Employee resource group at NPR hosts Indigenous Affairs Fly-in

By Sommer Hill

Published November 29, 2023 at 3:02 PM EST

Social media senior associate, Sommer Hill, talked with Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, Associate Producer at Planet Money and Sequoia Carrillo, Education Desk Reporter about their experience hosting the first Indigenous Affairs Fly-In conference at NPR HQ.

Why was it important for you to host this Fly-In?

Sequoia

We're a pretty small ERG (employee resource group) and we've been trying to figure out a way to incorporate our Member station colleagues that also identify as Indigenous to feel more invested in and seen by the newsroom at NPR HQ. And so I think that our goal with this fly-in, and we hope that what ended up being the result of it for many of our colleagues who flew in, is that they just feel like a little bit more a part of our community and they feel more comfortable and excited about working with the NPR national brand.

And can you tell me a little bit about the process of putting this together?

Sequoia

I pitched this idea to my editor [Steve Drummond] in January, so it took a long time. We did a fly-in for the education team and after that I suggested we should do something like this for the ERG. And he's such a big proponent and has always really helped us. I took it to Sam and we started talking about it. It was something we'd discussed long before, but we'd always wanted to find a way to just be more present with our Member station reporters, because there's a larger Native population in our Member stations than there are at NPR HQ. But this idea of the fly-in, we officially started going for it in the beginning of this year and we looped in the training team, Sarah Richards was such a huge, huge help in doing all of this. She was project manager for this and Keith Woods also was a huge proponent and incredible to work with.

Sam

I'm pretty sure this is something that either when we first spoke or when we first started the ERG, this was an idea that you (Sequoia) had. You said, "We definitely need to be more in conversation with Member station reporters." Because it feels, like Sequoia mentioned, newsrooms lean on [Native member station reporters] a good deal. There's only so much we can do internally. But in terms of the people who are actually in these tribal communities and reporting on them consistently and doing that work of, not parachute journalism, but of sticking with the community and reporting on them continuously throughout the year and following up on big stories. We really do rely on them as a network for reporting like that. Then they all kind of feel separate. They kind of all feel in their own world. So this was a good opportunity to bring them all together, put faces to names and give more of a structure to how we could communicate with each other and make them feel supported as reporters, rather than just kind of relying on them to provide us the content and the important journalism that they do.

I know that you all did this to look for opportunities for partnership and collaboration. So what does that look like now moving forward, were you able to create those relationships?

Sam

It feels like there was a good deal of business card swapping at the end of the two days. I think what we wanted to do and a lot of the goals of the sessions were for people to have their own ideas for stories, for series and know who to go to if they want to follow up on any ideas. It was about putting faces to names, so they feel a little bit more comfortable pitching ideas to newsrooms. So we had a session with Sami Yenigun (ATC) and Eric Whitney (Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief) from ATC and they talked about pitching and I think having basically the people who are accepting these pitches, telling you how to pitch gives them a concrete way to approach Sami or Eric in the future with an idea for something that can come from them rather than NPR reaching out and being like, can you cover this story?

Do you see opportunity for this type of thing to continue to happen?

Sam

Definitely.

Sequoia

Yeah, we definitely were learning so much this time. It was really just how much we can get done in the first year. And as we got closer and closer to the event, we got so much interest not only from teams within NPR that we wish we could have incorporated, but also even more Member stations and people who hadn't seen the initial asks over the summer and they wanted to participate. And it was just too late this year. But we definitely feel good about doing it again, and I definitely think that it should be something that happens every year and hopefully it'll be bigger and better next year.

What do you think that NPR could be doing to continue this momentum of sharing these stories and developing these relationships?

Sam

I feel like we need a Tribal Affairs Desk.

Sequoia

I would love an Indigenous Affairs Correspondent. We've been trying to do that forever. But I think that it often does fall to us. And we have lots of people who are fantastic allies in the network and especially in our programming division. I feel like people are always looking out and pitching stories and they love to loop us and it's always great. Sam and I both have our own jobs. I work in Education, and he works on Planet Money. So as much as I can pitch stories about Indigenous affairs, as much as I want, I still have my own job. And it would be great if this was someone's job to really bring in stories like this.

Sam

But a good example is that we had Meghanlata Gupta, who is a former intern to Nina Totenberg, join for this and a lot of her role in helping Nina this past summer was in covering the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) case in the Supreme Court. And it's something where, if I was asked to give notes on a script about that, there's only so deep I could go because I just don't have that legal knowledge. I don't have that in-depth knowledge about ICWA. That definitely seemed like a good decision to loop in somebody to give support on a story like that. But I wonder if there's a possibility for that to be a year-round thing to cover stories that concern Indian Country. Somebody who has that expertise to cover that in a way that is more in-depth. I'm very much on an amateur level of understanding Indian affairs, so to have somebody on the team who would be able to speak to that or who would be able to edit people about that in a more in-depth way, I've definitely always been saying we need that at NPR. You know, we covered national news and there's so much Indian country in America and we're 3% of the population. It seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

So what were some of the feedback and responses that you got from the attendees? How did they feel about the event?

Sam

We sent a survey and people filled that out and then also sent email responses, which was very nice. People just really enjoyed being able to see folks from all over different Member stations that again, they probably have heard their name on the radio, have seen their name in bylines and just were very big admirers of their work. And then to see them in person and get to talk with them, and you could feel a real electricity when people get really into talking about stories, that it's clear that they don't get to talk about them all that often or get to go in-depth as they usually can. And so that was definitely something that people took away there. People were just blown away by the expertise in the room and by the chance to see all these people. Usually you're the only person in the newsroom who is talking about tribal affairs and to get a chance, once or twice a year, to talk with other people about that, you could tell people just really opened up. There are times where you just get the ball rolling with a topic and people are more than willing to talk about it amongst themselves. There's just a ton of expertise between people.

Sequoia

I think that like the idea that we feel small as an ERG sometimes at NPR and then I look at areas of the country where like Native news is such a huge part of their regional news, and yet in those newsrooms it's still like such a small part of the Member station. And so it was great to just see a sense of community developing across the nationwide network that we don't often get in our own newsrooms.

Stories shared at the conference: