Setting The Record Straight

For many American Indians, the media coverage of the Red Lake tragedy is only the most recent example of how modern reservation life and tribal culture are mischaracterized.

By Garry Boulard

Dr. Jon Quistgaard is unhappy with the way the national media has

“This is actually a very vibrant area and we have many things going for us in terms of educational offerings and being a community that interacts positively with Native Americans and vice versa,” says Quistgaard, president of Bemidji State University, “and for that reason I did not want people to go away with an impression that really wasn’t accurate.”

That such coverage is even a matter of discussion is the result of a tragedy: On March 21, Jeffrey Weise, a 16-year-old student at the reservation’s Red Lake High School, went on a shooting rampage inside the school, killing nine people before turning his gun on himself.
The national media descended on both Red Lake and Bemidji in the days and weeks after the slayings. In many cases, reporters who were unfamiliar with the area and its people described the reservation and its outlying areas in terms that many residents considered either offensive or exaggerated.

National Public Radio’s Greg Allen, for example, characterized the reservation as a place where “poverty and unemployment are chronic problems.” A CBS broadcast called the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe, “one of the poorest in the state,” while The Chicago Tribune’s Don Wycliff, in a column describing the difficulties that reporters encountered trying to piece together a story that took place in a remote rural section of the state, said Red Lake “is on the other side of the moon.”

“The media reports also characterized the surrounding region as devoid of resources, sensitivity and prosperity,” Quistgaard wrote in a column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press on May 24, adding that “these narrow perceptions overshadow the numerous strengths of the tribe and the larger Bemidji area community, which are inexorably linked.”