Three years ago this fall, I was at the United Nations discussing violence on women like me, both as a journalist and a survivor, and whose stories have never really garnered attention the way it's been devoted to Gabby Petito this week. 

At the time, I was quite invested in chronicling the "Missing and Murdered" movement in Indian Country, the campaign calling attention to the insane rate at which Native women in America are disappeared or found dead.

According to the Department of Justice, studies indicate the murder rate for Indigenous women is ten times higher than the national average. The majority of these cases are ice cold. 

In Wyoming, Lynette Grey Bull who resides on the Wind River Reservation less than two hours from where Gabby's remains were identified on Tuesday, was quick to point out the disparities on MSNBC.

"We are still facing inequality across the board, whether it comes to our community, housing, jobs," she said. "It’s no different when it comes to missing, murdered Indigenous women and girls."

Her words were backed up by a report released in January from the Wyoming Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples Task Force which found that at least 710 Indigenous people, mostly girls, had reportedly disappeared (though half of the missing were found within a week).

"Why aren't any of these cases receiving national media attention?" asked the broadcasters as their frenzied coverage over Gabby's real-time, true-crime played out.

The answer is pretty simple, but a hard truth for my industry to accept:  racism, a word I don't use carelessly in this regard.

According to the Pew Research Center, today's newsrooms are  the whitest workplaces - not just in "the media industry" but in all occupations and industries in America combined.

The latest data comes from a survey conducted between 2012-2016 in which more than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees – those who work as reporters, editors, photographers and videographers in the newspaper, broadcasting and internet publishing industries – are white and male.  That is true of 65% of U.S. workers total.

Pair those statistics with another figure: $150,000 which is about how much I raised in 2018 to self-finance my investigation into the "Missing and Murdered" crisis.  Then take into account another number: zero.  That's how many editors out of a pool of eight agreed to collaborate with me. 

To be clear, as an independent journalist, I self-finance all of my reporting simply because so few newsrooms have invested in stories like Standing Rock.  And the editors I reached out to about my "Missing and Murdered" project were people I knew; some whom I had worked with in the past. 

Now add something else to your analysis. 

Out of the eight editors I approached, half of them circled back to me in the course of our talks, not to discuss my investigation, but to pick my brain about Indian Country.

One editor used my scheduled pitch session with his team as a way to squeeze in a "cultural sensitivity" training that I had never agreed to. Nevermind that I'm not even qualified in this important field of work, even if I am a person of color.

The missteps are so wildly offensive that they're almost hard to believe. But they're true and they came from white men and one white woman leading some of the most powerful investigative units in the business.  Here are a few of their redacted emails. 

This story, the "Missing and Murdered" movement had all the traction it needed to be a household identified issue three years ago but was dismissed by an industry that today is scratching its head over why police can kill people in broad daylight; over why Gabby Petito's life is valued more than Pepita Redhair, Mitzi Eagleshield, and on and on. 

One solution has been to hire more journalists of color but few know what it means to tokenize, and to that end, understands the fallout that that often brings.  It means it's easier to toss up hands and say, it's just too hard. 

In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, which has laid bare so much abuse and disharmony in America, including in our newsrooms, I don't know if this newsletter is a detachment from an industry that has shaped my entire adulthood. What I do know is that it sows me directly back to my Indigenous roots of telling our own stories in the way we've always managed: from the bottom-up.  As the late great Oglala journalist, Charles Trimble wrote, for the longest time, newsletters were all that there were.

As I wrap it up, here are a few links germane to this week's theme including: 

• the Pew's 2021 State of the Media report with completely excludes Indigenous journalists
• please absorb Jenny Abamu's exit interview from WAMU
• and give this New Yorker interview a listen between Jelani Cobb and the last-living member of the 1968 Kerner Commission, Fred Harris, one of Indian Country's earliest advocates in Washington
• then visit the Indigenously Bookshelf to learn more about the Kerner Commission Report - now a New York Times best-seller
• and I've also added a title I return to again and again, News for All the People 

"I'm working on decolonizing my belief systems. Your work helps my work."

Mary, the Internet

Thank you for sharing and caring, Mary.