Mark Trahant
ICT
My love for journalism is as old as I can remember. I drew a crayon newspaper when I was about eight years old, “The Sun.” And as a teenager I remember buying a copy of each of the newspapers in the stands, plugging dimes in a machine so I could skim through what was the same and what was different in each edition. In high school we started an “alternative paper” in class, “The Press Gang,” and I later discovered the power of a press pass, using the school’s Chronicle as an entry ticket into concerts and other venues.
When I was 17 years old I talked a radio station into doing a broadcast of the March basketball tournament at Fort Hall. I had listened to play by play from radio announcers, sometimes holding a transistor radio to my ear, as they described basketball, baseball and football games. I mimicked what they did. Describing the play and coming up with a few exaggerations.
And I had an audience. I was calling a game with a team from Ethete, Wyoming, and I said the players were Shoshone. About 15 minutes later someone handed me a note. A listener had called the station, “they were Arapahoes, not Shoshones.” Correction made.
I had so much fun I took my radio broadcasts on the road. I called a game in Yakima, Washington, for their tournament. (I have no idea how I talked my way into that one.)
A year or so later I was working at the radio station. This time I had a paid gig, $75 a month to produce and host “The Sho-Ban Radio Hour.” We played music. Promoted local events and reported the news.
I was hooked. The news was it.
A couple of years later I was attending Idaho State University and there was an ad posted for an editor for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ newspaper. The publication had been dormant for a few years after the last editor, Lorraine Edmo, moved away to work at a TV station. The funding for the position was the Comprehensive Training and Employment Act – CETA – a training program. I was hired … and the Sho-Ban News began a new era.
The first issue was published on December 10, 1976. From my high school journalism class, I recalled how to count headlines (an old technique for writing a headline that fits the space) and lay out a page. I did everything exactly by the book. On the front page was a picture of our office building, a modern brick teepee. The photo caption read: “The Dawn over the Human Resource Center Symbolizing (sic) the Dawn of The Sho-Ban News.”
Awful. I was proud, my byline even read: “BY MARK N. TRAHANT, Editor-in-Chief.” Too many Superman comics! I was completely in charge of a staff of one.
The content was routine: An update of tribal council resolutions, education reports, facts you should know about dental health, and, of course, sports. Important notes for any community, the standings of winter basketball, and the winners of the Buckskin Gloves Boxing Tournament. Only a newspaper is connected to the refrigerator – clips posted for the family as high honor.
From the beginning of our journey, we wanted to clearly chronicle national trends affecting Indian affairs and government policy. When Vice President-Elect Walter Mondale toured Idaho, for example, we thought we ought to tag along and see if we could get the soon-to-be vice president to talk about the new policies. So Wes Edmo and I traveled to Lewiston, Idaho, on January 10, 1977.
Mondale was set to arrive the next day but we had to get our badges for the press events. At the credentials office — an old hotel in downtown Lewiston — I noticed that all the other reporters dressed in suits and ties. In those days, my wardrobe consisted of jeans, tee-shirts and cowboy boots or sneakers. I wanted to blend-in; I wanted a chance to ask Mondale a question at the news conference and felt that if I looked as “professional” as the other reporters (and if I shouted loud enough) I could ask the vice president a question about the new administration’s proposed western water policy.
My solution was to buy a gray raincoat at J.C. Penney’s for about $30. I figured no one would know what was underneath. The only problem was that the following day, when Mondale arrived, it was a warm, sunny January day with temperatures soaring into the 60s. It was very hot underneath that coat. But it was my armor.
The news conference was held in a secluded area at the Lewiston Airport. It was my first encounter with the national press and I was struck by how rude most of the reporters seemed. Even though I had been standing in a spot close to the podium, when they came in (off the press airplane) there was no room for local media. They shoved and pushed until I found myself at the back of the room. When the vice president arrived it was difficult to ask questions. Most shouted and somehow a press secretary shifted through the noise to recognize one of the reporters. I am not particularly loud and shouting is not one of my better skills; still on every question I tried to be just a little bit louder than my previous attempt. Near the end of the news conference, I was recognized. “Mr. Vice President, will Indian water rights be protected under the Carter Administration’s new federal water policy?” Walter Mondale looked for a moment, then he turned to Interior Secretary-Designate Cecil Andrus and said, “I think I had better let the secretary answer that one.”
So much for my one-rain-coat question. For the record, Andrus answered by saying that Indian water rights are independent rights; not part of the federal claim. It was a good quote and one that found its way into the next edition of the News.
