Tips for reporters covering American Indian issues

Despite barriers to reporters -- including the right of property holders on Indian reservations to exclude outsiders -- there are steps journalists can take short of legal challenges to gain access to Indian news.

• If there are American Indians in your coverage area, do not ignore them in your stories.

"There are complex legal issues [to access], but there are also barriers of benign neglect," said Mark Trahant, editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe.

Dana Hedgpeth of The Washington Post said consistency is the key. "Cover [the American Indian community] like you'd cover any other community," she said. "Just cover it like you'd cover the Energy Department -- stick a beat reporter on it. . . . If you're a paper in Indian Country and you're not covering Indian Country, you have your head in the sand."

• Develop a relationship of trust and be fair.

"It's a very closed community," said Brad Swenson, opinion page/political editor of The Bemidji Pioneer in Minnesota, who has covered American Indian affairs for two decades. "Just walking up to the door and asking for comment is not going to get you anywhere."

To get past that door, be fair. "As long as you are fair, you are treated well," he said. Tribal members are used to dealing with people they know, and relationships of trust that develop over a long period of time are the most likely route to access, he said.

• Do not give up when one door closes.

"Be a dogged reporter," Hedgpeth said. "If you got shut out of a city council meeting, you wouldn't sit there with your notebook and cry."

If one door is locked, try to open another, she said.

"Don't come back with an excuse. Don't come back and say, 'They wouldn't talk to me.' Find somebody who will. . . . There is always someone who will talk and there is always someone who will give you documents," Hedgpeth said.

• Regularly read tribal newspapers.

"Look at who votes 'no' all the time," Hedgpeth said. "That's agate that every single tribal newspaper runs. If you look back at six issues of a newspaper and you find the one guy or gal who consistently voted against the majority, that person will break."

• Find experts on legal and cultural issues.

Duane Beyal, editor of the Arizona-based Navajo Times, said journalists seeking to cover tribes should find an expert on sovereignty and other legal issues, as well as experts on the culture of the particular tribe they are covering.

"Any tribe has their culture, their customs, and those need to be respected, and people should take the effort to find out what those customs may be and try to follow them," Beyal said. "On the Hopi reservation, some of the villages do not allow cameras. It would behoove a media person to check that out first."

• Get past the surface.

Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said that the news media have "a tendency to oversimplify. . . . There's a tendency to try to fit [all American Indians] into a mold that people already understand. It really takes a reporter that has a sense of history and open-mindedness to try to portray tribes accurately."

John Shurr, chief of The Associated Press' Columbia, S.C., bureau agreed. "I think most of the mainstream media coverage of what's going on on reservations is shallow," he said. "It typically looks for casino issues, it typically looks at the unusual aspects of tribal versus mainstream life. There's still a lot of the 'noble savages' approach -- 'hey aren't they unique, let's write about them.' That contributes to the perception that [the media] only write negatively."

• Get the facts straight.

Hedgpeth said the media often makes the simplest of mistakes, like getting people's tribes wrong or not even asking a person's tribe.

"It's like saying someone from West Africa is from South Africa," she said.

• Simply be a professional.

Perhaps the greatest key is courtesy.

"Journalists in general, when they're coming on to our land, they're our guests, and they should [conduct] themselves as such," Beyal said.

Smith said, "For us, all we ask is for people to be straight up, come in, tell us what they want, and adhere to all the conventions that a good reporter would adhere to -- check the facts, be fair, be straightforward and professional."