Journalists: The Gift of Being Present

For journalists, the gift of being present is the greatest gift

By Brenda Norrell
Censored News
Photo: On the road to Zapatista Stronghold by Brenda Norrell

It is often the simplest memory, the simplest truth, that is the most profound: Riding in the back of a cargo truck through Zapatista country in Chiapas, wearing our red bandannas; driving into Pine Ridge from the south, with the sky as a painter's palette; and hiking outside my log cabin in the Navajo Chuskas, watching for wild turkey, black bear and acorns.

It is often the simplest truth in a news story that returns to our minds in the years that follow: Hopi and Japanese revealing how water has intelligence and changes its appearance in response to positive words, or Navajo elder Howard McKinley remembering eating wild baked yucca bananas in Tse Ho Tso and how the ice from Blue Canyon was cut, hauled by wagon, and stored in the rock houses of finely chiseled stone.

This is why it matters to be present as journalists. The new cyber journalism, with editors telling journalists that it is OK to stay home and plagiarize the web, or rewrite others hard work and add a phone call interview to disguise it, are committing a crime of journalism. Besides being paid for others work, and publishing articles with content errors, these editors are denying journalists a precious gift.

It is the gift of being present. It is the gift of great and beautiful memories. It is the gift of sharing some vital truth when you see the speakers eyes, smell the blue corn cooking for lunch, taste the tamales steamed in banana leaves, and see the resilience within the young mother grinding corn.

It is the gift of riding horseback on Arapaho's Wind River, and on the back of a Harley in Green Bay. It is the gift of crossing the border one more time, going beyond the saguaros at sunset and seeing just one more time, where the desert meets the sea. It is the gift of smelling the damp red earth after a great rain and hearing words spoken which may never be spoken again.

It is the gift of swimming in rivers.

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Brenda Norrell has been a reporter in Indian country for 34 years, beginning as a staff reporter for Navajo Times and stringer for AP and USA Today. After serving as a longtime staff reporter for Indian Country Today, she was censored and terminated. As a result, she created Censored News, now in its 10th year with no ads or grants. She is blacklisted by all the paying media.

For permission to republish this article: brendanorrell@gmail.com

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Photos by Brenda Norrell: Photo 1: Mike Flores, Tohono O'odham and Mark Maracle, Mohawk, Indigenous Border Summit, San Xavier, Tohono O'odham land in Arizona. Photo 2: Bolivia, in mountains and home community of President Evo Morales as Morales played soccer, during Mother Earth Conference 2010. Photo 3: Dine' (Navajo) relocation resister Roberta Blackgoat protesting Peabody Coal mining and aquifer theft on Black Mesa, during Flagstaff, Arizona, protest. Photo 4: Jean Whitehorse, Dine', exposing the sterilization of American Indian women during AIM West Conference in San Francisco. Photo 5: Comcaac (Seri) in Sonora, Mexico.

Photos below from Sonora, Mexico by Brenda Norrell