2018 MATC Scholars Program: Mr. Kevin Abourezk

Mid-America Transportation Center Author

05/22/2019 Added

24 Plays

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Mr. Kevin Abourezk is the managing editor for Indianz.com.

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[00:00:06.088]My name is Kevin Abourezk,
[00:00:07.120]or as the people at the table
[00:00:08.750]over there call me, Kevin Abourez-k.
[00:00:11.341](audience laughing)
[00:00:13.541]I didn't realize there's the word rez is in my name.
[00:00:15.781]So that's pretty cool.
[00:00:17.552]Just pointing that out there.
[00:00:18.973](audience laughing)
[00:00:21.340]So I currently work for a company called Indianz.com.
[00:00:24.020]It's a Native American news website.
[00:00:26.788]It's owned and operated by the Winnebago Tribe.
[00:00:28.920]Do we have any Winnebago tribal members here?
[00:00:30.790]Awesome.
[00:00:33.620]So I've worked there for about a year.
[00:00:35.340]I just started there back in October of 2017.
[00:00:38.890]Yesterday was my one-year anniversary, actually.
[00:00:41.190]That's pretty cool.
[00:00:42.890]Before that, I spent about 19,
[00:00:44.519]well, oh wait, 18 years at the Lincoln Journal Star
[00:00:48.080]here in Lincoln, Nebraska as a reporter and editor.
[00:00:51.757]I'm gonna start off though
[00:00:53.400]and kinda describe my younger years and just go from there.
[00:00:58.410](people chattering)
[00:01:00.131]I have to back up a little bit, sorry about that.
[00:01:01.766](audience laughing)
[00:01:03.280]All right, so I was born Grand Forks, North Dakota.
[00:01:05.740]My parents were students at the University of North Dakota.
[00:01:08.830]That's where they met.
[00:01:10.160]And, this is where I lived.
[00:01:11.660]Actually, a colleague at Lincoln Journal Star,
[00:01:14.020]who found out that I had grown up in the student housing,
[00:01:17.660]like the married student housing section
[00:01:19.650]of the University of North Dakota.
[00:01:21.700]And he knew this, 'cause he grew up
[00:01:23.007]and lived in Grand Forks as well.
[00:01:24.820]So he found this photo for me.
[00:01:27.618]And as you see, it's like a,
[00:01:29.271]those are like tin panels, a couple corrugated tin paneling
[00:01:32.670]or metal (muffled speaking),
[00:01:34.793]So, yeah, pretty, pretty sparse.
[00:01:37.734]I didn't realize that.
[00:01:39.140]That's where the married student housing was
[00:01:40.960]for the University of North Dakota.
[00:01:44.013]I heard stuff when I was very young,
[00:01:45.745]in fact, I really have no memories
[00:01:47.340]of my biological father.
[00:01:49.753]I got to know him later in life a little bit,
[00:01:53.917]but not long after I was born,
[00:01:54.750]my dad left and mom moved us back
[00:01:56.190]to the Pine Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
[00:01:58.750]And mom's Lawless Sioux.
[00:02:00.490]I'm actually enrolled in Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
[00:02:02.770]That's my father's tribe.
[00:02:04.788]And I lived there probably until I was,
[00:02:06.870]I was probably in Kindergarten or so.
[00:02:09.840]We moved away, then I came back for here,
[00:02:11.990]about a year later.
[00:02:13.870]But I have some really great memories from the Reservation.
[00:02:18.270]The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was just
[00:02:19.880]a magnificent place, as far as geography goes.
[00:02:23.770]It's right by the Badlands.
[00:02:26.390]It was just gorgeous scenes like this,
[00:02:28.520]everywhere you turn.
[00:02:30.770]And I still dream about it sometimes,
[00:02:33.580]you know, going back there and moving back
[00:02:34.850]to the Reservation, living there.
[00:02:36.220]Unfortunately, as maybe some of you know,
[00:02:39.330]Reservations often don't have a lot
[00:02:41.350]of job opportunities and the job I have currently
[00:02:43.698]really doesn't exist there for the most part.
