freedomforum.org: View from Crazy Horse mountain

View from Crazy Horse mountain

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05.18.05

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Margaret Holt

By Margaret Holt
Senior Editor for Standards and Staff Development
Chicago Tribune

This article was originally published in the May 15, 2005, Chicago Tribune.

By far, the most poorly represented minority group in America's newsrooms in 2004 was the Native American. No surprise there. Shocking, though, was how pitiful the number. Of 54,100 professional journalists, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports, just 295 are Indians, down from 313 in 2003.

But there is hope. It was my privilege to participate in a remarkable and inspiring program in the heart of Indian Country, the sixth annual Native American Newspaper Career Conference, last month. People are doing something. They are dedicated to making a difference, day by day.

For me, this was both personal and professional. And irresistible.

These are my people. A friend calls me our stealth minority, since I don't "look" Indian, whatever that means. It seems to matter more to white people, actually, who are invariably startled if the subject comes up. My mother is a Tuscarora, an Iroquois nation, and we have been on the tribe rolls for years.

Professionally, part of my job is to manage the Tribune's accuracy program. Clearly, diversity rates as a key to accuracy and credibility. Truth is a moving target, and the complexity of stories can often lead us to think as much about what's absent as we do about what's in print.

When just 295 Indians participate in mainstream newspaper journalism, we cannot begin to imagine what we don't know or what we may have missed.

We met in a conference center at the quirky but wonderful Crazy Horse Memorial on a mountain in the Sioux's sacred Black Hills in South Dakota. A record number of 156 high school and college students, many from reservations in the West, gathered for a three-day immersion in journalism. For some, this was a first exposure to journalism as a career possibility and, for others, a next step.

Encouraging new voices
They were aided by a collection of teacher-mentors from newspapers and colleges, as well as a core group of people who have made this conference a labor of love and devotion that continues year-round. Our job, simply, was to be ambitious for these Indian students, in the hope that the program can harvest even more than the 20 or so who have begun journalism careers in the early going.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors' numbers on Native Americans in journalism provided even more urgency and power to the importance of this conference.

That's the macro view, of course. Down at ground level, my reality was that I worked with five students, only one of whom had attended the previous year's conference.

The conference puts out a newspaper, the Native Journal, that will feature the work of this year's participants. Each mentor group — most were five to eight students, grouped by ability level and experience — produced a story for this publication, which is sponsored by a South Dakota newspaper group and will be distributed statewide as well as at newspaper trade group meetings.

So my teens and I went to work. We lucked out with an assignment of capturing the reaction of students and advisers to the conference. It was perfect for beginning journalists in the hunt for a byline.

Interviewing 101. Think about your reader. Prepare questions. Go talk to strangers. Take notes. Double-check names. Come back and decide how to write what you have. Little steps. One sentence, followed by another. Put it all together.

Presto. A story.

I learned that Sierra, a freshman, has a flair for writing. Toby, a rapper, also likes writing and pitched in to craft the lead to our story. Brent just couldn't make himself talk to strangers; he found that this is probably not for him. Alexandria, who goes by Alex, is a senior thinking about what lies ahead. Adrian loves sports. And when he realized that some people get paid to watch games, he was having one of those pinch-me-I-can't-believe-they-call-that-work moments. Our little secret is that a lot of journalists feel the same way, even after years of newspapering, and we worry that somebody will bust us one day.

Several times, Adrian visited with me. How much money does a reporter make? What are the days like? How do you get started? How long does it take you to work your way up to covering a professional sport?

Definitely, Adrian was giving the idea a workout. Really, I don't think we could ask for any more than a chance to get on the radar screen of students.

'One person at a time'
That is pretty much how Jack Marsh views it. Marsh is the executive director of Freedom Forum's Al Neuharth Media Center, a major partner in the alliance of sponsors.

"We measure success one person at a time," Marsh said. "If we end up attracting even one of those students, it will be a success. But I'd like to see a lot more."

The numbers are big: a 50 percent increase in participants this year and 35 schools represented.

Some benefits to participants are intangible: a chance to meet other kids, having adults who are neither teacher nor relative focus on their work, having space to learn to dream.

"They are surrounded by so little hope," Marsh said. "I think this conference opens their eyes to the possibility of another life."

And what better place to manufacture dreams than under the watchful eye of the gigantic Crazy Horse Memorial carving on the mountain? The carving began in 1948, and work on that dream continues.

My links to my Indian ancestors are through my mother, who grew up on a reservation near Niagara Falls, N.Y.

She went to Washington, D.C., for nursing school in World War II and then joined the Army, traveling all over the South Pacific. My parents met in the Army and settled in my father's little town in Missouri. During my siblings' and my childhood, we went to New York every other summer to visit the reservation.

Little Momma, as she lets me call her, and I have been together the last 17 years. We take care of each other. Together, we have explored bingo halls and pow-wows of other Indian tribes, returned for the Tuscarora National Picnic and sampled fry bread at numerous festivities. In the quiet times, she tells stories about our people, our tribe, our language, our ways.

I didn't live them, but I know them, in a way that others do not, not even my siblings. And that made perfect sense to others at this conference. My story, while not typical, is common.

It dawned on me that the matter of racial identity can be decided formally in arbitrary fashion. I looked up my mother's birth certificate. Her parents were listed, on the line for race, as Indians. Thirty years later, my birth certificate listed my parents' race as white. Thus it is done. In a generation. An Indian — Little Momma — is determined by a clerk somewhere to be white. A benign form of assimilation, perhaps, but through an external force.

That is quite different from the choice of assimilation that many others make.

Informally, racial identity is quite another matter, apart from assimilation. Notions of fitting in or finding a place in life are not unique to a particular culture or ethnic group. Indian-ness is determined, Marsh said, by "what's in your heart, your soul."

That is not necessarily how others might define it. People sometimes see what they want to see, what makes them feel comfortable. To find that others are not so predictable can be unsettling. One of my epiphanies has been that if others are almost always wrong about me, what are the chances that I might be wrong about them?

That is sobering, humbling and enlightening. There is irony in all this. The Indian students were learning to be journalists, and I was learning more about being Indian.