“John,” the editor of a small Native American tribal newspaper, asked that VOA protect his identity. His paper, like an estimated 72% of media outlets in Indian Country, is owned and funded by the tribal government. And because the government controls the purse strings, leaders say they have the right to control what gets printed.

“That’s why my paper is kind of tame,” he said.

He writes about community events, school sports, births and deaths, national news that affects the tribe, but said he never reports on tribal affairs —unless, that is, it is something that makes the leadership look good.

“I wrote something [negative] a few years back and almost lost my paper,” he said. Had the tribal government cut funds as they’d threatened, he would have had to shut down operations.

Native media today

Because they have long been overlooked by mainstream media, citizens of the 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S. have always relied on their tribes for news and information that affect their daily lives.

The 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act (ICRA) made it illegal for tribal governments “to make or enforce any law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Many tribes have laws protecting First Amendment rights, but enforcement may be lax, and because tribes are sovereign, federal courts don’t have jurisdiction over civil rights violations.

In a 1998 article, “Protecting the First Amendment in Indian Country,” the late Yakama journalist Richard LaCourse described a number “interfering actions” tribal governments may take to stifle press freedom: hiring unqualified reporters on the basis of blood relation or political unity; firing staff; cutting funds; censoring stories before publication; blocking access to tribal government records and proceedings.

In 2018, the Native American Journalists Association, or NAJA, launched its Red Press Initiative, reaching out to members and asking them about the state of press freedom in their communities.

Only 65 media directors and producers responded, along with nearly 400 consumers. While not an exhaustive survey, it demonstrates that press freedom in Indian Country is inconsistent.

About half of the respondents said they faced censorship; a third said they were “sometimes or always” required to get tribal leadership’s approval before publishing stories; nearly a quarter said tribal government records and financial information were “probably” not open to journalists; and nearly half said they had faced intimidation or harassment by tribal officials or community members.

Today, NAJA says that a handful of tribal newspapers have managed to overcome these challenges and can serve as models for other tribes.

Rocky road to independence

The Navajo Times, based in Window Rock, Arizona, is one of a handful of Native newspapers to have achieved full editorial independence, but it was decades in coming.

The paper began as a monthly newsletter in late 1959 to keep off-reservation boarding school students up to date on happenings back home. Over the next two decades, editors came and went, and relations with the tribal government were uneven.

In 1982, Peterson Zah was elected Navajo chief, replacing Peter MacDonald, who had held a stranglehold on the office since 1971. MacDonald was, according to one Navajo Times reporter, a man who didn’t like to “work openly and honestly with the press.”

But Zah felt differently and pledged to restore honesty and accountability to the tribal government, along with press freedom, which he said was “absolutely necessary in a true democracy.”

Zah lived up to his promises, supporting the paper even when it was critical of his policies.

“We were completely independent, if not downright ornery,” former editor Mark Trahant would later tell the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

But Zah lasted only one term. MacDonald was reelected chairman in 1986 and shortly afterward closed down the Times—which had publicly endorsed his opponent—firing most of its staff. It relaunched four months later as a weekly paper.

Turning point

In 1989, a Senate Indian Affairs committee investigating corruption in Indian Country heard testimony that MacDonald was siphoning tribal money to fund his expensive lifestyle.

“It was a time of great turmoil and political divisiveness,” said Navajo Times CEO and publisher Tom Arviso, Jr., who had come to the paper as a sports writer in 1983 and by 1989 had been promoted to editor. “We just tried to tell the story of what was going on with the leadership and let readers decide for themselves.”

The Navajo Times covered it all, said Arviso, provoking anger among MacDonald’s supporters.

“People threatened me and some of the reporters with physical harm,” Arviso said. “A group of them actually marched to our office, telling me to come out and face them.”

On July 20, 1989, MacDonald announced he was taking back power. With his encouragement, several hundred of his supporters, armed with baseball bats and wooden clubs, stormed tribal offices in Window Rock. In the riot that followed, two people died and 11 were injured, including several police officers.

MacDonald was subsequently convicted on federal fraud, racketeering and conspiracy charges including inciting the riot. He was sent to prison.

Cutting purse strings

In 2000, Arviso was selected for a John S. Knight Fellowship in Journalism at Stanford University, where he studied newspaper publishing and business management.