[00:02:48.140]But there's a strong focus on family and culture there.
[00:02:50.510]That's one thing I'll say about the Reservation.
[00:02:53.969]I grew up dirt poor in the Reservation,
[00:02:56.110]but I didn't know that.
[00:02:57.810]I didn't realize how poor we were growing up.
[00:03:00.550]Everybody was that poor.
[00:03:01.580]In fact, we were one of the, probably more,
[00:03:03.680]wealthy families in the village.
[00:03:06.460]Whenever we would have a feast,
[00:03:07.680]we'd have everybody come take part in that feast.
[00:03:09.390]And that was sort of our way of showing
[00:03:12.000]our appreciation for the community.
[00:03:15.620]But my cousins were my brothers and my sisters.
[00:03:18.380]My aunts and uncles were my mothers and my fathers.
[00:03:21.560]I didn't know any different.
[00:03:22.570]I'd wake up every morning
[00:03:23.510]and walk across the street to my cousin's house
[00:03:25.130]and we'd play all day.
[00:03:27.540]That was my life.
[00:03:29.049]It was an incredible experience
[00:03:30.408]and I'm glad I got to experience that.
[00:03:33.350]Unfortunately, Pine Ridge is also a place
[00:03:35.080]of a lot of despair.
[00:03:36.280]And I'm sure a lot of you know
[00:03:37.113]about these stories, such as Whiteclay.
[00:03:40.620]I actually covered Whiteclay, Nebraska
[00:03:42.500]for many years at the Lincoln Journal Star.
[00:03:46.524]And one of the things that I wrote about
[00:03:47.710]a lot was this issue of this you know claim,
[00:03:49.980]this almost 4 million cans of beer that sold,
[00:03:52.650]that was sold there every year
[00:03:55.060]to this dry Reservation primarily.
[00:03:58.090]Now, as may know, it's been about a year, I guess
[00:04:02.359]since, what is it, the Racket Liquor Control Commission
[00:04:06.100]shut it down.
[00:04:08.050]They actually rejected the license,
[00:04:09.220]the alcohol licenses,
[00:04:10.982]so there's no alcohol sold in Whiteclay anymore.
[00:04:13.630]The people that used to live there
[00:04:15.146]on the streets are for the most part, gone.
[00:04:18.320]But I'll say that, growing up on Pine Ridge,
[00:04:21.523]I mean, Whiteclay was everywhere,
[00:04:23.120]in a sense, because everybody needed
[00:04:24.460]to go there at certain times of the day.
[00:04:26.360]I had family members who drank a lot.
[00:04:27.937]And I know, every afternoon at a certain time,
[00:04:29.978]almost like clockwork,
[00:04:31.660]I'd have an uncle who would come and ask my other relatives
[00:04:34.740]if he could get a ride to Whiteclay.
[00:04:36.385]And somebody would always,
[00:04:37.218]get in the car, drive him to Whiteclay,
[00:04:38.701]get his beer, and he'd come back and drink it.
[00:04:41.890]But I'll also say this,
[00:04:42.730]it's also a place where,
[00:04:44.360]there's a lot of other things going on too.
[00:04:45.990]You know, they sell groceries, they sell goods.
[00:04:49.220]I bought my first pair of tennis shoes there.
[00:04:52.337]And I think those are Converse.
[00:04:53.533]I tried to find Converse, 'cause I think that's
[00:04:54.366]what I purchased, my first pair of tennis shoes were.
[00:04:56.433]Those are Adidas.
[00:04:58.120]My family has a strong legacy of activism.
[00:05:01.850]This is a portrait of my great-grandmother,
[00:05:04.940]Cecilia Jumping Bull,
[00:05:07.138]and it was actually painted by Leonard Peltier.
[00:05:09.300]She's sitting in front of her home,
[00:05:11.690]which is on this place called the Jumping Bull Compound,
[00:05:14.130]which is where I grew up,
[00:05:15.010]where I played all the time growing up.
