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School Abuse, Slave Revolts, Hushed History

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Julian Brave NoiseCat competes at the Kamloopa Powwow held on the campus of the former Indian residential school where the first suspected graves of students were discovered in Canada. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)

With Indigenous, We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Martin, Gordon Are Front and Center on Harris
Word In Black Newspaper Alliance Backs Harris
Sinclair Anchor Quits Over Right-Wing Bias
Press, Rights Groups Urged Pressure on Netanyahu
Black Radio Split on Use of Campaign Questions

Short Takes: William C. Rhoden and Marc J. Spears on the Olympics; overturning Florida anti-DEI law; Carl-Philippe Juste and resilience of Miami’s Little Haiti; lack of progress since choking of Eric Garner; Marshall Project’s “Investigate This!”

Frances Robles; David Gonzalez; Dudley Brooks; Mary Mason; “disappearance” of Nicaragua journalist; webinar on press-freedom challenges in Ecuador; Guatemala’s Jose Rubén Zamora.

This Thursday: ‘Press Freedom in Black-Run Countries’

Homepage photo: Julian Brave NoiseCat competes at the Kamloopa Powwow held on the campus of the former Indian residential school where the first suspected graves of students in Canada were discovered. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)

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Says a promotional blurb for the trailer: “Set amidst a groundbreaking investigation,  SUGARCANE illuminates the beauty of a community breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma and finding the strength to persevere.”

With Indigenous, We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

At one point in the new movie “Sugarcane,” an Indigenous father reveals to his inquisitive filmmaker son, “My mother was abused by a priest and that’s how I was born.”

Filmed in Canada and made by two journalists who met at HuffPost — one Native, the other from a family of Holocaust survivors — the documentary makes personal the news stories about the trauma, even death, visited upon children forced to attend boarding schools to assimilate them into the majority culture. The trauma continues into succeeding generations.

“Sugarcane” goes into wider circulation in August. It was screened Thursday at the Indigenous Media Conference of the Indigenous Journalists Association, held in Oklahoma City and ending Saturday night with an awards program that included the Osage Singers, celebrated for their drumming prowess in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The association also elected board members, who in turn re-elected as president Christine Trudeau (pictured) of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, who is an independent investigative journalist and editor. The group announced Albuquerque, N.M., as the site of the 2025 convention.

The conference was a reminder to outsiders that we don’t know what we don’t know.

“In this Cherokee Almanac,,” says Osiyo TV, “we explore how many aspects of American life were adopted by some Cherokees who viewed assimilation as the best survival tactic against American expansion. One such adoption was the practice of chattel slavery. We look back on an uncomfortable part of Cherokee history, the Cherokee Slave Revolt of 1842.” (Credit: YouTube)

Another conversation at the gathering went back more than a century, to 1842 and the Cherokee Nation.

“On the morning of November 15 more than twenty-five slaves, mostly from the Joseph Vann plantation, revolted,” according to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. “They locked their masters and overseers in their homes and cabins while they slept. The slaves stole guns, horses, mules, ammunition, food, and supplies. At daybreak the group, which included men, women, and children, headed toward Mexico, where slavery was illegal.

“In the Creek Nation the Cherokee slaves were joined by Creek slaves, bringing the group total to more than thirty-five. The fugitives fought off and killed a couple of slave hunters in the Choctaw Nation. . . .”

It was the largest slave revolt west of the Mississippi, according to genealogist Angela Y. Walton-Raji, who spoke to the conference remotely, yet the revolt is not widely known. It is part of the sometimes-fraught joint history of two oppressed groups, African Americans and Native Americans.

As a journalism conference, issues of press freedom were of necessity a part, along with nuts-and-bolts training in the craft as well as topics specific to Indigenous people, such as how voting restrictions affect reservation dwellers.

The conference, attended by 402 registrants (up from 304 last year), presented another showing of 2023’s “Bad Press,” about a years-long fight in the Muscogee Nation to restore and codify free press protections. The struggle culminated in a landmark achievement in the fall of 2021, when the tribal nation’s citizens voted overwhelmingly to approve a free press constitutional amendment,” as Marina Fang wrote last November in HuffPost.

What is less well known is that of the 574 federally recognized Native tribes, just five have free press laws on the books. The Muscogee Nation is the only one with the right to a free and independent press enshrined in its tribal constitution.

