Representation and Truth: An Interview With Two Native American Leaders in Media

This year, Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan is posting and airing a series of episodes focusing on the lives and perspectives of the Indigenous women of North America. The first episode featured an interview with condoled Bear Clan mother for the Mohawk National Council Louise Herne McDonald and Wolf Clan Mohawk council member and advocate Jonel Beauvais.

The second episode in the series, which aired on February 6, focuses on the under- and misrepresentation of Native people, especially Native women, in news and media. The following is an edited and condensed excerpt from Morgan’s interview with her two guests:

Crystal Echo Hawk, a member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, is the founder, president, CEO, and executive director of IllumiNative, a Native woman–led racial and social justice organization dedicated to increasing the visibility of, and challenging the narrative about, Native peoples. Through IllumiNative, she works with a respected team of Native artists and thought leaders in pop culture, media, and social justice to advance new narratives for Indian Country in partnership with Native communities and allies in order to capitalize on the findings of Reclaiming Native Truth (RNT), the largest public opinion research and strategy-setting initiative ever conducted for and about Native Americans.

Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the writer and the host of the podcast “This Land.” Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law, and tribal sovereignty has been featured widely in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, Indian Country Today, and more. Nagle is the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, the largest cash prize for journalism in the United States. She has also received the Exceptional Journalism Award from the Women’s Media Center and a Webby Award for Best Documentary Podcast, the Medal of Distinction from Barnard College, and numerous awards from the Native American Journalists Association.

Robin Morgan: This week our program is in keeping with our promise to deliver a series of episodes over this year focusing on the deplorably enforced invisibility of Native American citizens and culture. This is the second of such programs, the first having dealt with the traditional culture, richness, and strengths that form the foundation underlying the very survival of these people. Today’s episode features a lively discussion between Crystal Echo Hawk of the Pawnee Nation and Rebecca Nagle, Cherokee, discussing Native presence, or, rather, absence in media, news, and entertainment; and also addressing the ghastly appropriation of Native creativity.

Let’s do a little quiz. This is not to trick you, merely to expose a certain shocking level of reality. Let’s say there’s a group of people — a group of Americans, I’ll even give you that much. Now, this group is really up against it. Members of this group are more likely to be killed by police than those of any other race or ethnic group. The women of this group are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than those of any other ethnic group, and 97% of them have experienced violence perpetrated by at least one person outside the group. Young people in this group are twice as likely to be disciplined as their white peers in school are, they are twice as likely to be incarcerated for minor crimes than teens of some other race, they have the lowest graduation rates of any racial group, and they die by suicide at the highest rate of any demographic in the United States.

What’s even more shocking is that most other Americans, whether of African, Asian-Pacific, European, or Latinx ancestry, don’t know that this particular group of so far nameless Americans even exists. A well-intentioned person might shrug, “I’ve never seen them, not in media or anywhere else.”

The above statistics are from an excellent article written for Teen Vogue by Rebecca Nagle, who is one of our guests today. It is about the work of another guest today, Crystal Echo Hawk, whose major survey, Reclaiming Native Truth, showed among other incredulities that two-thirds of Americans don’t believe Native people experience any racial discrimination. They don’t see it happening anywhere in the news or pretty much anywhere. This is not racism by the classic “othering” of oppressed people as “different” — “They’re different than we are; they’re ‘other.’” This is other-izing via erasure. Not only do we rarely if ever see news by and about Indigenous peoples in America, but when we do it’s the “if it bleeds, it leads” formula. A story on a secret graveyard being discovered; unearthing bodies of hundreds of Indian infants; or a case in the rising statistics of disappeared women in and around Wisconsin, Winnipeg, and environs, who if found at all are found dead. We hear or read the atrocity stories, and yes, they are major news and they should be covered. But where are the positive stories? Where do we see Native accomplishment? Where are we given a chance to grasp Native history, which also happens to be the history of this country? For that matter, where do we find Native people visible in contemporary affairs?