The Sho-Ban News started as a bi-monthly newspaper. The definition of “bi-monthly” was that anytime I got everything together twice in one month, there would be two editions. Actually, the publication cycle averaged one issue every three weeks. But that troubled me: The other communities in Southern Idaho, no matter how small, were served by weekly newspapers. Was Fort Hall and its 3,000 people any less deserving? Of course not. Just by asking the question, I knew I had to press The Sho-Ban News’ deadline. In September 1977 paper became a weekly.
The News grew so fast that we went through four office suites in less than a year. When the newspaper started it was one desk and one telephone in the middle of a tribal education office in the new human resource center. A couple of months later we (I now had a colleague) moved to a larger one-room office next door to the tribal council’s chambers. As we geared up to go weekly, we moved into a temporary suite of offices (our computer and photographic equipment was expanding too) and, finally, the News returned to the suite where it had begun. The only difference was the entire wing of that building was now the Sho-Ban News housing its five to eight employees (we hired students in the summer with money from another federal program), darkroom and computer typesetting terminals.
When I first got the job at the News, I thought it would be easy to continue my schooling at the university. I found out that was impossible because I had no time for classwork. It is impossible to work a mere 40 hours a week at a small newspaper, so I dropped out of college. But, I would also like to think, this is when my real education began. I entered fast-paced courses in tribal government, law, journalism and culture.
One of those lessons came courtesy the Bureau of Indian Affairs (really!). The agency sponsored and paid for a conference in February 1977 in Spokane, Washington, about the importance of tribal journalism. I met other editor leaders, folks like Loren Tapahe, Navajo Nation, and Richard LaCourse, Yakama Nation. LaCourse opened my eyes about the history of the Native press and its role as a vehicle for Indian intelligence.
It’s funny now, but one of the speakers – a non-Indian reporter, again, paid for by the government – was there to tell us we should be “house organs.” Only printing the tribal side of the story.
LaCourse was offended. He said: “I’ll have to admit that you are making me extremely angry with your presumption about Indian newspapers are ‘house organs.’ Are you aware of the 1968 law which guarantees freedom of the press in Indian Country?”
Someone else added, “If the tribal council came to us and said you are going to print it this way, we would walk out.”
That was my first lesson on editorial independence. Courtesy the good ol’ BIA.
One reason why this lesson was so important was the era. The 1970s was the time of the “backlash” or “whitelash.” It was a movement of people who lived near tribal nations who decided it was time for a new Indian war. The groups involved covered themselves with noble names, South Dakotans for Civil Liberties; Montanans Opposed to Discrimination and the Interstate Congress for Equal Rights and Responsibilities. These groups defined American Indians as “special citizens” who, because of treaty rights, were getting a better deal than the rest of the nation. A book, “Indian Treaties: America’s Nightmare,” was sent by the group to members of Congress, the secretary of Interior and other Washington officials. “The liberal treatment of minorities has reached unheard of proportions in denying equal rights to all citizens of our so-called democracy,” a brochure for the book said. “Sportsmens (sic)– organizations — fishermen — hunters — land owners — commercial fishermen and just plain tax paying citizens who have just about had it with Indian take-overs make up the membership of ICERR.”
The root cause was anger about perceived slights.
The Sho-Ban News covered the backlash as best we could. We tried to keep track of the legislation in Congress, including those that proposed abrogating treaties. The backlash is a cyclical attempt to reverse the Constitution. It comes around every 20 years or so; the backlash of the 1970s, termination of the 1950s and the assimilation movement of the 1920s.
But the roots are deeper. The notions are the same as those expressed by Georgians who wanted the Cherokees removed. I suspect these movements reoccur because there is a segment of our society that will always challenge the constitutional rights of “treaty Americans.”
But the problem for journalism is that by covering the “backlash” as a force, there is a misperception about journalists being “advocates.” Yet none of our counterparts has to explain why a city exists, or a state, yet tribal editors must defend tribal government to other journalists, readers and critics. This is not advocacy journalism – at least not to me. It’s explanation.
Several weeks after the Spokane journalism conference there was a new push for the tribal news media to share its stories and start a news service. LaCourse wrote a memorandum on March 25, 1977, that he sent to all northwest Indian media ventures outlining his idea for a service based on the American Indian Press Association model. “These matters may be pondered, ignored, discussed or rejected, as you will,” LaCourse wrote.
I took this to heart and tried to fashion some sort of news service. It started with an old technology, a Telex machine. I purchased for $100 one of these devices … and tried to convince every other tribal newspaper to buy one. The goal was to produce shared news copy in real time.