[00:05:17.120]I didn't know much about the history
[00:05:18.260]of that place growing up.
[00:05:19.280]I didn't learn much about it,
[00:05:20.900]'cause my family didn't like to talk about it.
[00:05:22.730]But I knew that I'd see these holes in the house,
[00:05:25.860]in this adobe house that where my grandma grew up.
[00:05:28.040]All the time, I always kind of wondered what that was.
[00:05:30.620]I figured somebody was taking shots at the house,
[00:05:32.600]with a .22 or something like that.
[00:05:34.350]It wasn't until college that I realized and learned
[00:05:35.987]that there had been this massive shootout there,
[00:05:39.605]back in, might get the years wrong, but I think it's 1975.
[00:05:44.620]There was a shootout there, in which,
[00:05:48.959]a group of American Indian Movement members
[00:05:50.620]engaged federal law enforcement
[00:05:53.670]after some law enforcement people
[00:05:55.420]had traveled onto their land looking for an AIM member.
[00:05:58.640]And this is the shootout where, as you may know,
[00:06:00.630]Leonard Peltier was involved in, somewhat.
[00:06:03.740]He was later convicted of killing two FBI agents
[00:06:07.030]on my great-grandparents' land.
[00:06:09.950]So, it's weird though, because my family never talked
[00:06:13.060]about that growing up.
[00:06:14.280]It was kind of a stain,
[00:06:15.450]I mean, it wasn't something we were proud of.
[00:06:18.630]I mean, yes, we were proud of Leonard Peltier,
[00:06:20.260]we were proud of the American Indian Movement,
[00:06:22.150]all of those things were sources of pride for us.
[00:06:24.790]I grew up revering people like Leonard Peltier,
[00:06:27.920]and Russell Means, and Dennis Banks,
[00:06:30.160]and Clyde Bellecourt, and Vernon Bellecourt.
[00:06:32.690]These are names that I heard every day in my household.
[00:06:36.830]But as far as that history of that shootout,
[00:06:39.220]that wasn't something we're proud of.
[00:06:40.260]So I didn't learn about it
[00:06:41.100]until I was much older and in college.
[00:06:46.970]Now, I was probably in about Kindergarten,
[00:06:49.150]as I said, we moved away.
[00:06:50.510]I moved around a lot after that.
[00:06:51.940]My dad went to college at the University of South Dakota.
[00:06:54.830]When he got his first job, we went to Winter, South Dakota.
[00:06:58.250]And after that we went to Perry, South Dakota,
[00:07:00.241]where he got his next job.
[00:07:01.920]We're moving around meant losing friends, making new ones.
[00:07:05.800]But also meant being away from my Reservation family.
[00:07:07.840]That was very hard for me.
[00:07:09.200]I became disconnected, really, from my Reservation life.
[00:07:12.400]I remember coming home, probably when I was
[00:07:15.486]in about 3rd grade or so,
[00:07:16.640]and I had an uncle there.
[00:07:19.040]His name was Shorty Bernard.
[00:07:20.450]I couldn't even tell ya his real name.
[00:07:23.445]But that's how everybody knew him,
[00:07:24.390]was Shorty, Shorty Bernard.
[00:07:28.369]And I came home once to the Reservation,
[00:07:30.027]and I wanted to talk with Shorty.
[00:07:32.868]You know, he was the favorite uncle,
[00:07:33.701]he always gave me money whenever I saw him.
[00:07:36.784]So, when I went up to talk to him and he pushed me away,
[00:07:38.880]when I went first went to talk to him.
[00:07:40.964]And he said,
[00:07:41.797]"You need to go back to your town where you live now.
[00:07:45.817]"You don't live here anymore.
[00:07:47.237]"You're not Indian anymore."
[00:07:49.427]And that, that really hurt me.
[00:07:51.978]You know when I was young.
[00:07:53.240]But, he was speaking from a place of pain.