The Women’s Media Center found that in a year of overlapping crises, a presidential election, an ongoing pandemic, heightened protest in community-police relations, the economy, environmental crises, and much more, the cold-eyed erasure of Native peoples, along with other people of color, is all the more glaring an omission. For example, on the five major Sunday morning news programs that define news for the week — ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, CNN’s State of the Union, MSNBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday — not a single Indigenous woman appeared as a guest during all of the year 2020. This means that the unspeakable treatment of Native peoples in the Americas (some of which, albeit superficially, I exposed in Episode 332, dated November 22, 2020, and also in my blog, “The Thanksgiving Reality,” which is dated November 25, 2020) is not over; it just goes on, it’s continual. Even had the European conquest not decimated the population already living in the New World nations, even had there not been deliberately smallpox-infected blankets distributed to Native people so that, having no resistance, they fell by the hundreds, even had Native children not been torn from their families, forbidden their traditional belief systems, beaten if they spoke their language, shorn of their hair, and sent to perform menial labor for the European conquerors — even had none of that happened, the pain of the European invasion would still be evident today in this systemic institutionalized racism that has added insult to agony, to disappear an entire people.

There are currently 193 member states in the United Nations; that’s a number that has grown from the original 51. Each of those 193 nations has its own unique culture, traditions, language, socio-political system, relationship to land, work, art, food, and so forth. In fact, many of them embrace diverse cultures within themselves; the United States is one. That’s a lot of countries, 193 nations. There are today in the United States of America alone 573 federally recognized nations with more than 5 million real, existing Native people. And that’s not counting the original number of Native Americans living in both South and North America, constituting a population as large as that of Europe when the European invasion took place. That’s a lot of countries, 573 recognized nations. It takes a massive amount of activity to make and keep that many nations, each with its own unique culture, language, relationship to land, art, food, tradition, socio-political systems, and so forth, utterly invisible. The loss to the rest of Americans and to the world, the loss of contributions that could be made or that have been made but ignored is immense. It’s immense. It’s also a time that is over and finished. The original inhabitants of this country are stepping into the light.

It is my honor and my pleasure, my real delight, to welcome Crystal Echo Hawk and Rebecca Nagel.

Rebecca Nagle: Thank you for having us.

Crystal Echo Hawk: Thank you so much for bringing us into this conversation.

Morgan: Well, you’re central to this conversation, which I’m hoping will hover around the issues of appropriation of Native culture, fashion, looks, everything, and also media representation — otherwise known as the lack thereof — the invisibility of Native Americans, and in particular Native American women, who have been vanished, disappeared. I’m going to just throw it open to the two of you because you both have areas of profound expertise in media, and/or appropriation of Native culture, so you take it away.

Echo Hawk: To level set what we mean when we talk about invisibility … we did a research project starting back in 2016 called the Reclaiming Native Truth project, and it was the largest public opinion research project ever done about Native Americans. What we really wanted to do was examine: What do Americans think about Native Americans, why do they think these things about Native people, [and for] these dominant narratives that people hold about Native Americans, where do they come from, and how do they affect Native Americans in different facets of life, from the way that institutions like the courts and Congress treat us, to media, to just Native people’s interactions with different people in different sectors all over this country. It was a $3.3 million research project, and we used a diverse set of methodology to really look at these key questions, and what we found was that nearly 80% of Americans know little to nothing about Native people. And that was a big number, and I think you can ask any Native person in the United States — we often, in our day-to-day lives, feel very unseen and unheard. But to see … a big number like that was really an eye opener, and as we began to dive further on some of those questions we found, for example, that 72% of Americans rarely or never see anything about Native Americans in the media.

And then we looked at amazing research done by a lot of incredible people all over and found, for example, that almost 90% of schools in the country don’t teach about us past 1900, so literally generation after generation of Americans that are going through the K through 12 public education system are literally conditioned to think that Native Americans don’t exist past 1900. We sort of fade to black; maybe the last data point might be something about Wounded Knee in 1890, and then really nothing. Very little to nothing is taught about Native Americans in a contemporary context, and so that’s one big system that really serves to perpetuate our erasure. And what little does get taught about Native peoples in terms of history is oftentimes incredibly inaccurate and certainly not very comprehensive. And then as we began to turn our gaze to other sectors, going back to 2015, the research team of [University of Michigan psychology professor] Dr. Stephanie Fryberg was able to map that representation across TV and film was less than 0.4%. And that even if you googled “Native Americans,” 95% of the images that would come up were of Native peoples pre-1900, and typically of men, so you see that double erasure of Native women happening.