Mark Randolph, a member of the Muscogee (Creek Nation) National Council who appears in the film, told the screening audience, gathered Thursday at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, “Education is very important. A lot of people don’t know what freedom of the press is; why it is so important.

“Whoever controls the media controls the mind,” Randolph added, noting that he did not originate that maxim.

Journalist Angel Ellis, Muscogee Creek, a major figure in the documentary who was re-elected to IJA’s board, told the group, “We’re trying to revive ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ ” programs of animated shorts starting in the 1970s that  illustrate educational subjects such as history, science, multiplication tables and basic grammar.

“We don’t really understand the role a free press plays” in our democracy. Ellis also said, “People are excited to come work for Mvskoke Media now after seeing the film.”

The conference was the first since the Native American Journalists Association voted at its 2023 convention to change its name to the Indigenous Journalists Association.

Francine Compton, a former NAJA president and the associate director of IJA, said then that the move was made to match international language and to ensure that all Indigenous storytellers feel welcomed.

The organization had already made moves in that direction. The group participated at the 22nd Session of United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and a Saturday session in Oklahoma City, “The Power and Promise of Global Indigenous Collaborations,” featured panelists from New Zealand, Australia and Canada and Hawaii.

As illustrated at the awards ceremony, the border between Canada and the United States, known by some as the “Medicine Line,” was never as distinct among Indigenous people. Tribal nations straddled the demarcation.

The 2024 Tim Giago Free Press Award went to Brandi Morin (Cree /Iroquois/French), “for her reporting on police actions and coverage of the removal of a homeless encampment for Ricochet Media on Jan. 10 in Edmonton, Canada. Despite being a credentialed journalist, Morin was arrested for doing her job and documenting the experience of Indigenous people living in the encampment.”

Morin spoke at length Saturday night, along with Mary Hudetz (pictured) of ProPublica, who received the Richard LaCourse Award for Investigative Journalism “for her work with ProPublica’s “The Repatriation Project – The Delayed Return of Native Remains.“

“The project highlights how museums and universities have actively fought against repatriating Native American remains and sacred objects plundered over centuries. As a result of this reporting, American museums and universities repatriated more remains and objects to tribal nations in 2023 than any year in the three decades since NAGPRA’s passage,” IJA said, referring to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Genealogist Walton-Raji (pictured), based in Fort Smith, Ark., raised the example of the 1842 slave revolt case at a workshop called “Oklahoma Freedmen and McGirt,” a reference to a tribal sovereignty case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, that bore on the rights of Black members of the various tribes.

That slave revolt ultimately was unsuccessful.

“The Cherokee Nation sent the Cherokee Militia, under Capt. John Drew, with eighty-seven men to catch the runaways,” reports the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. “This expedition was authorized by the Cherokee National Council in Tahlequah on November 17, 1842. The militia caught up with the slaves seven miles north of the Red River on November 28, 1842. The tired, famished fugitives offered no resistance.

“The party returned to Tahlequah on December 8, 1842. Five slaves were executed, and Joseph Vann put the majority of his rebellious slaves to work on his steamboats, which worked the Arkansas, Mississippi, and Ohio Rivers. The Cherokees blamed the incident on free, armed black Seminoles who lived in close proximity to the Cherokee slaves at Fort Gibson. On December 2, 1842, the Cherokee Nation passed a law commanding all free African Americans, except former Cherokee slaves, to leave the nation.”

The role of Black people among Native tribes is “sort of like the big elephant in the room,” Walton-Raji said in response to a question about how much of this history is taught in schools, including in Oklahoma, home to 39 tribes.

“Not just about slavery, about anti-Black sentiment.” Walton-Raji’s remarks will be part of a podcast, said the presenters, Allison Herera, Xolon Salinan, and Adreanna Rodriguez, Standing Rock.

A more contemporary example of Black-Indigenous relations involved the case of Michael J. Hill. As Chris Cameron and Mark Walker explained a year ago for The New York Times:

“Early one morning in September 2020, Michael J. Hill called the police after hearing banging on the doors and windows of his home in Okmulgee, Okla. — part of a swath of the state that the Supreme Court had recently ruled to be tribal land.

“He eventually realized it was a group of his friends, Mr. Hill later recalled in an interview, but the police had arrived and proceeded to arrest one of them, Aaron R. Wilson, for an outstanding warrant. Mr. Hill, 40, then got into an altercation with the police and was himself arrested after a struggle.