[00:07:55.310]He was speaking from a place of, he really missed me.
[00:07:57.703]That's how I've sort of taken it since now.
[00:08:00.610]Is that it was his way of sort of,
[00:08:02.380]acting out of that pain.
[00:08:04.780]Unfortunately, that's been the case
[00:08:06.450]throughout much of my life is having lost that disconnect.
[00:08:09.580]That connection to the reservation.
[00:08:11.580]It's been a journey for me to reconnect.
[00:08:13.879]And, yeah after some extent, but it's a constant journey.
[00:08:17.910]It's not something you ever completely reconnect
[00:08:20.060]to your culture once you lose that connection.
[00:08:24.700]I spent most of my life as kind of somebody living
[00:08:27.260]on the border between the Native American world
[00:08:30.425]and non-Native American world.
[00:08:32.590]As I was telling the table over there,
[00:08:35.020]my step-father actually raised me.
[00:08:36.700]My last name Abourezk is actually a Lebanese name.
[00:08:40.200]My step-father is Lebanese by birth and I took his name.
[00:08:44.300]I mean, he raised me since I was probably in Kindergarten.
[00:08:47.230]That's how long I've known him.
[00:08:48.440]Just seemed right I guess.
[00:08:50.117]But I was born Kevin Miller,
[00:08:52.390]that was my biological father's name.
[00:08:55.680]So, I have three half siblings
[00:08:58.090]that I grew up with and they're all non, you know,
[00:09:00.500]half-Native, half non-Native.
[00:09:03.030]Course I have a non-Native father and step-father.
[00:09:05.810]And I've always kind of walked that line,
[00:09:08.410]I guess, in my life.
[00:09:10.400]But it's given me some strength.
[00:09:12.320]It's given me some,
[00:09:14.173]some abilities that I maybe I wouldn't have otherwise.
[00:09:15.710]It's allowed me to sort of understand both worlds
[00:09:18.973]and communicate between the two worlds.
[00:09:20.600]Maybe that's part of what led to my career as a journalist,
[00:09:24.580]you know, as somebody who kind of feels the need
[00:09:28.930]and maybe has some ability to communicate
[00:09:31.790]these experiences back and forth.
[00:09:34.370]But primarily, trying to communicate the Native experience
[00:09:37.610]to the non-Native world.
[00:09:42.280]College years, I went to the University of South Dakota.
[00:09:44.650]And, I had a great time there,
[00:09:47.800]but I also had a lot of struggle there.
[00:09:49.250]You know, I drank a lot when I first got
[00:09:51.030]to the University of South Dakota.
[00:09:52.700]Had a hard childhood, a step-father who was, well,
[00:09:56.670]he was fairly abusive in some ways.
[00:09:58.850]We get along great now and he's really gotten better
[00:10:01.420]in his older years,
[00:10:02.253]but when he was younger,
[00:10:03.840]he had a really strong temper
[00:10:05.470]and so, my siblings and I suffered a lot, quite honestly.
[00:10:11.797]So when I first went to college,
[00:10:13.573]I mean, I was acting out of that.
[00:10:15.530]I was acting out a lot.
[00:10:17.253]I was drinking.
[00:10:18.780]I was going to a lot of parties.
[00:10:21.300]Getting in a lot of trouble.
[00:10:22.750]When I turned 21, I actually went to treatment.
[00:10:25.580]I was still in college when I did this.
[00:10:27.930]I left in about November or so, this was in '96.
[00:10:31.760]And I went to this treatment program.
[00:10:33.990]It was actually at the foot of Bear Butte in South Dakota.
[00:10:37.420]Called Sacred Hills Treatment Center.
[00:10:38.750]And I spent 30 days there and it changed my life.
[00:10:42.160]I wouldn't be here standing
[00:10:43.070]in front of you right now
[00:10:43.903]if I hadn't gone to that treatment program.
[00:10:48.290]That's 22 years ago.
[00:10:49.994](mumbling)
[00:10:53.080]So this is my life today.
