By Louise Mengelkoch
March 21 will mark the one-year anniversary of the Red Lake Reservation high school shootings that left ten people dead, including the gunman, sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise. Bemidji State University, where I teach journalism, is in a small resort town of the same name thirty miles south of the school. Over the years it has been a continual challenge to recruit and retain Red Lakers and Native American students from the two other nearby reservations (White Earth and Leech Lake) for our journalism program. It’s harder still, in the wake of that story.
I happened to be in England with thirty BSU students when we saw the headlines in the London papers. We felt shock, grief, and a strange sense of loss, knowing we’d never be part of the shared memories of our community, horrible though they were. When I returned, I discovered that part of those shared memories was centered on disgust with the news media that descended on Red Lake from around the country and the world.
Eyewitness accounts were not flattering: one reporter sneaked into a closed hospital wing. Others slipped into funerals from which the media were specifically banned. Some offered candy and cigarettes to teenagers in exchange for information, yearbooks, or access of some kind. Most treated the local media with indifference and disrespect. Unfortunately, most local residents I spoke with, both Native American and white, approved of the tribal government’s extreme measures in trying to control the press, which included herding reporters to a penned area in a parking lot, warning that leaving the road constituted trespassing, arresting photographers and confiscating their equipment.
The situation dramatized the excesses of both positions — demand for access and excessive demand for secrecy and control — when pushed to their logical extreme. Those two forces were exacerbated by the horrific nature of the crime, the international media attention, and Red Lake’s closed society. Red Lake residents are justly proud that their land has never been broken up, but their unity and isolation have come at a price. Red Lake’s constitution has no free-speech clause, and it has seldom been challenged.
When the front door is closed on a big story, as one Tribal Council spokesman conceded, the media will head for the back door. Still, the behavior of the outside news media made it even harder for those of us left behind to push for civil liberties on the reservation. It also made it harder for local journalists, who have the unenviable job of providing news to and about a reservation with no free press of its own.
The Bemidji Pioneer’s editor, Molly Miron, studies the Ojibwe language at the university. She studied Lakota when she worked in South Dakota. She arrived at Red Lake High School last year only forty-five minutes after the shooting because one of her sources called her on a cell phone, and took the photo of the three teenage girls hugging each other that showed up on the front page of newspapers around the world. “Media need to educate themselves about the culture of the area,” she says. “It’s not that hard with the Internet. You’d think they’d do their homework.”
Brad Swenson, the Pioneer’s opinion-page/political editor, thought the “cloister” that tribal officials created for the media was too drastic a measure, but says he can understand why it happened. He, too, witnessed the poor behavior of the outside press, and empathized with tribal friends. But he also keeps a framed copy of his Red Lake passport on a wall to remind himself of the reservation’s sovereign status. He’s only slowly getting back the access that was lost last spring, even though he’s been with the Pioneer twenty-five years and has always taken the coverage of Red Lake politics seriously.
Larry Oakes, the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s northern correspondent, described the week of March 21 as “a low point in my career.” He thinks the magnitude of the story and the presence of dozens of journalists from as far away as Sweden created a competitive feeding frenzy, during which he witnessed “a lot of bad behavior by fellow journalists.” When Oakes refused his editor’s request that he interview the shooter’s grandmother, even though she had already refused requests from two other Star Tribune reporters, he says he was admonished.
Tom Robertson, a reporter and producer at the local Minnesota Public Radio station, thinks all mainstream media should take Indian politics more seriously. “Read their constitution,” he told me, noting that it is available online. “There are not enough checks and balances and no separation of powers.” He, too, is struggling to regain the access he lost after the massacre.
Robertson is right. Red Lake needs to revise its constitution. But the pressure to do so must come from the outside. Although the reservation is wired, there’s no freedom to use the Internet to cover local issues. Mike Barrett runs a Web site called Red Lake Net News, but he has received funding from the tribal council. Truly independent reservation media are almost nonexistent, except for a few persistent souls like Bill Lawrence, who owns The Ojibwe News/Native American Press. The sixty-six-year-old Lawrence has been waging a free-speech battle with all eleven tribes in Minnesota for seventeen years, but especially in Red Lake, where he is an enrolled member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians. He recently was awarded a prestigious Freedom of Information award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his tireless efforts to obtain tribal financial documents, especially those related to casinos.
There are other Native American journalists out there in both mainstream and alternative media trying to get attention for the story of civil rights in Indian Country. The Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) has struggled to bring the issue to public view. It deserves more support from mainstream media.
Meanwhile, the FBI has shrouded the Red Lake shootings case in secrecy and chastised the press for even asking questions. The tribal chairman’s son has been sentenced in U.S. District Court for exchanging threatening messages with Jeff Weise before the shootings. His hearing was closed and his sentence is not public information. Red Lake residents are frustrated that they will never get answers to the many questions they have — not from their tribal government, their school, their feckless media — and not from the outside media that were so concerned about the sensational, but incomplete, original story.
Indian politics and sovereignty, and the issue of free speech on the reservations — those also need to be taken seriously in the press. When that happens, I will be able to stand before my Red Lake students and show, not tell, that journalism is a way they can serve their people and that it is a profession worth pursuing.
Louise Mengelkoch is an associate professor of journalism at Bemidji State University in Minnesota.
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