There’s also the Sharp v. Murphy Supreme Court case, which will decide questions on tribal land rights and the state of Oklahoma’s jurisdiction. Bennett-Begaye notes that Supreme Court justices are not required to have any knowledge of Tribal law, pointing out only Neil Gorsuch has some experience with it. The unfortunate reality is that the highest court in the nation doesn’t have much knowledge about Native Americans, yet the justices are tasked with deciding important cases.

But it’s not all politics and policy. It also means covering light-hearted, non-political moments, such as when the Nationals won the World Series.

Nedra Darling, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation and descendent of Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is former Head of Public Affairs for the Department of the Interior, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs. Indian Country Today’s nationwide bureaus, she says, are “a great way” to cover Indian Country’s issues. Most outlets, she notes, can’t cover so many issues in so many places.

Phoenix as the Hub for Conversations about Land, Water, Race and Immigration

In the heart of the Southwest, Phoenix is home to more than 43,000 Native Americans. Arizona has 22 tribal communities, and Native Americans make up 6 percent of the state’s population.

Indian Country Today’s Phoenix bureau lives at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Chris Callahan, Dean of the Cronkite School and CEO of Arizona PBS, says the coverage of Native American communities across the country is lacking, in terms of the amount of coverage, quantity, and quality. “Often what you do see lacks the nuance and sophistication the stories require,” says Callahan.

Indian Country Today can help to correct that.

Callahan says that because the school specifically seeks to serve underrepresented communities, being home to Indian Country Today’s bureau is important, noting they can provide support via Arizona PBS, the largest public television station in Arizona and, per Callahan, the 7th largest in the country. Cronkite News serves as the news division of Arizona PBS with a nightly news program and robust digital site, striving to offer Native American coverage.

In turn, Indian Country Today provides students opportunities to work with them. ASU serves 3,100 American Indian students from almost 200 different tribal nations.

Rhonda LeValdo, Acoma Pueblo, is on Indian Country Today’s board of directors and is the former president of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA). She spent some of her life in Phoenix, where she says the urban Native population faces issues like many others — Native and non-Native alike — including homelessness. One of the biggest Indian health service centers is in Phoenix, and many Natives have relocated from the reservations around the Southwest to the city for jobs.

Phoenix is also centrally located, LeValdo notes, providing easier access to the dozens of tribes across the Southwest, including in California, New Mexico, and Utah.

The NCAI conference was recently held in Albuquerque, and Indian Country Today was there, live streaming the debates for NCAI president to 15,000 online viewers. NCAI is the largest and oldest intertribal organization. The group passes resolutions that become policy positions, serving as a collective voice from Indian Country, calling upon the U.S. Congress to take certain actions, and to address issues such as changing a certain Washington, D.C., NFL team’s racist name.

On Election Night 2018, a collaboration between Indian Country Today, FNX Television, and Native Voice One Native Americacn Radio Network brought live results to Native populations nationwide. (Credit: Tapahe Photography, via Facebook)

In addition to large, intertribal events such as the NCAI conference, the larger region surrounding Phoenix teems with issues. “Sustainability and water intersect with Native American issues on a regular basis,” says Callahan.

Brayboy notes that water rights are intimately connected to tribes. Native Americans hold about a third of the Arizona’s water rights, he says, although the issue is often framed as Arizona v. California — a correction that more nuanced news coverage can address. “People couldn’t be here without [tribes] sharing their water. Municipalities understand that. Citizens don’t.”

Part of what Indian Country Today does, says Brayboy, is to “show that there is a small but mighty group of peoples who have a land mass, who have water, who have in many ways set up infrastructure that’s been in place for 1,000 years or more.”

“People in D.C. understand, but not entirely, that the battles to be fought in the West are going to be around water — clean, drinkable water.”

The folks in Washington — and the rest of the United States — most likely do not grasp the size of reservations in the Southwest either. For example, Navajo Nation is the size of West Virginia. “That’s another reason having Indian Country Today here is important. I don’t think people in D.C. understand the land mass, or the scale of the land,” says Brayboy.

In addition, the complex geo-politics of the region are often invisible to Western mainstream media. Parts of the Southwest, says Brayboy, are places that have always been tribal communities, “But …[historically] lands get confiscated, taken over, then all these people have relationships in present-day Mexico.” The people have always been Indigenous, he notes, with centuries, if not millennia, of tribal relationships — even though now the government classifies them as “Mexican” or “aliens.”