“Mr. Hill and Mr. Wilson are both Black and citizens of Native American tribes in Oklahoma. They both moved to have their cases dismissed, arguing that as tribal members in tribal territory, they were outside the state’s criminal jurisdiction. Mr. Wilson’s case was dismissed, but Mr. Hill’s request was denied.

“The key difference in the fate of the two men was race — specifically, a small degree of what is known in the courts as ‘Indian blood.’ Mr. Wilson is one sixty-fourth Creek Indian. Mr. Hill is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation through ancestors called Freedmen — Black people who were enslaved by Native tribes. Because Mr. Hill’s ancestors did not have Indian blood, he was found in court not to be Indian. . . .”

Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie take questions after a screening Thursday at Oklahoma’s First Americans Museum. (Credit: Richard Prince)

Julian Brave Noisecat, the co-director of “Sugarcane” who had been a Native issues fellow at HuffPost when the idea for his project germinated, appeared with his filming partner Emily Kassie, the co-director and producer who has also worked at the Marshall Project, which reports on criminal justice issues.

Speaking to the IJA audience at Oklahoma’s First Americans Museum, they said that a bill for a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies would be going to the U.S. Senate floor, and that many of those affected would like “some kind of reparations.”

Writing of the festival prizes the film has won, Christian Blauvelt wrote for IndieWire July 10, “it’s a really hard film to watch in a lot of ways. It’s very much about abuse and trauma and the extraordinary ripple effects of that across generations and across an entire community and nation. But I think that the way it combines that history with really intimate moments is poetic and really beautiful and something that needs to be celebrated, and I can’t wait to see what happens as more people see get to see this film.”

The documentary opens Aug. 9 in New York and in the Canadian cities of Ottawa, Saskatoon and Toronto.

“Join me tonight immediately following President Biden’s address to the nation,” Ed Gordon wrote Wednesday on Facebook. “Swipe for details. Be a part of the conversation and get ready for next steps. This election is critical. Don’t sit [it] out.” (Credit: Facebook)

Martin, Gordon Are Front and Center on Harris

Black journalists Roland Martin and Ed Gordon were front and center as Vice President Kamala Harris began her first week as the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, raising millions in the campaign’s inaugural days.

“It started Sunday, when Win With Black Women hosted a Zoom call that the group said attracted 44,000 attendees and raised more than $1.5 million,” Ja’han Jones wrote Friday for MSNBC. “The next day, a group of Black men under a similar banner, Win With Black Men, hosted a call that an organizer said attracted nearly 54,000 attendees and raised $1.3 million.

“Several more virtual meetups have followed.

“A Latinas for Harris call on Wednesday reportedly attracted 5,000 attendees and raised $110,000. The same night, a call hosted by South Asian Women for Harris drew 10,000 attendees and raised $285,000, according to an organizer. The latest whopping fundraising haul came Thursday night during a Zoom call intended for white women who support Harris, which an organizer said drew 164,000 participants and raised $2 million. (NBC News hasn’t confirmed these fundraising numbers independently.)

“And the trend continues. A call was held Thursday for Black gay and queer men supporting Harris, and a similar call was organized for white men. And a national, coalition-wide Women for Harris call has been scheduled for Monday.

“What a difference a week makes.”

Separate from these fundraising events, Gordon co-hosted a “Town Hall” from the NAACP Wednesday to “discuss the role and importance of Black voters in the upcoming election.” It immediately followed President Biden’s speech to the nation on why he was stepping away from the presidential nomination and endorsing Harris.

“We cannot be distracted,” the NAACP said. “Ahead of November, we must remain all in on educating, engaging and mobilizing Black America. All in on fighting for policies that will advance, not undermine our progress. We must remain all in on our community, standing as a powerful front as we head to the ballot box to defend democracy.”

Speakers included Derrick Johnson, president and CEO, NAACP; Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, and Wes Bellamy, EdD, public policy chairman of 100 Black Men of America, among others.

Roland Martin reports for his Black Star Network, “Call For White Women To SUPPORT Kamala Harris: Whiteness Won’t Save You From Trumpism.” (Credit: YouTube)

“On Monday night, following Sunday’s historic call and fundraising effort with Black women, over 20,000 Black men joined the ‘Win with Black Men’ meeting” hosted and streamed by journalist Roland Martin and his Black Star Network “in support of Harris’ historic campaign,” Rayna Reid Rayford reported Wednesday for Essence.

