Acee Agoyo and several friends founded the online news portal Indianz.Com in a Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment in 1999 when he was a student at MIT. Agoyo says the lack of news and features about Indigenous Americans in mainstream media was a key reason, and he wanted to produce content that reflected Native American communities from the inside out. Agoyo attended the November 2022 White House Native American Heritage Month commemoration—the first of its kind—and says while it was an important event, much more outreach is needed to ensure that Indigenous voices are heard. [Transcript | Video]
5 takeaways:
➀ Family reunions can be a good thing. Though he’s based in Washington, D.C. and covers politics, Agoyo says he found out about the White House celebrating Native American Heritage Month only when a friend called from New Mexico to say he was headed to DC for the event. “At first I thought he was joking,” Agoyo said, until he opened an email with a copy of the invitation. Along with several of his relatives who were coming, Agoyo said he also knew some of the performers scheduled to appear. “One of them is actually a distant relative of mine. And her father was coming along and he lives in our village as well. So, for me, to have somebody from my own community perform at the White House and to have been invited to the White House, I was very immensely proud of that.”
However, after arriving, Agoyo was disappointed to see that he was the only Native American journalist in the briefing room. In fact, “There was no other media waiting. I thought I would recognize or I would see a fellow native journalist that was invited.” Agoyo thinks the White House missed an important opportunity to identify and include Indigenous journalists in the event and to also stimulate more participation by mainstream media.
➁ Technological advances helped fuel increased coverage of Indigenous communities. Agoyo said his technology background helped shape the vision for Indianz.Com. Because many Indigenous communities are in rural areas, his creative partners sought a way to get information to people more quickly.
That pursuit was especially helpful for community activists and advocates seeking to educate the public. “A lot of the things that we focus on involves a lot of research. It involves a lot of understanding, technical terms, even legal terms. And so, you have to spend a lot of time understanding why Indian law and policy is so complex, complicated, or sometimes it’s just outright outrageous. And to do that, we utilize our technical and educational backgrounds to understand Indian law policy from that perspective.”
Being online is a blessing, Agoyo said. “You can actually show people the treaty that you’re talking about. You can actually show people the law that you’re talking about. You can actually show people where the information comes from directly, which is not as easy to do when you’re doing a print version of a news publication. So, from that angle, we try to give people as much as information as possible, we try to give people historical information because a lot of these incidences, a lot of these controversies, they’re not new. They’re rooted in decades of fights, decades of advocacy, decades that have been fought by people who came long before us.”
➂ Access to Information helps right wrongs. Historically, Indigenous people have been denied the opportunity to speak in so many different ways, Agoyo said. “And when you look at newspapers that are based near reservations, it’s very racist, it’s very discriminatory. So when your local newspaper calls you dirty names and write stories about your community that are obviously biased, that informs your upbringing and your beliefs. And when you are a minority among other people, that does affect how news is presented about you. So, in order to counteract those kinds of historic sentiments, we try to get people as much information as possible.”
➃ The relationship between Indigenous tribes and the United States is nation to nation. It’s a relationship that’s based on the sovereignty of tribes and the sovereignty of the United States, Agoyo said. “So, when we talk about our right to speak up, it’s written in the Constitution, and we should be able to voice that right and to express and exercise that whenever we want. And that’s why you’ll see a lot of tribal newspapers. Almost every tribe has a newspaper or at least a newsletter, and that’s how they have to get information out to their community.”
➄ Indigenous communities need more independent media voices. Agoyo said tribal politicians are very much like their counterparts on Capitol Hill. “They don’t like it when you ask questions. They don’t like it when you wonder what they’re doing or what they’re spending the money on, or sometimes even when they’re indicted in federal court. So, there has to be a really big focus on mainstream media to start focusing on native people.” He also believes tribal leaders should amplify the story-telling traditions within their communities.
The Widening the Pipeline Fellowship is sponsored by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, Bayer, J&J, Twitter and Lenovo. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