“And that’s how we came up with the plan to incorporate the Navajo Times, break away from the government and organize [it] as a for-profit corporation,” he said. “The bylaws state that the actual owners of the newspaper are the Navajo people themselves.”

The tribal council approved the plan in October 2003, and on January 1, 2004, the Times began operating officially as a publishing company.

“The tribe has asked that we make a return on the investment that the government has made,” he said. “But we don’t just write a check and say, ‘Here’s $50,000.’ We give it back in services to our people.”

Today, the Times serves 23,000 paying subscribers and generates substantial advertising income. But what about smaller tribes, which could never hope to generate that kind of revenue?

 

Legislative route

When former newspaper reporter and publisher James Roan Gray was elected chief of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma in 2002, he was determined to shake things up. A century earlier, the U.S. government had passed a law restructuring the tribe’s government and membership qualifications.

“We were stuck in an old tribal council structure that really didn’t give us much self-determination at all,” he said. “The BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] agreed with us.”

Gray envisioned an overhaul of the Osage government, and in 2003 took his case to Washington. H.R.2912, a bill to reaffirm the inherent sovereign rights of the Osage Tribe, passed and was signed as Public Law No: 108-431 in 2004.

“The law allowed us to reorganize our government, determine citizenship and chart a future of our own design,” Gray said.

After extensive consultation with tribe members, the Osage Nation drafted and approved its first constitution in almost a century. It contains language barring tribal government from making or enforcing any laws restricting a free press.

The tribe passed an independent press act, naming the Osage News as its official newspaper.

Gray also issued an executive order tasking the newspaper to report “without bias the activities of the government and the news of interest to foster a more informed Osage citizenry and protect individual Osage citizens’ right to freedom of speech or the press.”

He didn’t get everything he wanted: Gray had hoped that the executive branch would have sole control in naming the three-man editorial board. The tribe’s supreme court, however, ruled that tribal legislators would have equal say in the matter.

“We’ve all learned to live with that structure,” he said.

Since then, the tribe has amended the law to protect journalists from being forced to reveal their sources and prohibit leadership from defunding the newspaper.

Raising trust

Bryan Pollard, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, piloted the 2018 Red Press Initiative during his tenure as NAJA president. He cautions against making assumptions.

“It’s not always because there’s an authoritarian regime that wants to control the message, although that exists in some cases. Sometimes, it’s simply because a tribe doesn’t have the capacity to develop the structures and institutions necessary for press freedom,” Pollard said.

Today, NAJA works with tribes and Native journalists to educate them on methods of achieving press freedom, and the ways in which it benefits both the tribal leaders and citizens.

“Society is better if it is informed,” said Gray. “Press freedom benefits the tribe if the tribal leadership values the trust of the people.”

Some tribal leaders don’t trust their own citizens, he added, so they tell them what they think they want to hear “in hopes that it will get them reelected.”

“And if folks don’t trust the contents of the tribal newspaper, then no matter what you put out, they’re not going to believe you—or at the very least, they’ll be skeptical,” Gray said.
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With many small businesses failing during the economic downturn of coronavirus lockdowns, three sisters in the U.S. state of Colorado chose the pandemic to open Denver’s first Vietnamese coffee shop. VOA’s Scott Stearns went to their café to hear their story.
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On Monday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee will begin four days of hearings on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, a critical step in the confirmation process that could make her the first black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. 

 

Jackson’s nomination by President Joe Biden last month fulfilled a campaign promise, made two years ago, in which Biden said that if he had the opportunity to nominate a new Supreme Court Justice, he would select a black woman.  

 

Twice-confirmed to federal judgeships already, and a third time to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Jackson is expected to be confirmed by the evenly-divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the deciding vote in the event of a 50-50 tie.  

 

However, Jackson has received some Republican support in the past, and it remains possible that the vote to confirm her could be bipartisan. 

 

Distinguished background 

Jackson, aged 51, was born in Washington but grew up in Miami, Florida. She attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, graduating magna cum laude in 1992, and returned a year later to attend Harvard Law School, where she served as supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She graduated in 1996. 

 After law school, Brown served as a clerk for judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. After a year in private practice, she secured a clerkship with Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose seat she has been nominated to fill. 

 

In addition to spending several years in private practice, Jackson served as an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C., representing clients before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. 

 

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama nominated Jackson for the United States Sentencing Commission, where she served as vice chair until 2014. In 2012, Obama nominated Jackson to a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and she was confirmed by the full Senate in March 2013. 

