Who Will Be Our First Founding Member? The new Indian Country Today is launching a membership drive and an auction. Top bid will be forever known as Indian Country Today’s: “First Founding Member.”
Indian Country Today is back! The NCAI has taken over, and this is grand news.
From September through February I have heard about the importance of saving Indian Country Today. So many people across Indian Country had the same idea:
What if … What if we all contribute?
What if I step up to make certain Indian Country has solid, accurate, fair reporting?
Is it worth it to save this voice? A national media platform for Indian concerns? And how much will it take?
Yes. Yes. And the answer is a lot — or perhaps a few tax-deductible dollars if we all contribute together.
We are building a new Indian Country Today on a public media model. We will have some advertising, but most of our resources will come from members, tribes, enterprises, and non-profits.
We need you.
We are launching a membership drive and an auction.
The membership drive will solicit help from our “members” as $100 Founding Members, $500 Sustaining Members, and $1,000 for Premier Members.
Unlike public media we don’t have nifty gifts as a thank you. No t-shirts. No coffee mugs. Just a better news report. We want to use the money to build our news operation, a multimedia reporting platform about what’s going on across Indian Country. We’ll stretch your dollars by partnering with other organizations, and amplify our reporting by letting others repurpose our editorial content.
We will serve.
This is great news, but to work, ICT needs help from people. If you can drop a few dollars into the fund, please do, and if you can’t do that, please, please, spread the word, get it out everywhere! You can read more by Mark Trahant at Indian Country today, or go straight to the membership drive. This is so very important, it’s vital for Indigenous peoples to have a voice. Also, be sure to check out the new edition, there’s all manner of interesting reading!
ETA: I should point out that it’s possible to donate $5.00 to the membership drive, which is all I can manage right now, but I’ll be dropping more fives each week.
This is indeed great news. If you’re not familiar with just how important the work of ICMN/ICT can be, check out this NCAI/NIGA joint open letter published by the site. Though you should read the whole thing, you can get a hint of the importance from these two paragraphs:
Diversity in your media diet is also important. Though it in no way substitutes for ICMN/ICT, I’ve found many good stories at CBC’s Unreserved. It represents my bias, of course, but I found this audio segment (and it’s accompanying text story) to be an interesting and good story, and part of what Unreserved does well.
Of course, they also do lots of stories on culture and arts, and though I’m glad they’re there I’m still an academic and law geek at heart.
So yes: celebrate ICMN/ICT’s return and give them money if you can, but if you’re not already cued into multiple sources of indigenous news, for FSM’s sake don’t stop there. Try the Indigenous Power Hour and RCNR to enrich the West Coast USian perspective. Try Sne’waylh to pick up some of the basics of Coast Salish language (focussing on Squamish). Metis Matters addresses stories from across Canada of particular interest to Metis people and if you’re outside the PNW just go anywhere podcasts are collected and search for terms relevant to your own area and the indigenous peoples who live in your area now or traditionally did in the past.
I’m going to tell my friends about this!
Thank you so much, Joseph! I am so excited, and it will be great to do some blogging via ICT again. My other main source is the Lakota Country Times, but it’s subscription only, so I can’t link back for full stories, and I don’t like it when I can’t provide the full source.
CD, that’s kinda bordering on spam, had to fish you out of the filter. I appreciate your focus on Canadian efforts, and there could certainly be more blogging about indigenous issues in Canada, especially from Canadian people. I would love to see my fellow bloggers here writing occasionally about Indigenous issues, rather than people seeming to feel I’m the only one who should do that sort of thing. Here’s hoping lots of people click on your links, but that really shouldn’t have waited for a post by me to come up in the first place.
That said, in this thread, I’d prefer to focus on ICT right now, as people in UStates are stunningly ignorant when it comes to native peoples, let alone issues. I have written before about the sheer amount of white people who are surprised there are actually living, breathing Indians. And worse. Much worse. It can also be like trying to forcibly pull teeth to get people to actually click their fucking mouse and go read a Native paper. People here are highly resistant to doing that, and more often than not, resentful and suspicious of any paper which is not majority white. Most of the people who hang out here and did regularly read ICT are European. (Not all, but most).
ICT also has a global outlook, and are one of the few papers who spent time on issues faced by Indigenous people around the world. It was, and hopefully, will again be a unique journalistic force.
Good point, Caine. I’ll make better future efforts.
“I would love to see my fellow bloggers here writing occasionally about Indigenous issues, rather than people seeming to feel I’m the only one who should do that sort of thing.”
I’ll keep this in mind.
I was going to post about Jason Pero and Colten Boushie in the past few months, but I found I didn’t really have anything to say other than how enraging and fucked those situations are. And I usually don’t post when I don’t think I have anything meaningful to add.
Well, not having nifty gifts sounds good to me, as they are rarely something that is truly needed and humanity could do well with less waste and less useless stuff in general. But anyway, this seems indeed important, I can’t donate much, but I made a small contribution.
I Have Forgiven Jesus:
I think anything you would have to say would be meaningful, especially as Native Lives slide right by most peoples’ consciousness, and if anything, raising that consciousness and awareness is crucial to changing attitudes. Also, these efforts need to be made by all people, not just Indians, because to a great extent, we are still perceived as being outside the circle of humanity, and that will never change if people refuse to speak up.
Nightjar:
That’s all I could do myself, and every penny counts, so thank you very much.
I got the email asking for donations and support, and for once I think I can manage a drop in the great sea. I really hope they get it up and running again, it was a great source and resource!