The State Of Native American Public Radio Public Radio Stations on Indian Reservations
As this is being written, there are more than 3 dozen public radio stations broadcasting on Indian reservations, and another three dozen Indian groups that have Construction Permits from the FCC to build new reservation-based Native American public radio stations.
This report was prepared in 1987 on behalf of the Native American Radio Training Project, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and carried out by Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium, now known as Native American Public Telecommunications, Inc.
The project provided on-site technical assistance to reservation-based Native public radio stations, and a team of us spent nearly a year during 1986-87 visiting a dozen Native radio stations on Indian reservations across the West to provide skills workshops and management support. During the course of the project, I spent at least one week on-site at eight different Indian broadcast stations, and I made return trips to four.
While CPB required a final report from the Training Project, they requested only a narrow accounting of project activities. They did not request nor were they expecting a major analysis of the state of the Native radio stations at that time.
However, I had observed a number of shared conditions and issues that carried across a large group of Native broadcast stations. Because the operating circumstances and reservation conditions were unlike most public radio stations, I knew that Native stations were radically different from the concerns of nearly all other public radio stations and also that these issues were invisible within the system as a whole.
Consequently, I thought this was an important opportunity to introduce the system to Native and reservation radio, and give CPB and all of public radio, a broad picture of the importance and unique problems facing radio stations in Indian Country.
I prepared this extensive assessment on my own initiative, and the opinions and conclusions were solely my own. The findings and recommendations in the report were based on my direct observations and activities at the Native stations, as well as drawing from my extensive experience with community radio station operations nationally and my familiarity with national public radio issues and policies.
For nearly a decade, this was the only overview available that described Native radio or Indian broadcasting.
Frank Blythe, Executive Director of NAPT at the time, made it possible to include these findings in the final project report and I have been very pleased that it has been used heavily as a major planning document and guide to strengthening Native stations.
Native radio has changed a great deal since I wrote this paper – conditions on many reservations have improved, and now there are many more stations. Reservation stations can get outstanding Native-produced national programming, a 24-hour satellite program network is in place, and there is a much higher level of cooperation among Native stations for common planning and problem solving. But many of the underlying problems exist unchanged, and too many Reservation radio stations remain financially and politically vulnerable.
Native radio stations are a small but vibrant and critical voice, not only within public radio, but as part of the broadcast spectrum as a whole. As the media environment continues to evolve, I believe they themselves will continue shaping the system around them to reflect their particular needs and values.
