When journalists get the opportunity to share and collaborate with those they report on – to give something back, rather than simply taking their photos or their statements – it can be life-changing.
On May 1-2, an inaugural regional conference focused on poverty gathered a group of journalists to train residents of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on media literacy, multimedia skills and entrepreneurial journalism. In most cases, the reporters, who were members of the group UNITY: Journalists for Diversity, traveled to the homeland of the Oglala Sioux Tribe at their own expense and on their personal time.
You may recall that 57 children from Pine Ridge’s American Horse School made headlines in January after asking local police to investigate an incident in which they were harassed at a Rapid City minor league hockey game. They said a group of men sprayed beer and yelled racial slurs at the kids, some as young as 9.
More recently, the young adults of Pine Ridge made the front page of The New York Times because a shocking number of them have committed or attempted suicide.
“The event was designed to teach the people there to tell their own story through social media, through investigative journalism and to take steps to empower themselves through research and access to public information,” said UNITY President Russell Contreras, a reporter for The Associated Press.
I knew nothing about this when I saw Lalo Alcaraz’s online campaign (GoFundMe.com) asking for donations for “airfare and cartooning supplies for the almost 60 native students from American Horse School signed up for the workshop” he’d be conducting alongside fellow cartoonist Ricardo Cate, who creates “Without Reservations.”
Beautiful pictures of Pine Ridge and the people attending the workshops quickly started popping up all over my social media networks.
In the midst of the solemn black-and-white images of Wounded Knee, the Oglala Lakota College Historical Center and children with fresh pens and sketch books, there was Alcaraz, creator of the comic strip “La Cucaracha” and editor-in-chief of Pocho.com, sitting in a blue kindergarten chair in a newly built youth center with reservation dogs lapping at his feet.
Alcaraz had many reflections about his short time on the reservation that will inspire his social commentary just as the experience will improve the reporting of all the journalists in attendance.
“It was very eye-opening to me, how similar it was,” Alcaraz told me. “Yes, there’s 80 percent unemployment and high poverty, but to me it was like any poor little barrio in California or New Mexico.
He said they are going to go back in the fall to get some stories out of the older kids.
“We really want to target the seventh- and eighth-graders, because it’s the older ones who probably felt the brunt of the hockey incident and they are the next generation,” he said. “We need to at least make them visible to the rest of the country, help them tell their story, and show them that they can publicize what’s going on in their homeland and not do it in a poverty porn way.”
Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.
