The Ones Who Don't Matter

Julia Gogol
jg152015@ohio.edu

"Some people in our culture count, and some people don't."

These were the words spoken by Mary Annette Pember at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism's "90 Minutes" series this past Wednesday night.  Pember, a Cincinnati-based award-winning journalist and citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, came to the university to speak about sexual assault in Indian country specifically, but also the rest of the United States.

"The National Crime Information Center reports that, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database, NamUs, only logged 116 cases," according to the Urban Indian Health Institute.

We as Americans pride ourselves on being the "melting pot," but we seem to have forgotten what exactly that means.  How long has it been since we've had equal opportunity for all?  Have we ever?

More than 84 percent of native women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, while U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute 67 percent of sexual violence cases occurring on tribal lands, according to a report from the Native American Journalists Association.

Police clearly aren't taking charge and fighting to change this statistic.  It's usually the small activist groups that make any headway on this topic at all.  But we as journalists can take the first steps to helping.

As journalists, we sometimes go into a story with a predetermined ending, we'll call it the "ideal" way we want our story to end.  But our interviews and our subjects don't always turn out the way we plan.  Pember recalled countless times when journalists she was with were so engrossed with taking notes so they could give a good story to their editor, that they would never look up from their pen and paper and just be.

In the case of reporting sexual violence, we as interviewers can sometimes be the only outlet for our subjects to talk to, and we need to take that into consideration.  We must take into account the history and heritage of the people we are writing about, especially when it comes to native women.

Courtesy of Anthro Feminism

Perhaps, Pember explained, men view native women as "spoils of the conquest."  Like they deserve to take these women because their bodies are devalued to simply being part of the land.  Feasibly, men don't care about these women's bodies because they don't see them as women.  Because of their native heritage, they are just bodies for the taking.

It is in our best ethical interest to report about these cases and these women with the utmost respect.  We cannot have predetermined stereotypes or judgement.

Back in the 80s in the police room, they had an expression, Pember said.  "NHI."  It stood for "No Humans Involved."  This was term they used to describe cases involving missing or murdered women of color.

The ones who didn't matter.

But the thing is, these women do matter.  They matter just as much as you or I or the police chief himself.  And we need to start showing this in our journalistic work.  Everyone deserves fair representation, and everyone deserves to matter.