And so the big systems of media, entertainment, education, and our government have really served to perpetuate and institutionalize that level of erasure. Through our partnerships with social psychologists we began to understand that the impact of invisibility serves to dehumanize Native Americans in the eyes of other Americans because “out of sight, out of mind”; we’re kind of almost seen as less than human. Things are slowly starting to change, but I think what’s important is people understanding the consequences of this because this is not just an issue of political correctness, and just “Why isn’t somebody on a TV show?” This is really that erasure on that level serves to dehumanize Native Americans. Also, because there’s very little information out there about Native people, most Americans actually vastly underestimate the levels of discrimination that Native people encounter on a daily basis. In fact, two-thirds of the Americans that we polled didn’t think that Native Americans faced any significant discrimination, and when we asked them to rank different populations, we actually sort of fell in the middle just above white people.

And then that final piece of erasure in terms of the consequences is that we often get left out of important discussions around key pieces of legislation, policy, decisions around the allocation of resources, you name it, because again, “out of sight, out of mind.” So this is a really important issue to understand, and as our lead researcher says, invisibility is really the modern form of racism against Native Americans; one of the greatest challenges facing Native people today is that so many Americans aren’t even sure we exist anymore.

So that is a level set of data that we published in 2018. Folks like Rebecca have played such an important role in terms of, as a writer, as a journalist, really helping to elevate contemporary issues. So I’m curious, Rebecca, from your standpoint, how you are looking at it now, through the lens of all your advocacy and work.

Nagle: That data and that research that you all collected, Crystal, I feel like it’s so important; I mean, I remember when I first read that report, it felt like it validated so many day-to-day personal experiences that I’d had. I’ll never forget, I was at this racial justice convening, and I was approached by a white woman, and she just said to my face, “Um, I thought we killed all of you. Like, I thought Indigenous people literally just didn’t exist anymore.”

Morgan: I mean, my god, did she think it was funny?

Nagle: No, she was …

Morgan: What planet is she from?

Nagle: No, she was being genuine. I do think genuine, like that was what she had thought, that she didn’t realize that Native American people were still alive. And meeting me was like learning new information. [Laughs]

Morgan: You were an artifact.

Nagle: Yeah, and I think Indigenous people, we experience that on a micro scale like that, and then, as Crystal’s research has really pointed out, on a macro scale. One thing I just wanted to add is that when Crystal was talking about how Native people are left out of big policy discussions, I just wanted to [add that] a lot of times we’re just completely left out of the data, and so when people are researching important issues in the United States they’re not even including Native Americans in the information that they’re collecting. A couple of examples: In January 2020 the CDC released a bunch of data on maternal mortality and race, and didn’t include data for Native women, again, and so Abigail Echo Hawk, who’s a great public health researcher with the Urban Indian Health Institute, they pulled out data for urban Native women and found that urban Native women had a maternal mortality rate four and a half times that of white women, and that hadn’t even been captured in the data. They did another really good study where they looked at cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in 2015, and they identified 5,712 cases, and only 116 of those cases — so a very, very small fraction — had actually been logged by the Department of Justice.

I did a piece for The Guardian in the early months of COVID, and at that time, in the spring of 2020, only half of U.S. states that were reporting COVID infection and mortality with race were including Native Americans, and so in half of U.S. states at that time (and I haven’t checked back since then, it could have changed), we were marked as “Other,” basically. I’m sure Crystal’s going to talk about some of the progress that has been made in Hollywood and TV, which is really encouraging, and I would just say that I have not seen that progress happen in news media. I think there are a few journalists who are at non-Native outlets who are making headway, and some non-Native media outlets like High Country News, that has an Indigenous affairs desk, and some people who are trying to carve out that space where they work, but for the most part, whether it’s The Washington Post or The New York Times, or NPR, they just don’t have Indigenous correspondents, and they don’t have dedicated journalist staff that are knowledgeable, that even just have that baseline knowledge, about our communities. And I think that like Crystal said, it’s not about political correctness, but I would say that as a journalist the lack of Native people in newsrooms, it’s not a diversity problem, it’s a journalism problem.

Morgan: It’s a news problem, damn right.

