In the run-up to Super Bowl LIV, the issue of the Kansas City Chiefs’ appropriative fans and the San Francisco 49ers’ genocide-referencing team name was hashed out at least a dozen times over in the mainstream media, including here, Vox, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and The Hill. For a brief period on Saturday and Sunday, my social media feeds were a steady stream of articles with lead photos of fans dressed in redface and headdresses. It felt like it could have been a turning point as the pages of these national outlets found themselves in consensus about the wrongness of the team and the fan responses, a signal of an eventual change in how Americans empathize with their Native neighbors.

The pieces were mostly good, laying out how the Chiefs fans’ “arrowhead chop” and fake regalia are appropriative amalgamations of hundreds of Native cultures and should be instantly discarded. Too bad, then, that you likely won’t see those writers, or any meaningful engagement with those same arguments, in the regular, workaday coverage at these publications.

While talking with another Native writer last week, the two of us realized we were hard-pressed to name a full-time Native reporter covering anything at these outlets, let alone Indian Country. Neither the Post nor the Times (or The Atlantic or the Wall Street Journal or the New Yorker) has a dedicated Indian Country beat or an Indigenous journalist or editor in a position of power to guide them on their newsroom’s coverage of the myriad of issues that concern these communities. That’s not to say we don’t exist in this industry, but our voices are amplified only when we’re espousing opinions that fall in line with what others are already collectively saying in the op-ed pages and on social media: when right and wrong is clear-cut enough for the editors of these publications to feel comfortable printing our words.

Part of this has to do with hiring practices and the calcification of Native invisibility over centuries of American press development. In 2018, the American Society of News Editors reported that there were just 41 Native journalists employed at the 184 digital and print outlets that responded to its annual diversity survey. If one wants to read news on things going on in Indian Country that aren’t the latest social outrage—the legal and political matters that directly impact Native lives—it’s necessary to turn to Native-run outlets like Indian Country Today or Indianz.com or the Indigenous affairs desk of High Country News. This isn’t to short-change any of those outlets, which do the Lord’s work and are a vital part of my journalistic intake. But none of them have a sliver of the financial resources, political power, or social reach of their mainstream counterparts. And so hanging the necessary reeducation of the American public on these more regional, smaller sites is a tall order.

Rather than build out this kind of necessary beat, mainstream media institutions would prefer us to be segregated to their opinion pages. But in between events like the Super Bowl, Thanksgiving, and Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test, the rest of the field’s coverage of Native issues is sparse, to put it nicely. In part, it makes sense. Non-Native reporters and editors, though they are learning and progressing, do not come from these communities, so they do not think to cover them regularly. Instead, they pick and choose their spots, commissioning their reporters to file features every few months on the latest instance of colonizer foolishness. It’s not that news isn’t constantly happening in the interim; it’s that it rarely warrants coverage from a Native-first perspective.