Archives aren’t neutral: How reporters covering Indigenous issues can push back

My journey to launching an Indigenous news service began last August when I dropped my only daughter off at Loyola Marymount University in Southern California.

I hugged her and told her I had taken the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford to make our lives better.

I flew back to Minnesota to pack up the place we’d lived together for the last four years. It was our safe haven overlooking a leafy corner of Cedar and Lake Nokomis Parkway with a short walk to my favorite lake in the city. Between tears, I sorted through boxes of all her school spelling tests, artwork and ribbons awarded to her as a student of the month in Minneapolis Public Schools.

I packed what I could in my red Jeep and took the familiar 10 hour drive down I-35, through Iowa and Missouri, into Oklahoma, as I had done countless times before as a reporter. It was hard to leave behind these places where I’ve built my professional career.

Through the summer heat, deserts, torrential rainstorms in New Mexico and Arizona, and traffic in California, I drove to Stanford University. I knew I was just a particle in the universe. This was the beginning of a new assignment in California, my home state, that no editor would’ve trusted me with: get to know who I was.

I came to this fellowship wanting to understand more about Indigenous identity. To make a reporting guide, to talk to people about being California Indian and to help those who don’t cover California’s Indigenous population understand us better. I realized that I couldn’t do that without knowing more about myself and my family and where I/we come from.

Throughout this fellowship, my goals also changed about what I wanted to focus on. Reporting on Indigenous identity isn’t on a nine-month timeline. It’s a lifetime’s worth of work. It also deserves a place to land, which is why I am hoping to start my own Indigenous led news service in California that is led by California Indians for California Indians with support from the Listening Post Collective.

Archives aren’t neutral

The University of California at Berkeley has one of the largest holdings of Indigenous artifacts waiting to be repatriated. It’s the place where the late Dr. Alfred Kroeber, a well known anthropologist, began the study of California Indians. His reputation is both celebrated and vilified among California’s Indigenous populations. He opposed racism and eugenics and advocated for Indigenous people, while others criticized his collection of Indigenous artifacts and said he harmed Indigenous people.

However you choose to characterize him, his work created an important record: an archive that we can use to tell, and in some cases, rewrite our own history.

During a visit to the University’s Bancroft Library, I requested a binder full of books containing photos of California Indians from a collection belonging to C. Hart Merriam, a biologist and zoologist that visited California Indians into the 1930’s.

As I turned to one page towards the back of the book, I gasped. There, among the pages were photos of my grandma Anna Herrera (née Forsting), great grandmother Felista Forsting Rosas and my great, great grandma I’d never seen. These photos were taken in 1934 when my grandmother was just 13 years old in a place her family had lived called Toro Canyon, or Toro Creek, as she had told me it was called.

The pictures had been tucked away among boxes sitting on shelves. I had so many questions: Who took these photos? Why were my family members important enough to merit fifty photos on film? What were they talking about and what information did they withhold when talking to outsiders? Why was this recorded and who else knew about these archives?

UC Berkeley also has an important language archive that contains recordings and more boxes of detailed notes about California Indian languages-including my language, the Salinan. They include recordings of my relatives, reading the language and telling stories about the beginning and end of the world.

To hear their voices and see their faces in these archives is beautiful, breathtaking and heartbreaking.

Participating in this fellowship gave me an opportunity to unearth these important truths about my family’s past and a path to tell stories about it.