Independent Journalism
Since 2002, News From Indian Country has broken stories related to the investigation of murders during the 1970s at the Oglala Sioux Tribe Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. These include American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Aquash, whose maiden and legal name at the time of her death was Annie Mae Pictou, in December 1975; FBI Special Agents Ronald A. Williams and Jack Coler earlier in 1975; and Black civil rights activist Perry Ray Robinson, who had disappeared during the Wounded Knee Incident in 1973 and was believed to have been murdered by AIM activists.
The paper's coverage contributed to federal investigations and attracted controversy for its implication of AIM leadership in the murder of Aquash, the highest-ranking woman in AIM. In January 2003 the US government began a grand jury hearing in Rapid City on the murder of Aquash. Based on the information he had learned, in March 2003 DeMain wrote editorials in which he withdrew his previous support of clemency for Leonard Peltier. Soon after, a former AIM member, Ka-Mook Nichols, told DeMain that she had witnessed Peltier bragging about shooting the FBI agents. In March 2003 the US government indicted two men for the murder of Aquash.
DeMain and News From Indian Country were sued for libel by Peltier in May 2003. Some considered this an attempt to expose Nichols (whom DeMain had relied on in 2002 as one of three confidential sources of information) prior to her public testimony during the trial of Arlo Looking Cloud in 2004 for the murder of Aquash. Peltier dropped the lawsuit against News From Indian Country shortly after Looking Cloud's trial, with a settlement out of court.
Looking Cloud was tried and convicted in 2004. Witnesses in the trial testified to believing that AIM leaders had ordered the murder of Aquash because of fear that she was an FBI informer (she was interrogated at gunpoint) and would tell about having heard Peltier confess to the murders of Williams and Coler. John Graham was tried by the state of South Dakota in 2010 after extradition from Canada and convicted in 2010 of felony murder of Aquash. Indicted with Graham, Tracy Rios, a Lakota activist, made a plea bargain and pled guilty to charges as an accessory to the kidnapping of Aquash. A third man, Vine Richard "Dick" Marshall, bodyguard to AIM leader Russell Means in 1975, was indicted in 2008 for aiding and abetting the murder by providing the murder weapon, but was acquitted in 2010.
News From Indian Country is the oldest nationally distributed Native publication which is independent and not owned by a tribal government. Columnists for NFIC range from Mohawk author Doug George-Kanentiio from Akwesasne, New York to the award-winning Canadian writer Richard Wagamese, an Ojibwe now residing in Kamloops, British Columbia.
News From Indian Country has broken new ground online with IndianCountryTV, which began in 2008. IndianCountryTV brings the Native community to the world on a grassroots level, sharing interviews, news stories and music videos. IndianCountryTV is the creator of RezStyle, with host Kimberlie Acosta, and the Native News Update, with anchors Paul DeMain and Kimberlie R. Acosta.
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Famous quotes containing the words independent and/or journalism:
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