Nagle: Yeah, exactly, because over and over again, we think about the standards of journalism as being a) factually accurate, b) showing the depth of knowledge of the subject area, so it’s contextually accurate, and then c) being timely. And I would say that there’s not a mainstream non-Native news outlet that is meeting those standards for the Indigenous community. If there is an article that is well reported, oftentimes it’s months after Native news — whether it’s tribal newspapers or Native-run outlets like Indian Country Today — has already been covering that topic. And I’ll just give one more statistic: NAJA, the Native American Journalists Association, did a big, comprehensive study of The New York Times’ coverage of Indigenous issues, and they found — this is a study that came out in 2021 — they found that more than half of The New York Times’ coverage of the Indigenous community contained racist stereotypes. So we have a long way to go with getting accurate coverage, and I think that really feeds into what Crystal is talking about in terms of the public perception research, where people don’t see Indigenous people as alive [laughs] and as contemporaries, and also don’t see the challenges that our communities face because it’s not part of the information that they’re getting in the media.

Morgan: It’s not on the radar. When Aliyah Chavez, who is an anchor for Indian Country Today, accepted her Exceptional Journalism Award from the Women’s Media Center, she addressed this, and she said, “Where are the Native journalists on network news?” The American Indian and Alaska Native population is 2.9% of the total population — it’s 9.7 million people; you know, there’s news to be learned and made and broken and covered in that. How do we begin to address this first great stain on what is laughingly called this republic?

Echo Hawk: There’s no magical one silver bullet; it’s everything that you just listed and more. I do think Native people are really building power, and yes to everything Rebecca outlined and mapped out, and all of the horrible statistics. But I think on the flip side, to see the amount of progress that has been made can’t be denied. There are few Indigenous reporters in these major newsrooms and outlets, but I think that the shift we have started seeing is that there is increased coverage, and I think for so long even when stories would break about Native people, Native people were never interviewed; it was always non-Natives commenting on issues that were impacting [us], so it was just stunning. I’ll never forget when, for example, the Cleveland baseball team was announcing it was retiring its Chief Wahoo, who was this super-racist mascot, a few years ago, I remember seeing all the coverage break across the United States and not one single Native [person] was interviewed. So this is a big part of our advocacy work for these big outlets and reporters across the country — really trying to educate them about the amazing amount of expertise that exists out there in Indian country on a range of issues.

So I think that’s part of it, advocating to these major media companies on their hiring practices, and creating these pathways for Native people to be working in front of the camera, behind the camera, in newsrooms, and really doing that intense advocacy with these different companies, where the prevailing myth is “Well, there are just no qualified folks out there.” This is an industry that is very dug in, and I think that oftentimes you have to deal with these gatekeepers at the top that are really trying to prevent opportunities for people of color and particularly Indigenous people. We had a pretty big battle last year with CNN over Rick Santorum and some incredibly racist comments that were made, and have been really working hard with the network to not only — thank goodness we finally got Santorum removed — but really the longer-term battle is about getting an Indigenous affairs desk at places like CNN to insure that they’re having Native journalists, that they’re booking a variety of different Native subject matter experts.

Morgan: What do they say when you raise that? What is their excuse?

Echo Hawk: They don’t really offer an excuse; they sort of dance around it. I think more and more Native people, they’re really seeing this and jumping on board, just really starting to make our voices heard with these companies that we need to be represented, and we need to be represented accurately. And that’s really important, and I think that [with] increased pressure that these companies are feeling, we’re starting to see some progress, and we’re particularly seeing that progress in Hollywood. You know, over the last year, I mean we’re so excited, in 2021 we had our first-ever two Native American TV shows, Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, and that is a huge breakthrough moment, and then to see that they were met with critical success. Because I think the industry, whether we’re talking about Hollywood or the media industry, they’ve always just kind of perpetuated a myth that there’s not an audience for Native stories. Our research found that nearly 80% of audiences want to know more about Native Americans, and that there’s an equal number that really want to see increased representation in TV and film, and so what was so exciting was to see that these two TV shows last year really met with critical success, and you had the critical success of films like Wild Indian or Night Raiders. Now you’re really kind of seeing momentum, so what we’re seeing behind the scenes now is increasingly more and more studios are buying Native projects, in TV and film. And we’re seeing these success stories; I look at Rebecca and the success story behind her podcast, right? And it’s really these breakthrough moments that are beginning to show media makers that there is an audience for contemporary Native stories. There’s still so much work to do, but we are definitely beginning to see a shift in the industry, and that is due to a lot of advocacy and really pushing on these big media makers.

