Censored News Celebrates 15 years Publishing Voices from the Land

Censored News Celebrates 15 years of Publishing Voices from the Land

By Brenda Norrell

Censored News

We are celebrating 15 years of publishing at Censored News. It was 15 years ago that I was terminated as a staff writer at Indian Country Today, after being censored. The editors threatened me, with termination, if I did not stop writing about grassroots Indigenous People. The threat was in writing. The newspaper had been sold to the new owners, a New York tribal government, in the late 1990s.

There was not only the censorship of Native people who live on the land, but there were the hidden agendas and other forms of censorship. The truth about casinos was forbidden -- the Las Vegas casino owners who exploited tribal sovereignty, the white casino management companies who hid the profits, and the detriment to local communities. There was also the cover-ups of the Washington DC wannabes -- both politicians and non-profits who benefited with power and money.

Today, we are happy to share with you, now 15 years later, those grassroots voices, the voices of Natives who live on the land, which the newspaper attempted to silence all those years ago in September of 2006. We lost some of our friends and great writers and voices who began with us, Lakota Debra White Plume, Yaqui Ceremonial Leader Jose Matus, and many others.

Still, today we have so many great friends and writers that continue with us at Censored News. We don't have advertising, secret grants, salaries or revenues, so there are no cash prizes, but we send out a heart-felt thanks to all of you who believed in us, helped us continue, and made Censored News one of a kind, free from the dollars and control of the exploiters and profiteers.

Thank you, Brenda. https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/

Photos: Debra White Plume giving the masquerading Lewis and Clark Expedition a symbolic blanket of small pox on the Missouri River in Chamberlain, South Dakota. Louise Benally of Big Mountain speaking out for the protection of the aquifer water stolen by Peabody Coal and the Navajo Generating Station on the Navajo Nation. 

Buffy Sainte Marie singing at Dine' College, where she was censored by Indian Country Today, when she described being blacklisted out of the U.S. music industry by Presidents Reagan and Johnson. Yaqui Ceremonial Leader Jose Matus in the mountains of Chiapas, serving as a human rights shield in a village as the Mexican government continued its assassinations of Zapatistas in 1995.

Onboard the trucks to the Zapatista stronghold near the Guatemala border in Chiapas. Tohono O'odham Mike Flores and Mohawk Mark Maracle at the Indigenous People Border Summit.

Gilbert Badoni, displays a family poster of Cold War uranium when he was a child. Even today, the radioactive tailings remain strewn in the Shiprock, N.M., region on the Navajo Nation.

Anishinaabe songmaster Keith Secola, and the unforgettable Lakota Floyd Westerman, supporting the Indigenous Border Summit on San Xavier, Tohono O'odham Nation, 2006. Photos by Brenda Norrell.