It might have worked, except no other tribal newspaper purchased a machine. So we were talking to no one else. (We could send telegrams but that was costly.)
The technology of news has changed a lot in 50 years. When we first started printing The Sho-Ban News our host was converting from “lead” type to “cold” type. For us that meant a huge machine – a Compugraphic 7200. We’d type the story and then someone else would retype it into a machine and produce a version that could be pasted on a board with wax to make up a newsroom. A few years later one Mac did the same thing – and was a lot less expensive. I remember traveling to meetings with a tiny typewriter, then later a Radio Shack TRS 80 (writing four lines at a time) that would connect to a phone to send the story home. The rise of the Internet and web publishing made ICT possible. We never could have done a daily that served all of Indian Country without that technology.
After the 1978 election, Idaho’s governor, Cecil D. Andrus, was picked by President Jimmy Carter to be the Interior Secretary. It’s always interesting when someone from your home state is selected because you know people in the secretary’s office. I interviewed Andrus in Boise in January 1979. We published a complete text of the interview as a four-page special section. Andrus also suggested I spend some time with Forrest J. Gerard, his pick for assistant secretary for Indian affairs. This was an important job because it left intact the commissioner of Indian affairs, the historic job, as the operations officer for the BIA and set up the assistant secretary in a policy role.
Meeting Gerard changed my life. We connected almost immediately. Instead of just writing about the BIA’s weaknesses, he challenged me to move to DC and try and improve things. I did just that (one of my few detours out of journalism). I learned a lot about how Washington worked in my time there (including the lesson that journalism was far more satisfying than government.)
Gerard also became my life-long mentor and friend. One of the honors of my life was being able to write “The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars” and chronicle his work on Capitol Hill. He was the author in the Senate of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, Indian Health Care Improvement Act, Indian Finance Act, and so many other critical pieces of legislation. He went on to serve in the Carter administration as the first Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs.
The best newspaper in the country
There were so many great adventures at Navajo Times. We were all young – and full of a can-do spirit that defied logic. So when we asked, “why not a daily newspaper?” We answered with action. We published every night and delivered to a geography larger than many states.
On March 21, 1984, the paper went daily. The Christian Science Monitor happened to be there: “MARK Trahant, a razor blade in one hand and a narrow strip of galley proof in the other, shoots a quick glance out the window near the sloping work table at which he stands.
‘’I can see the propellers going on the plane,’ the youthful editor calls out to the half-dozen staffers in the cluttered newsroom housed in a ramshackle one-story building next to a dirt parking lot. It is 9:06 p.m. on Monday, March 19 – six minutes past deadline for the Navajo Times.”
A daily deadline is a dance. There are steps you take during the day – and with practice it gets easier. Our delivery mechanism was an airplane loaded with newspapers. About 12:30 a.m. the plane would take off from Window Rock, fly west to Tuba City, then Black Mesa (we also served readers on the Hopi Reservation), Blanding, Utah, and finally Crownpoint, New Mexico.
Our airplane paper route delivered newspapers even when roads were closed by snow. Our system worked.
One night I had finished editing the paper early, about 10:30 or so. I had gone to bed when I got a call: A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber crashed near Kayenta. My first reaction was to wait for the next day, the next edition. Then I got to thinking, “no, we’re a daily.” So we posted a few paragraphs, a bulletin. Then Paul Natonabah, a Times photographer, and Leonard Sylvan, a printer who went along for the ride, and I headed from Window Rock to Kayenta.
It was an adventure. And one of the key decisions I made was I told Natonabah to shoot pictures as fast as he could and then give me the film. I then rolled up the film in my jacket hood, out of view. After we were there a bit, FBI agents showed up. Their first order of business was to let us know this was a military scene and that Natonabah’s camera would have to be confiscated temporarily.
But I had the film. The next day the photograph was on the front page of the Arizona Republic and in newspapers around the world via both the Associated Press and United Press International. Every image was credited to Natonabah and the Navajo Times. On that day, the Navajo Times Today was the best newspaper in the country.
The Navajo Nation’s election in 1986 was a rematch between the incumbent Peterson Zah and the former chairman, Peter MacDonald. I did something unexpected. I used to write the editorials in Navajo Times (the most talked about was only three words. When Ronald Reagan was re-elected the entire page was black, except for the words, “Four More Years.”) So one day I went into my office, shut the door, and decided to endorse Zah. My logic boiled down to one reason: freedom of the press. The Navajo Times often made Zah uncomfortable – and yet he always lived up to the ideal of an independent newspaper. The only person I told was the managing editor, Monty Roessel.
