Paul DeMain, editor and co-owner of news From Indian Country, believes that a free press on Indian lands is a remote dream because tribal leaders feel threatened by journalists.

In a country where press freedom is a constitutional guarantee, journalists working for American Indian-owned newspapers are denied the basic, fundamental First Amendment rights that are at the very root of news reporting.

Some 600 such publications -- mostly weekly and monthly newspapers -- are owned and controlled by leaders of Indian tribal governments. Most operate on the conviction that the job of the native press is merely to showcase the tribe's accomplishments -- not to report the crimes, misdemeanors, and malfeasances that sometimes mark life on the reservation.

Tribal journalists lack protection of the First Amendment because its safeguards are accorded to the owner of the press -- namely the tribal government -- not the reporter. Native newspeople have little recourse against such oppression: Indian tribes enjoy a government-to-government relationship with the federal system, and their unique legal status as sovereign nations -- a designation that predates the U.S. Constitution -- shelters them from having to comply with intrusive laws such as the Freedom of Information Act. Censorship and verbal attacks by tribal leaders against Indian journalists are commonplace, often resulting in staff firings and even the shuttering of newspapers.

A study by Richard LaCourse, editor of the Yakama Nation Review in Washington state, says that only about seventy of the 557 federally-recognized American Indian tribes have free-press language in their constitutions, but even in those, it is routinely ignored by tribal leaders. In 1968, Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, which extends First Amendment rights to reservations. But journalists working for tribal media insist that free-press guarantees provide little or no protection because tribal governments view their newspaper staffs as employees wholly answerable to tribal government.

It's a black eye on American journalism. Reporters and editors at many of these newspapers learn to walk a thin line between reporting the truth and suffering the consequences. The threat is taken seriously because it comes from the boss who pays the news staff's salary: the tribal government.

Incidents of censorship and suppression are on the rise. Here are some recent examples:

* In July 1997 the Cherokee tribal government laid off the entire staff of the bimonthly Cherokee Nation (circ.: 195,000) in Oklahoma. The newspaper was covering allegations of wrongdoing against the principal chief.

* In June 1998 Frederick Lane, editor of the Lummi tribe's monthly newsletter, Squol Quol, was fired for failing to get his articles approved by representatives of the tribal council and tribal administration. Lummi tribal council secretary Tim Ballew said Lane had repeatedly run stories that opposed projects that the Lummi nation -- a tribe of 4,500, located about ninety miles north of Seattle -- had undertaken within the past four years.

* In February 1998 the editor of the weekly Navajo Times in Arizona (circ.: 17,500) survived two attempts by the Navajo Nation administration to fire him, as the paper continued to cover financial mismanagement involving Navajo Nation president Albert Hale.

* In October 1997 a reporter for the weekly Native American Press/Ojibwe News (circ.: 10,000) in Minnesota was arrested by tribal police for trespassing while covering a meeting about a controversial land sale among Minnesota Chippewa tribes.

Mounting frustration prompted the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) -- a group of 770 members in the U.S. and Canada -- to declare 1998 "The Year of Promoting Free Expression in Native America." By focusing on free press issues, NAJA hopes to educate mainstream North America about the tough jobs tribal journalists face, and search for solutions. Says NAJA past president Paul DeMain, editor and co-owner of News From Indian Country, a twice-monthly privately-owned newspaper published in Hayward, Wisconsin (circ.: 8,000): "It's very traumatic because people tend to lose their jobs for reporting things that tribal leaders would rather not see in print."

A tribal journalist's job is most precarious in times of tribal political strife. DeMain learned that lesson twenty years ago as editor of the Lac Courte Oreilles Chippewa tribe's LCO Journal. He refused to let the tribal chairman review the paper's copy before it was printed, and was threatened with firing. Fortunately for DeMain, a majority on the tribal council supported him. But his brush with prior restraint moved him a decade later to buy the LCO Journal and turn it into an independent paper.

That's a rare feat since most reservations are located in remote, depressed areas with few advertising dollars to support a paper. In a collection of essays by Native American journalists published by the Freedom Forum, titled "From the Front Lines: Free Press Struggles in Native America," DeMain writes that a free press on Indian lands is still a remote dream: "Many tribal leaders still are threatened by the tribal press, and continue placing restrictions on what can be printed."

The stories they attempt to muzzle share recurrent themes: political battles within tribal governments; power struggles among factions vying for control of a reservation; conflicts that in extreme cases erupt into violence and armed takeovers of tribal buildings. Tribal officials inexperienced with dealing with the news media are not likely to cooperate with reporters and editors, and are quick to censor stories that they perceive as negative.

Jeff Armstrong, a non-Indian reporter for the privately owned Native American Press/Ojibwe News in Bemidji, Minnesota, discovered that even non-tribal papers face difficulty reporting tribal politics. He was arrested by tribal police last October, while attempting to cover a meeting of the Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians. He is fighting a trespassing charge brought against him after the Mille Lacs Tribal Executive Committee ordered him to leave the meeting because he was not a tribal member. Armstrong (whose beat includes seven Minnesota reservations) says he had previously covered four of five public meetings the committee held to discuss a controversial offer by the U.S. Justice Department to settle tribal claims to more than 800,000 acres of reservation lands. Many tribal members strongly opposed the offer. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court against county and tribal law enforcement officials, Armstrong says the committee "intended to restrict the press from reporting on the meeting specifically to harass and obstruct Petitioner from carrying out his duties as a reporter in order to further their efforts to subvert the will of the people."

part 1: Repression on the Reservation
part 2: Native American rights advocate...
part 3: A Native Press Primer (sidebar to original story)

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