tribal representative who submitted the bill to require the teaching of Indian (specifically Wabanaki) culture and history in all grades K-12. The law took effect in September 2004.

However, it might be worth noting that Maine was the last state to allow Indians to vote in state elections.

-- Jeff Tuttle, Bangor (Maine) Daily News

Marmon, who was born on the Laguna reservation in 1925, chronicles the last generation of the Laguna and Acoma tribes living by their traditional ways and values in his book “The Pueblo Imagination.”

The book, published in 2003 by Beacon Press in Boston, features tribal photographs and landscape images with native poetry by Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz and poetry and prose by Leslie Marmon Silko, the photographer’s daughter.

The power of words is enhanced by the images, in both color and black-and-white.  The images also stand on their own.

“Storytelling can be told in photographs,” said Marmon who still lives in the Laguna Pueblo. 

“There’s an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words,” he added. “Instead of trying to describe things in very minute detail, you can see it.”

Marmon, whose work has been shown in New York galleries, now has a web site to promote his work at http://www.leemarmongallery.com.

It’s a long way from his beginnings as a photographer taking pictures of people in the pueblo while delivering groceries in his pickup truck.  “That’s how I got some of my best stuff,” he said. 

The Native American photographer will talk about his images, the stories behind them and the challenges of journalists taking photographs in native cultures during a session Thursday with the Western Knight Fellows in Acoma.

Some of the journalists here have this idea that we should maintain standards that don’t lend themselves to blogs.

There’s also the argument that blogs go against journalistic training of maintaining objectivity. One reporter pointed out that a flippant blog remark could come back and bite you in the rear.

I’ll share two thoughts on the topic. One is that a journalist can reach expert status when she spends years covering a subject. At this point, objectivity is an ideal, but not a reality. I’m human and I won’t pretend not to form opinions. I’ll stand behind them and am not afraid to share them.

Second, blogs can be fun. Our tour guide at the National Museum of the American Indian, Phillip Hillaire, a Lummi, at one point said, “Humor is a really important part of our culture. We’ve had it for a long time.”

This seminar so far has been interesting and packed with facts, with a certain stress on the importance and urgency of some of the issues in Indian Country. The blog is a way of highlighting the lighter side of things.

Don’t all cultures like to laugh and appreciate a look at the lighter side of things? Look at what many people turn to first in the newspaper: the comics.

--Jill Ingram, Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times