 

President Biden nominated Jackson to the seat she currently holds on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Jackson was confirmed in June 2021, with unanimous support from Senate Democrats as well as three Senate Republicans. 

In remarks after President Biden announced her nomination, Jackson said, “If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, I can only hope that my life and career, my love of this country and the Constitution, and my commitment to upholding the rule of law and the sacred principles upon which this great nation was founded, will inspire future generations of Americans.” 

 

Some controversy 

Jackson’s nomination has not been without controversy. Biden’s promise to elevate a black woman to the court was criticized, primarily by Republicans, as unnecessarily eliminating other qualified candidates from consideration.  

 

The White House noted that such promises are not without precedent. In 1980, then-Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan promised to name the first woman to the Supreme Court if he were elected. He later nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the court, and she was confirmed as the first female associate justice. 

 

Republicans have also criticized Jackson for her past work as a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, where she advocated for lowering minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine and other drug charges.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, appeared to be referring to that when, in recent remarks on Jackson’s nomination, he said, “This is a moment when issues relating to the law and the judiciary are directly hitting American families — from skyrocketing murders and carjackings; to soft-on-crime prosecutors effectively repealing laws; to open borders.”

Guantanamo Bay  

During her time as a public defender, Jackson represented accused terrorists held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a fact that a number of conservative news outlets have used to criticize her nomination. 

 

However, others point out that federal public defenders do not generally get to choose who they represent, and that it is their obligation to mount as effective a defense as possible within the bounds of the law, once they are assigned a client.  

 

Brown was also highly critical of the legal processes put in place at Guantanamo Bay — criticisms that gained traction in 2007, after the government’s chief prosecutor resigned, claiming that the system was engineered to prevent acquittals. 

Hearing as ‘introduction’ 

High-profile congressional hearings are often dismissed as political theater, but Christopher Schmidt, a  professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and co-director of the law school’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States, told VOA that hearings for Supreme Court nominees serve an important purpose. 

 

“It’s going to be an opportunity for the American people to learn something about Ketanji Brown Jackson,” he said. “That’s one thing that confirmation hearings still perform very well. There’s a lot of complaints about how they work for a variety of reasons. But one thing they do is introduce people to someone who, in most cases, they had never heard of before the nomination, and probably know relatively little about.” 

 

Schmidt said that given Jackson’s previous confirmations and the fact that her replacement of Justice Breyer is not expected to cause a significant ideological shift in the balance of the court, he does not expect her hearings to be particularly contentious. 

 

Speaking of Republican members of the committee, he said, “I think they’ll want to score some points about how they see the court, and obviously, the Biden administration. But I don’t know that they’re going to want to really have it be an aggressive hearing against this particular nominee.”  

 
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South Carolina has approved firing-squad executions, a method codified into state law last year after a decade-long pause in carrying out death sentences because of the state’s inability to procure lethal injection drugs.

The state Corrections Department said Friday that renovations have been completed on the death chamber in Columbia and that the agency had notified Attorney General Alan Wilson that it was able to carry out a firing-squad execution.

Lawmakers set about tweaking state law to get around the lethal injection drug situation.

Legislation that went into effect in May made the electric chair the state’s primary means of execution while giving inmates the option of choosing death by firing squad or lethal injection, if those methods are available.

During South Carolina’s lengthy debate, Democratic state Sen. Dick Harpootlian — a prosecutor-turned-criminal-defense lawyer — introduced the firing squad option. He argued that it presented “the least painful” execution method available.

“The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a while,” Harpootlian said. “If we’re going to have it, it ought to be humane.”

According to officials, the death chamber now also includes a metal chair, with restraints, in the corner of the room in which inmates will sit if they choose execution by firing squad. That chair faces a wall with a rectangular opening, 15 feet away, through which the three people will fire their weapons.

State officials also have created protocols for carrying out the executions. The three shooters, all volunteers who are employees of the Corrections Department, will have rifles loaded with live ammunition, with their weapons trained on the inmate’s heart.

A hood will be placed over the head of the inmate, who will be given the opportunity to make a last statement.

According to officials, Corrections spent $53,600 on the renovations.

Lethal injection drugs scarce

South Carolina is one of eight states to still use the electric chair and one of four to allow a firing squad, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

In June, the South Carolina Supreme Court blocked the planned executions of two inmates by electrocution, saying they cannot be put to death until they truly have the choice of a firing squad option set out in the state’s newly revised law.