“After the call, Martin posted on X, “I have no words. And not just because I’m tired. My @BlkStarNetwork just told me that 53,862 people registered for our #WinWithBlackMen video call. We raised $1.3M and counting from 17,000 donors.”

According to Martin, the money fundraised “will go to the Harris campaign, as well as to grassroots organizations run by Black men in battleground states.”

The call was organized by Quentin James,  co-founder of The Collective PAC, political and legal strategist Bakari Sellers, Khalil Thompson of Win With Black Men, and Michael Blake of Kairos Democracy Project, Gerren Keith Gaynor wrote Tuesday for TheGrio.

Word In Black Newspaper Alliance Backs Harris

Word in Black, a three-year-old online news collaboration of 10 of the most well-known Black newspapers in America, “wholeheartedly, and without question endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the next president of the United States,” the group announced Friday.

“At this pivotal moment in American history, Harris represents the change we want to see now. She is a transformational figure, poised to make history not only as the first woman to serve the nation as commander in chief but as the first Black woman, first HBCU graduate, and first member of a Black Greek letter organization to hold the most powerful job on earth.

“It is our first-ever political endorsement, and we make it without reservation. . . .

“For us at Word in Black, the choice for president is as obvious as it is historic. The Republican nominee represents an America that will return to its ugly, violent, racist past, a time when we were treated like second-class citizens and our communities were under constant threat. Harris represents a new generation of leadership, a future built on optimism, inclusion, and continued progress toward a more perfect union. . . . “

Sinclair Anchor Quits Over Right-Wing Bias

“Eugene Ramirez (pictured), the lead anchor of Sinclair’s national evening news broadcast, resigned in January over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias of the content he was required to present on air, three sources told Popular Information,” Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby reported Tuesday for the newsletter, which says it is “dedicated to accountability journalism.”

“The sources — one current and two former Sinclair employees — spoke to Popular Information on the condition of anonymity, citing concerns about the potential professional repercussions of speaking out about Sinclair’s editorial processes. Ramirez’s show, which continues to air with a new host, appears on at least 70 of the hundreds of local television affiliates owned by Sinclair.”

Ramirez confirmed the information later Tuesday on X, writing, “This morning I was sent a news story about me. I can only say that I do not contest any of the claims made, and I appreciate the messages of support I have received in response.

“My integrity is not for sale.
“Now, let’s get to work.”

The Popular Information story continued, “One of the primary issues that prompted Ramirez’s resignation was the requirement to include at least three stories produced by Sinclair’s Rapid Response Team (RRT) on a nightly basis. Sinclair’s RRT is a group of four reporters who work out of Sinclair’s national headquarters in Maryland. The group’s output is prodigious. A Popular Information review found that between January 1 and July 4 this year, the RRT published at least 775 stories.

“Most of the RRT’s stories are short and aggregate information from other sources. Sinclair publicly claims that the RRT and other components of its national newsgathering operation, known as The National Desk, provide a “comprehensive, commentary-free look of the most impactful news of the day.” But a look at the RRT’s stories over the course of the year shows that the group frequently produces pieces that have more in common with right-wing agitprop than journalism. . . .”

“Nine months into the war in Gaza, journalists … continue to pay an astonishing toll,” CEO Jodie Ginsberg of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a video message to the Israeli prime minister. “More than 100 journalists have been killed. An unprecedented number of journalists and media workers have been arrested, often without charge. They have been mistreated and tortured.” (Credit: YouTube)

Press, Rights Groups Urged Pressure on Netanyahu

There is no indication that their pleas were heeded, but 10 human rights and press freedom organizations urged President Joe Biden to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the unprecedented number of journalists killed in the Gaza Strip and the near-total ban on international media entering the Strip.

Netanyahu met with Biden at the White House on Thursday.

The letters, sent to the White House and U.S. congressional leaders, were signed by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International USA, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Knight First Amendment Institute, the National Press Club, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents USA, and the Coalition for Women in Journalism.

“The letters call on the United States, Israel’s chief ally, to ‘ensure that Israel ceases the killing of journalists, allows immediate and independent media access to the occupied Gaza Strip, and takes urgent steps to enable the press to report freely throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,’ while outlining a series of grave press freedom violations and a response of utter impunity,” CPJ reported.