The next day the staff was blown away by the editorial. Most were angry, wondering why I didn’t consult them? Simple: I wanted them to be able to tell their sources they had nothing to do with it.
The MacDonald campaign created an atmosphere of inevitability. His campaign wooed the outside world, letting business and political leaders alike know that MacDonald would soon return and he would again be a force.
On election night, Nov. 4, New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici called me in the newsroom to chat about national elections. He then asked about the tribal election. I remember him being surprised when I told him it was too close to call; he had been led to believe that a MacDonald landslide was coming.
Our headline the next morning said it all: “Cliffhanger: It’s MacDonald.”
One of the ramifications of the election – at least for me – was that I was certain I would be fired as publisher of the Navajo Times Today. The paper was not profitable, we had endorsed his opponent and there were plenty of legitimate reasons to let me go. For weeks nothing happened – I began to think things were fine. But on Feb. 19, 1987 – a day when I was out of town – the MacDonald administration sent police to close down the newspaper. They didn’t just fire me – they fired the entire staff. “Effective immediately, the Navajo Times Today will cease publication,” wrote Loyce Phoenix, MacDonald’s chief executive administrator. “All employees of the Navajo Times are terminated effective today.”
MacDonald’s contention that the paper would lose a million dollars that year was essentially correct – especially when you include the cost of closing down the Times. What was left unsaid was an offer, including one by management, to purchase the paper. One of the tribe’s lawyers told MacDonald that it was the “best opportunity” for the tribe to recover its investment.
The closing of the Navajo Times Today was expensive – especially in political terms. That very act tainted the discourse about MacDonald. Hundreds of people protested the chairman’s imperial nature at the same time he closed the newspaper because of a “million dollar loss.”
And it fed a narrative about corruption – without a newspaper to keep track.
The night I was fired, the publisher of the Arizona Republic, Pat Murphy, called and offered me a job. He asked me what I would do if I had time – what story did I really want to tell? At my house in Fort Defiance, I wrote an outline for a newspaper series on federal Indian policy. The eventual series by Mike Masterson, Chuck Cook, and myself, “Fraud in Indian Country,” chronicled the failures of federal policy and how the natural resource wealth of so many tribes either was mismanaged or outright stolen.
The interest in the series from Washington was incredible. Since this was pre-Internet days, every day we were faxing daily copies to folks on Capitol Hill or at the Interior Department. More than that, the Senate decided to do something. It launched a special committee to investigate the allegations raised by the newspaper. But here’s the twist: the Senate’s first target was MacDonald. Federal prosecutors, tribal prosecutors as well as the Senate’s investigative team probed MacDonald’s affairs.
This led to an internal debate on the Navajo Nation and a tragic riot in the Navajo capital (not unlike Jan. 6th) and the eventual conviction of MacDonald on federal charges.
There is a story there, too. I was in The Arizona Republic when the riot started. I think I started getting calls just a few minutes after the events began to unfold. A photographer and I raced to the airport, flew to Gallup, and then took a cab to Window Rock. By then there wasn’t much activity – a lot of property damage – and a group of protestors holding clubs were standing around. When we got out of the cab, someone shouted, “there’s the guy who started the Senate investigation.” We were surrounded and the photographer said to me, “I don’t think I want to be around you right now.”
But there was a great reporter moment. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my notebook. Everyone there wanted to talk. They wanted to tell their stories about what had happened.
The long view
The thing about a 50-year reporting horizon is that I have been lucky to witness so much history. I was at the Arizona Republic writing about the legislation that followed the Cabazon decision that recognized the inherent power of tribal nations to regulate gaming. The law that followed was the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. There are three stories worth repeating.
First: Gaming was so tiny back then, bingo was estimated to be $100 million. Hard to even fathom what’s happened since, a $42 billion industry.
Second: So often the context about gaming wasn’t reported by mainstream media. I grew up in a community where “Buff Vegas” saw the action of traditional games on a regular basis (for thousands of years at that). “Ah!” an editor once retorted, but one is modern, one is traditional.” True enough: There are no slot machines whirring or bells clinging at Buff Vegas. But the adaptation to new technology is universal. It should never be an argument to stop tribes from doing something “modern.”
Third: One of the most important pieces of misinformation came from the Indian gaming debate and that is that Congress gave tribes the right to operate casinos. The story, at first, was that Congress was limiting a Supreme Court victory, adding a regulatory framework. But a few years later it was the opposite. Most stories involving Indian gambling describe the gaming law as “giving” tribes the right to create gambling establishments on their lands. Thus, the story changed from a law that takes away a tribe’s inherent right to one that “gives” tribes something.
Beyond the resume
It’s impossible to capture 50 years in one essay. I don’t want this to be a resume. I am grateful for every journalism home that’s been a part of my life – in fact – I felt so lucky to be there. The list is long: The Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer – and of course Indian Country Today, now ICT.
Then there are the books. I have lost count when it comes to my contribution as a chapter author of books. I am really proud of an academic journal, Daedalus, of an issue I helped edit and contributed a piece on the Indian health system.
Then there is television. My first on-air venture was for PBS Frontline (what a way to start). So far I have reported two stories, most recently “The Silence” about sexual abuse by priests in Alaska. Then I produced and hosted “Wassaja” for FNX: First Nations Experience. And I have done just about every job associated with the ICT Newscast, including a stint as anchor and another as executive producer. I especially loved working on the climate project for ICT.
One of the highlights, of course, are election nights. Almost on a whim, ICT did an election night broadcast starting with the historic 2018 election. I wrote the next morning: “If anyone in a news company ever, ever says, ‘I can’t find anyone’ when hiring … I will make them sit and watch all five hours. The talent from Indian Country is amazing.”
And it’s not just the full-time gigs. In 1988 I was covering the fires at Yellowstone National Park and just happened to have a portable short-wave radio. This was long before the internet – so you had to make an effort to get international news. An Englishman came up to me and asked: “Are you listening to the BBC?” I was and he was an editor at The Economist and soon I was a correspondent.
The Economist was interesting because the process was so different. Instead of writing a bylined article, the work was anonymous. I would write a two- or three-page memo and the American Survey editor in London would boil that down to a few paragraphs. Lean writing long before USA Today.
Another twist on one of my dreams happened just after I joined Indian Country Today. An editor at National Geographic asked to meet. They had an issue that was soon to be published and there was a journalistic hole. “Any chance you could write something?”
Now I have always loved the idea about writing for National Geographic. Some of my friends had assignments that lasted a year or more with lots of resources for travel and a depth of reporting.
Not me. I was given a week.
I also had fun with the jobs I didn’t get. I was asked to interview at MSNBC for the editor-in-chief of their digital site. That’s when it was a joint venture with Microsoft and NBC. I went to NYC and hit it off the NBC folks – so much so that they asked if I could stay a couple more days (and offered to buy me clothes to make it so). But the Microsoft people and I didn’t sing from the same page. It was pretty clear that a job offer wasn’t happening.
The best: Stories and people
So often in my career I was where a story was unfolding. Just lucky. For example I was asked to speak in a little community in southern Ontario. And one of the other speakers that night was a legislator from Manitoba, Elijah Harper. The very night before we both spoke – he had voted against the Meech Lake Accords – a constitutional process – because he said First Nations had not been a part of the negotiation.
At Kettle Point Reserve he was hailed as a conquering hero, the man who saved Canada from itself. (I also wrote a breaking news story for ˆ, I suspect the only U.S. paper to cover Harper.)
Another lucky moment: I ended up at a birthday party for the Dalai Lama (at Richard Gere’s house, no less). That followed by a press conference ended up as a story. Just how do you sing happy birthday? “The Big D?” “His Holiness?” No one knew.
I think I have probably interviewed hundreds of tribal leaders and heard some great stories. A few: Billy Diamond, Joe DeLaCruz, Lucy Covington, Helen Peterson, Leona Kakar, and every month when I worked in Seattle I’d have breakfast with Billy Frank Jr.
Some of the stories I will remember most are about my own family. When I was a kid, my grandmother showed me pictures of her aunt from Fort Shaw. I learned about the basketball team that was champions of the world. My piece: At the turn of the century, Aunt Genie had game.
When my grandmother died I wrote a column about her life in the Seattle Times. A few days later I got a call from a producer of the Oprah show. She said that it had touched people there and asked if I would consider coming on the show. (She never quite said Oprah was one … but I have to think she was.) In the end, they decided it wasn’t good television. My family loved that: I was almost on Oprah.
The toughest words I have crafted were written after the death of my son, Elias. However I also learned something from that story. I heard from a father about how Elias influenced his son and helped shape his career as a journalist, especially creating a framework for the coverage of Indigenous people. “I was blown away by that note. Where did that come from?”
This is a powerful reminder that we influence people every day in ways we do not expect.
I can’t imagine how many other stories like that are still out there after 50 years of writing.
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