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Tribal stations: the great radio hope

Submitted by jonathan on Mon, 2007-10-15 08:22. Grassroots Media | Media
Justice | Radio | Newswire

by Neelanjana Banerjee, New America Media

When Native America Calling – a live, daily call-in radio program based in
Albuquerque, N.M. – started more than 12 years ago, they had a hard time
gaining people’s trust.

“The phones barely rang,” says host and producer Harlan McKosato. “The
native communities weren’t just going to call in right away because of
their distrust of media for painting them as ‘savages’ and ‘redskins.’”

Today, the show airs in 15 states and two countries on 52 stations,
attracting some 500,000 listeners with topics ranging from the
light-hearted (“Rezzed Out Weddings”) to serious community issues like meth
babies.

“Our job is really to be in tune with Native America, and then being able
to articulate that over the air waves,” says McKosato. “Now that they trust
us, it’s just a matter of pushing the button to get people to talk.”

But Native America Calling’s national success in connecting tribal
communities doesn’t solve the lack of telecommunications infrastructure
that plagues Indian Country.

The communications landscape hasn’t changed for Native Americans in the
last decade, according to Loris Ann Taylor, executive director of Native
Public Media, an organization dedicated to strengthening Native American
media capacity.

“On some Navajo land, they still don’t have telephone lines and sometimes
people can’t afford cell phones – and even if they can, reservations are
often black holes for cell phone service. A lot of reservations are nowhere
near connecting to the Internet,” Taylor says. “In this landscape, the
radio is their information highway.”

That’s why Taylor – dubbed the “Gospel Woman of Radio” – has been working
to ensure that there is a radio station in each tribal community. She says
that mainstream America is unaware of how important locally produced radio
is to the health and safety of Native communities.

On the weekly radio program “House Calls,” for example, which airs on a
Hopi radio station in Arizona, a local doctor answers questions from
listeners and discusses Native health issues. “This show is so important
because it is connecting the community with a local health care
specialist,” Taylor says. “It’s not a program that’s designed for them
somewhere else.”

But these shows are scarce in a media environment that largely ignores
Native news. At a recent conference of tribal leaders in California, Taylor
recalls, “they talked about how the mainstream media still did not carry
stories about their communities. They said it was like writing 5,000 press
releases and maybe getting one reported.”

Native America Calling may have half a million listeners, she adds, but it
is not enough.
“We have 562 tribal nations in this country,” she says, “and they want the
same freedom that the rest of America wants: the freedom to express
themselves.”

The national show sees itself as a connector between the local radio
stations that dot the Native media landscape. “At the beginning, the whole
idea was to create a conversation that would link these tribal stations in
remote areas – because they don’t have the Internet, they don’t have
cable,” says McKosato. “What they have is radio.”

The program now serves primarily as a way to bring Native news to audiences
in cities like Spokane, Billings, Boise and Flagstaff, McKosato says. “Even
though the show’s become an urban thing – most of our listeners are in D.C.
– they want to be connected back to the Rez.”

In the last decade that McKosato has been working on the radio show, he
says the core issues of the Native community haven’t changed. “It’s about
identity, first and foremost. That’s the core issue. It’s about our
relationships with non-natives, our relationships with state and federal
governments, and with other minority communities.”

Cristina Azocar, president of the Native American Journalists Association,
says the strength of Native America Calling comes from its recognition of
diversity. “They help recognize the differences among us, which mainstream
media doesn’t when it comes to Native issues,” she says. “You can really
see the diversity of opinions around Indian Country by listening to the
show.”

They aren’t afraid of controversial topics, either, she adds. “I was on a
show a year and a half ago talking about Native American identity issues.
We were talking about Rez life versus non-Rez and blood quantum issues and
what makes someone an Indian. It got really heated and that made it really
interesting.”

In order to bring more Native broadcasters into conversations like this
one, Native Public Media is pushing tribal nations to take advantage of the
Federal Communications Commission’s window to apply for a non-commercial
educational broadcast FM license, which is open from Oct. 9 to Oct. 15,
2007.

But it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

“What’s happening is that [radio] spectrum is a finite resource like land
and water,” Taylor says. Available FM radio spectrum goes between 88 and
108 megahertz, and once those frequencies are secured in a certain area,
there aren’t any left for Native communities. “The likelihood of getting
frequencies in Phoenix is unlikely. There are other areas where it’s locked
out. The Cherokee in North Carolina are locked out; there aren’t any
frequencies available.”

Taylor says her group has been trying to educate Native American
representatives about the importance of securing frequencies for Native
radio stations, but they are concerned with more pressing issues like
housing and education. Because Native Public Media only started working on
this two years ago, she adds, they are “playing catch-up.”

Native Public Media, however, will testify on Native telecommunications
issues in front of Congress on Oct. 24. “This means that while the FCC’s
rules on media ownership are being forged, we’re still working on
education,” Taylor says. “It’s like we moved into the house while it was
still being built.”

Taylor says if they aren’t able to secure radio stations for all the tribal
nations, they will have to look at new platforms of communication and delve
into the FCC conversations on broadband and Internet neutrality. “It’s like
this whole universe just opened up and there’s this critical conversation
going on, but we’re just a small voice at the table.”