The high court halted the scheduled executions of Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens, writing that officials needed to put together a firing squad so that inmates could really choose between that or the electric chair. The state’s plans, the court wrote in an unanimous order, were on hold “due to the statutory right of inmates to elect the manner of their execution.”

Now that a firing squad has been formed, the court will need to issue a new order for any execution to be carried out.

The executions were scheduled less than a month after the passage of the new law.

Prisons officials had previously said they still couldn’t obtain lethal injection drugs and have yet to put together a firing squad, leaving the 109-year-old electric chair as the only option.

Attorneys for the two men argued in legal filings that death by electrocution is cruel and unusual, saying the new law moves the state toward less humane execution methods.

They have also said the men have the right to die by lethal injection — the method both of them chose — and that the state hasn’t exhausted all methods to procure lethal injection drugs.

Lawyers for the state have maintained that prisons officials are simply carrying out the law, and that the U.S. Supreme Court has never found electrocution to be unconstitutional.

South Carolina’s last execution took place in 2011, and its batch of lethal injection drugs expired two years later. There are 37 men on the state’s death row.
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The Biden administration is in danger of cutting short its efforts to help vaccinate the world because U.S. lawmakers had slashed global pandemic response funds from the omnibus spending bill that President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this week.

The $1.5 trillion spending bill did not include $15.6 billion requested for COVID-19 response, of which $5 billion had been marked by the White House to fight the coronavirus around the world.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told VOA during a briefing Friday that the administration did not have an alternative plan for delivering the 700 million doses of vaccines remaining from the 1.2 billion doses it had pledged.

“We need additional funding to continue to be the arsenal of vaccines,” she said. “There is not a secret fund that we have not told you about to continue to provide the type of free programs we have in the United States or to provide the level of international assistance that we would like to continue to provide.”

A White House official confirmed that the 1.2 billion doses of vaccines had been purchased. The lack of funding, however, will devastate America’s ability to ensure recipient countries can effectively deploy them, and to provide tests, therapeutics, oxygen and humanitarian aid to countries still struggling to manage the pandemic.

The pandemic response fund was stripped following Republican lawmakers’ refusal to add new coronavirus spending unless it was offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

In early March, 36 Republican senators sent a letter (( )) to Biden saying that before they would consider additional COVID-19 requests, they wanted an accounting of how the federal government had allocated taxpayer funds to combat the pandemic. “Congress must receive a full accounting of how the government has already spent the first $6 trillion,” the letter said.

House Democrats have introduced a standalone COVID-19 relief bill, but it does not yet have the votes to pass both chambers of Congress.

Strategy pivot curtailed

Just last month, the administration said it would adjust its global pandemic response strategy, pivoting away from boosting vaccine supply and toward increasing delivery capacity. But now it can no longer finance Global Vax, its international initiative launched in December.

“Without additional funding to support getting shots into arms, USAID will have to curtail our growing efforts to turn vaccines into vaccinations — just as countries are finally gaining access to the vaccine supplies needed to protect their citizens,” said Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in a statement.

Humanitarian organizations criticized the removal of COVID-19 funding from the omnibus bill.

The U.S. will not be able to “keep up the fight against COVID at home and around the world — a serious concern given the rising surges in Asia and Europe,” said Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, in a statement to VOA.

Hart said that if large parts of the world remain vulnerable to the virus and its variants, Americans’ own health and economic recovery are at risk. “What should be a no-brainer after two years of a pandemic has proven impossible for world leaders and lawmakers to grasp: We will not end the pandemic anywhere until we end it everywhere. Congress can and must fix this,” Hart said.

Only 14.1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, according to Our World in Data.

While the U.S. remains the biggest vaccine donor (( )) by far, public health officials called the lack of global pandemic response funding “self-defeating.”

“American leadership for a robust and effective global response is the best pathway to end the pandemic, build resilient health systems, and be better prepared for future health security threats,” said Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

“We can’t fully protect the health and economic prosperity of Americans without doing more around the world,” Udayakumar told VOA.

The cut to pandemic response funding came as lawmakers agreed to $13.6 billion in assistance for Ukraine, including $6.5 billion to supply Kyiv with weapons as it battles Russia’s invasion and $6.7 billion for economic and humanitarian aid for the country.  
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