But also, the proof is in the pudding. We are seeing a slow shift, but even last year with the two shows that came out, you know, when looking at the Nielson screen report, our representation in terms of screen time is really remaining stagnant, it’s 0.4% on streaming services, and that’s the biggest place where you’re going to see Native people. But when we get into cable and broadcast, those numbers are dismal, like 0.05% and 0.08%. So there’s still a lot of work to do, but we are really making headway and there is just some incredible Native talent out there, so we’re pushing and we’re really hopeful.

Morgan: Wow.

Nagle: And to piggy-back on that a little bit, I think what Crystal mentioned about that these outlets need to have an Indigenous affairs desk, I think it is a really, really good model, and there are a couple of outlets with Native staff that have built that out. High Country News has had an Indigenous affairs desk for a few years now, and Tristan Ahtone, who used to work there, is now building that out at Grist. And so you’re starting to see pockets of outlets having Indigenous coverage with not only just Indigenous journalists but also Indigenous editors, which I can say as a freelance journalist make a really big difference. I did an Indigenous panel for NPR News recently, and what I told them was you have to treat it like a journalism problem and just realize that you’re missing an area of your coverage. You know, people have foreign correspondents, people have more experts on climate change — now that people are realizing that that’s a bigger issue they’re starting to invest in it — and, you know, whenever you hear an ad for The New York Times, they always brag that their journalist who is reporting on Afghanistan has been reporting on Afghanistan for 20 years, you know, is stationed there, is very, very knowledgeable about that area. And when they send someone to report on a Supreme Court case about Native rights, or about what’s happening in Oklahoma between the tribes and the governor, they send a reporter who doesn’t know almost anything about tribes and tribal sovereignty and, you know, you hear from the back end from the Native leaders who were interviewed that they were asked extremely ignorant questions, and you wouldn’t do that to any other government official, you know, send somebody to interview them who doesn’t understand their government, who doesn’t know the history of their place. But that’s what happens over and over again in Native American communities, and so I think that it really is an issue that we need to look at solving as a journalism problem by dedicating that resource and that time for there to be staff that really have the expertise for our community to have the same level, same standard of journalism, and the same level of coverage that we would want for any community in the United States.

Morgan: Yeah, there’s such richness there of stories that can be covered, that are dying to be covered, that are waiting to be covered. Because I notice also the few stories that squeak through — and I’m grateful even for those, but still — are the victimization stories, are the atrocity stories, are the disappearing women, are the dead babies found. And it is vital that these stories surface. But your other stories also of creative people with good ideas pushing for good entertainment, you know, first-class drama, all of that is also part of the picture, that’s a whole picture, you know, and we never get a whole picture.

Nagle: Yeah, and the Native American Journalists Association, they have this thing they call the Bingo Board of racist stereotypes, and it’s a lot of what you’re talking about, you know, it’s that kind of … what sometimes people in the journalism world call poverty porn, but ... stereotypes about Native people.

Morgan: Right — if it bleeds, it leads.

Nagle: Yeah, and you know, when they did that study of New York Times coverage, that’s the type of issues The New York Times was focusing on. And I think COVID is a really good example where we had a lot of coverage at certain times about COVID deaths in Native communities, which were disproportionate and high, and I believe also underreported based on my own reporting, but we also had a lot of tribes leading the recovery effort, so, you know, here in Oklahoma, even Oklahoma residents who are non-Native, who aren’t tribal citizens, could get their vaccines through the tribes before they could actually get them through the state and the public health system. You know, our testing systems have been more efficient, and so sometimes that’s the type of coverage that is also missing, and it feeds a stereotype that our tribal governments are primitive or backwards. That can also really undermine efforts for tribal sovereignty.

So, yeah, like what Crystal said, I think those Indigenous affairs desks, and Indigenous affairs correspondents, we’re starting to see them at a handful of non-Native outlets, and really I think the time is for the big, mainstream news organizations to adopt that model.

Morgan: Right, and we’ve got to get the unions in on this somehow too, or the journalists’ associations backing it as well to bring pressure — and sponsorships, I’m afraid. Listen, separately and together you two women are something — capital E — Else, and I’m enormously grateful for your expertise and your knowledge and your statistics, and most of all, your fire. And keep us in the loop so that we know and we can cover, as we’ve done in the past but we should always do more of, Native [people], and particularly Native women in this country and in the world. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Crystal.