The saying “the border crossed us” is meant to be metaphorical, notes Brayboy. But “here in the Southwest, it’s true. The border split community into pieces, cut part of the community off, and it became much more of an issue after 9-11.”

For example, the Pascua Yaqui people have a sister tribe in Mexico with whom they share cultural ceremony. The people have been traveling back and forth between their lands since time immemorial. Today, that can be an issue.

In addition, the current U.S.-Mexico border travels through land of the Tohono O’odham Nation, but that tribe is often completely left out of any discussion of the border wall.

“There are large conversations in Washington, D.C., without a real understanding of what it looks like on the ground,” says Brayboy. “It becomes a US-foreign or ‘alien’ issue.”

Because the media often starts any discussion of U.S. history with statehood, the deeper history of the Southwest gets lost. “In Arizona, there are people who are proud of being sixth-generation Arizonans,” Brayboy says. “But there are groups of people who’ve been here 200 generations or more, and then they became Mexican or Mexican-origin or Indigenous.” Families that have been in present-day Arizona for thousands of years have stories that are totally erased or never told, he notes.

Worse, because of the invisibility and lack of understanding of Native peoples by others in the United States, racism against Native Americans in Phoenix and, indeed, across the Southwest is often presented as being anti-Mexican or anti-immigrant, despite the fact that the targets of such attacks are not only United States citizens, but residents whose family goes back on the land hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

“We experience a different type of trauma, because people don’t know who we are,” says LeValdo.

Often, the stories originally told were written, and repeated, by colonizers. Their eye-witness accounts are problematic, especially when looked to as the historical record.

“We start taking out eyewitnesses in legal trials because sometimes people don’t understand what they’ve seen,” notes Brayboy. It might be wise, then, to question some of the historical accounts in the Southwest taken as fact that were recorded by, for example, Spanish slave traders and Catholic priests. “People who see something in 2019, with roots in 1919, and 1819,” and further back, will see things differently, often through the lens of their own family history and understanding of what happened — an understanding that often runs counter to the standard narrative.

“In 2019 we understand [that] facts get taken up to mean different things based on one’s nuanced understanding of what’s in front of us,” says Brayboy. “The team at Indian Country Today ends up telling different stories. It’s part of a different whole, nuanced understanding. That’s the power of having Native and Latino and African American journalists. They see things that others don’t see.”

In Anchorage, Explorations of Diversity, the Arctic and Climate Change

Indian Country Today’s newest bureau is on track to open by the end of 2019 at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage.

The university serves a student population that is more than 25 percent Native, and it is the first university founded by an Alaska Native. Alaska has the largest percentage of Indigenous people in the United States — about 20 percent of the population. Alaska is home to 229 tribes and 12 major language groups, and many different dialects within that. Many of those dialects are threatened.

Anchorage in particular has the largest population of urban Native peoples in the United States, often moving to the city for jobs, educational opportunities and health care.

LeValdo notes that Alaska Natives are a different community than Native Nations in the lower 48 states, including how tribes are structured. With an Anchorage bureau, Alaska Natives reporting from Alaska can explain those nuances that might otherwise be lost on someone who sees Indian Country as one homogenized group.

Indian Country Today’s Anchorage bureau will ensure their stories are being told, what affects the urban Alaska Native population, and the change that occurs when people leave their rural place to relocate to a city. In addition, there are issues relating to what happens when communities of different cultures come together in a new urban environment.

“There’s huge value having someone from that community tell the story,” says Robert Onders, President of Alaska Pacific University. “From an equity standpoint, Indigenous reporting is under-reported. Having increased representation will improve those stories in a meaningful way. For [Indian Country Today] to come on our campus is extremely meaningful.”

Indian Country Today will integrate with the school’s liberal studies curriculum, and offer students internship opportunities, and teaching opportunities for bureau members on the APU campus.

Onders says the university’s curriculum needs to reflect Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge, and it is apparent as president he strives to incorporate that.

“Education is a huge tool of colonialism,” says Onders. “It’s an aristocracy, particularly post-secondary education. How do you change those dynamics? The system is not created to enhance the success of certain populations.”