Richard V. La Course, Yakama and Umatilla, was the gold standard for Indian journalists for more than 30 years.
A founder of the Northwest Indian News Association, he also started the Confederated Umatilla Journal and the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ paper, the Manataba Messenger. He was managing editor of the Yakama Nation Review in 1977 and its associate editor from 1989 until his passing on March 9 at age 62.
Richard was born in Nespelem, Wash., where his father worked for the BIA on the Colville Reservation. He died not far away, in a Seattle hospital from a post-operative stroke. His siblings and their children were with him. He liked being near his family and spent most of his life on Yakama Nation land in Washington. Now he rests with his parents in hallowed ground on the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon.
His first job was with the Seattle Post Intelligencer in 1969. While many Native reporters and editors worked for tribal publications, Richard was the only Indian reporter with a mainstream newspaper or the only one who went out of his way to befriend other Indians in media.
Richard contacted me and my husband, Frank Ray Harjo, (Wotko Muscogee, 1947-1982), after hearing our radio program, “Seeing Red.” Frank and I were producers at WBAI-FM in New York City, the flagship of free-speech radio in the late 1960s. It was a time of firsts and ours was the first regularly broadcast Native news program in the country.
Richard had a thousand questions for us and asked them all ?- the kind of questions that boil down to one: “How did you get to be that way?”
After a couple of years of a terrific telephone friendship, we met at an American Indian Press Association conference and became even closer pals.
For those of you who know the present-day Native American Journalists Association, with its hundreds of members and big confabs, think smaller, much smaller. The Indian journalists in the early 1970s could have met in a motel room and still had space for everyone’s boxes of tribal newspapers. The broadcasters could have fit in a shower stall.
AIPA was a news service that sent out between 15 and 35 stories weekly. Richard moved to Washington, D.C., in 1971 to be its news director. That meant reporting, assigning stories to precious few stringers and interns, fact-checking, editing, typing, mimeographing,* labeling, stamping and delivering the subscribers’ envelopes to the post office. (*Ancient form of paper reproduction, using a typed plastic sheet, ink and elbow grease.)
It was great being young with Richard. It was great chasing the stories of the day. I mean the Day, as in the standoffs at Alcatraz, Ellis Island, Route 81 and the BIA building, and the killings of Leroy Shenandoah, Raymond Yellow Thunder and many, too many more.
Richard covered most of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee from the Oglala Lakota reservation in South Dakota and from nearby Nebraska. He was torn between his close personal friends on both sides of the bunkers and feared that he would join the growing list of Indians dying in unexplained single-car accidents.
That was the first of many times I heard him say, “I hope they put on my tombstone, ‘He Meant Well.’”
He called in feeds for our station’s newscasts every other day of the 10-week occupation. At the end of one report, I inadvertently left the tape recorder running, capturing our good-byes, the dial tone and a man’s voice saying, “Got it?” Years later, at a 1998 NAJA conference, Richard told me he had obtained documents through a freedom of information act request, confirming that the FBI was tapping both of us.
Richard lived and breathed news and Indians and the ethics of journalism. He loved impossible questions and the resulting arguments no one won: Which is the best paper, Americans Before Columbus or Akwesasne Notes; the Washington Post or New York Times? Did Americans hate the Cheyennes more than other nations or did the Cheyennes just get better press? Is it more unethical to scribe a position paper for a tribal council or a dissident faction ?- or is either OK, so long as you don’t report on it?
Then, there was the biggest question of all – “Who’s doing what in Washington and how are they getting away with it?”
Richard became increasingly impatient with illusive answers and with Indian and non-Indian bureaucrats and politicians who did not see him as a “real reporter” and expected him to be their press flack. He adopted a pose, perhaps from his favorite movies of the 1930s and 1940s, of a hard-bitten, hard-drinking newspaperman, churning out lots of pedestrian stories and some excellent work, furiously speed-typing and burning at least one cigarette at all times.
But, try as he might, he could not disguise his true nature – compassionate, kind, humble. He gave away most of his money and lived in spartan, austere surroundings, more befitting the priest he wanted to be in seminary than the most important Native journalist of our time.
Richard slogged his way through the tough Washington beat until 1974. He called me late one night, saying he was burned out on D.C. and would I take his job. I had burned out on New York and said yes. Even today, I consider as one of my defining characteristics that Richard was my brother and colleague, and that he chose me to replace him at AIPA.
He followed his heart out West, starting all those fine tribal papers and nurturing the present and future crops of Native journalists.
I don’t know if anyone will write on his headstone, He Meant Well. If so, they need to add that Richard La Course did very, very well, too.