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war last October, the letter said, the Netanyahu government’s actions have created what amounts to a “censorship regime.”

Black Radio Split on Use of Campaign Questions

The controversy over a Philadelphia talk show host’s departure after acknowledging she had interviewed President Joe Biden using questions that had been provided by his campaign “was a deeply painful moment for WURD — and many others in Black talk radio,” Josh Hersh wrote Thursday for Columbia Journalism Review.

“A review by the New York Times revealed that half a dozen Black radio hosts had interviewed Biden over the course of 2024 using variants of the same questions: what were some of his accomplishments, what would he say to people who didn’t think their vote mattered, what’s at stake in the election for Black voters. (The campaign acknowledged distributing the questions, but insisted to reporters that it was ‘not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer.’)

“The picture didn’t look good, when viewed through the lens of journalistic ethics. Even so, members of the community couldn’t help but feel used. ‘The Biden White House is following its same old tricks again,’ Marc Lamont Hill said that week on his podcast. ‘They once again are showing that they don’t respect Black media.’ . . . .”

Hersh also wrote that many talk-show hosts contend, as did Andrea Lawful-Sanders (pictured, above) “that they aren’t traditional reporters; adherence to journalism’s strictures could even undermine the work they do. Lawful-Sanders didn’t respond to an email, but some of the other hosts who interviewed Biden with prescreened questions said they felt no regret about how their conversations went, even after the controversy at WURD. . . . “

Short Takes

Thursday: ‘Press Freedom in Black-Run Countries’

Please click here for larger image of flier/poster

The Journal-ismsRadio Ink: Ethics Inquiry Urged for FCC’s Carr Over Project 2025 Participation Roundtable will hold a panel discussion, “Press Freedom in Black-Run Countries,” in Chicago while the National Association of Black Journalists convention takes place in that city.

The Roundtable will not officially be part of the convention; instead it will be hosted at the offices of Chicago Public Media on Thursday, Aug. 1, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Central time. Chicago Public Media offices are on Navy Pier, at 848 East Grand Ave., Chicago, Ill., 60611.

The event is co-hosted by the NABJ Global Journalism Task Force. Those who are not in Chicago may join by Zoom. All are invited. To register for either in-person, Zoom or to watch on Facebook, please email blackruncountries (at) gmail.com.

After Black French journalist Olivier Dubois was held hostage last year for 711 days in Mali, West Africa, the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders said, “To be a journalist in the Sahel means enduring the growing presence of radical armed groups who do not hesitate to kill reporters or kidnap them and use them as bargaining chips,” and more.

More recently, the rising authoritarianism around the world includes Africa as well as the United States. That most often means finding a way to tamp down, even silence, the press. Haiti’s existential crisis has been extensively reported, less so the state of journalism there and in the rest of the Caribbean.

Discussions about the African diaspora most often do not include press freedom, and journalism sessions in the U.S. about Black people often do not include a global view.

Panelists:

RSVP to < blackruncountries (at) gmail.com > whether or not you will be at the NABJ convention.

Update:

(Credit: Wallace House/YouTube)

Exiled Haitian journalist, NABJ honoree, joining Roundtable

Roberson Alphonse, this year’s recipient of the Percy Qoboza Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, has agreed to join the special Journal-isms Roundtable Aug. 1 in Chicago on “Press Freedom in Black-Run Countries.” 

“I’m honored by your invitation to join that panel,” Alphonse messaged. Commitment to “ringing the bell on press freedom, democracy in this era of disinformation, populism and the rise of authoritarian regimes is priceless. We have to deal with those issues while our profession is facing [an] existential crisis. We are in surviving mode in Haiti. It’s almost the same for local press here in the US.”

NABJ said, “This award recognizes a foreign journalist who has done extraordinary work while overcoming tremendous obstacles that contribute to the enrichment, understanding, or advancement of people or issues in the African Diaspora.

“Alphonse, one of Haiti’s most respected investigative journalists, is not only a fearless journalist but a brave soul. He survived a shooting attack in 2022 that left him wounded in both arms on his way to work at a Port-au-Prince radio station. Now a University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellow, he boldly continues to heal and continues his work as the News Editor for Le Nouvelliste and Information Director at Magik9.”
—

You can see a video detailing Alphonse’s story and journey to Wallace House here. 

Previously:

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