“Alexa, play the Rocky soundtrack.” Thursday night, I cleaned my house, while my four-year-old and eleven-year-old swirled with laughs, coughs from allergies and sibling bickering. I needed music. I needed to clean. Now I need to write.
Writing, music, dancing, and cleaning (apparently) all have helped me cope. My anger has now turned into sadness. Seeing in writing that a memorial scholarship meant to elevate Indigenous voices will not be awarded because of an interpretation of law almost shut me down again here.
There are more than 850 members in the Indigenous Journalists Association. Ohio University has had Indigenous journalism students, including one that just started a prominent Indigenous Affairs job. But, sadly, the system here — as evidenced by the deletion of scholarships — does not support them.
Ohio University could be more inclusive of Indigenous students, but from my experience here, I am not sure it wants to be. The university systems make it hard, and it falls on the faculty member who supports the initiative. I am pretty popular at OU during November, when I can benefit someone, but now when Indigenous people and students need someone to stand up for their scholarships, silence. Choices turn into law.
On Friday, I woke up at 5 a.m., nauseous and unable to sleep. I walked into my office, after dropping off my child at school around 9 a.m. and I still felt like I wanted to vomit. My office door is on the corner of the College Green; I can see the Class Gateway where graduating students will don their best smiles and snap a quick phone photo.
Those smiles may look a lot less like me in years to come. Both women and minorities have been deleted from support. I am not going to go over everything that has happened here. My director, Dr. Eddith Dashiell, said it better than I can and has been saying it for a while.
On my LinkedIn page, I wrote that my best academic advice in light of the disheartening and discouraging changes being made is the following: If you have donated money to a university, in any capacity, to help an underserved community, pull it now and donate it directly to the individual or organizations that serve them. These include the Indigenous Journalists Association, National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association , South Asian American Journalists Association, The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists , and Trans Journalists Association.
These organizations will need to become the “academic banks,” for underserved communities. I write“academic banks” to refer to the limited amount of money that universities — and other institutions — have used to support these communities. My guess is it is far less than most realize. The positive is that if nonprofit organizations support these students, there will most likely be more transparency than public institutions, which are bogged down with fear, forms and frameworks to make it hard to get information.
There are reasons society needed a Black Press and Indigenous Press. In my experience, people who hate journalists, people who try to attack our profession, people who try to take us over and people who don’t respond to us, hide from the light of truth. They do that to maintain their own power and control, which usually benefits them and people like them.
Journalists, like those trained in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, follow a code of ethics and chronicle history. Who has the opportunity to chronicle this history may be more limited considering funding is now being deleted. To have a more accurate and well-sourced history, we must have a more equitable one.
Now time to get out my “Sage Against the Machine” shirt.
LaPoe thanks Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton at Tulsa World and Megan Diehl at The Post for discussions as she created this piece.