[00:10:54.380]I've got five children, as you can see.
[00:10:56.580]And, I'm actually a 19-year veteran journalist today.
[00:11:01.810]Our three youngest children we've adopted,
[00:11:04.040]those are the three right in the middle as you can see.
[00:11:06.390]The boy in blue, the girl in the turquoise,
[00:11:08.868]and on the right here they're both biological.
[00:11:11.720]But, I'd say the one on the left, in the back,
[00:11:14.370]my wife is holding Jessa, she's now five.
[00:11:17.720]Zack is in the middle and he's 10.
[00:11:19.800]Jasmine is seven.
[00:11:22.080]And then Maya, who's on the right here.
[00:11:23.870]Maya's actually home with a sore throat today.
[00:11:26.003](laughs)
[00:11:27.150]When I left, I asked her if she's going
[00:11:29.130]to be okay for an hour and she said,
[00:11:30.607]"Yeah, I'll be okay."
[00:11:32.256](laughs)
[00:11:33.325](muffled speaking)
[00:11:35.187]Got my Master's Degree in Journalism.
[00:11:37.410]Well, first I got my Bachelor's Degree in English
[00:11:39.150]from the University of South Dakota, back in '98.
[00:11:42.273]I got my Master's Degree in Journalism here
[00:11:43.970]at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln
[00:11:46.899]actually, back in 2012.
[00:11:48.677]You know, getting my Master's didn't really
[00:11:51.570]plant anything concrete.
[00:11:53.620]It's, I didn't get a pay raise.
[00:11:55.924](laughs)
[00:11:56.757]I didn't get any certain benefits necessarily prominent.
[00:11:59.070]I can't actually get a job just because of the Master's
[00:12:01.330]I had, necessarily.
[00:12:02.930]I mean, there are some jobs, but.
[00:12:05.620]They all say, if it makes me feel better,
[00:12:07.890]it makes me feel like I've accomplished something.
[00:12:10.815]Like, I took that extra step, I guess,
[00:12:12.413]in my education and I invested in myself in some way.
[00:12:17.370]So it built my confidence, if nothing else.
[00:12:20.831]And I do think it is good to see on a resume
[00:12:23.431]that you've had that experience.
[00:12:27.260]So that's about it.
[00:12:29.460]Any questions anybody?
[00:12:30.293]Ohhh, I guess one thing that Dave asked me
[00:12:31.870]to describe real quick is what I do today.
[00:12:33.840]Stuff I didn't say much at the start.
[00:12:36.660]So today, my title is actually Managing Editor,
[00:12:40.110]and I work for Indianz.com.
[00:12:42.470]Have any of you ever heard of that website?
[00:12:45.510]It's a Native American news website.
[00:12:46.900]It's Indianz with a Z.
[00:12:49.580]And, basically what we do is we cover
[00:12:51.580]national Native American news.
[00:12:54.860]But the way we do it is sort of interesting.
[00:12:56.883]We have a program, that's a scraping program,
[00:12:58.670]that every day it goes through
[00:13:00.740]all these different websites we've plugged into it.
[00:13:02.720]It finds certain keywords,
[00:13:04.310]like American Indian, Native American.
[00:13:06.530]We have to look for Indian too 'cause the Associated Press,
[00:13:09.430]their style for Native Americans is actually
[00:13:11.450]the word Indian.
[00:13:12.310]So, we have to look for that as well,
[00:13:14.270]which obviously brings up a lot of other kinds of stories.
[00:13:17.250]But, every day we get, this program sends us an email,
[00:13:20.470]a long list of possible headlines we can post on our site.
[00:13:23.670]We decide which ones we want to put on our site.
[00:13:26.131]We put them into, you know, our platform basically
[00:13:30.389]to post them on our website.
[00:13:32.410]Then we write about a five or six paragraph
[00:13:34.680]summary of each story.
[00:13:37.310]And then, we also pick out,
[00:13:38.670]what stories we want to write ourselves.
[00:13:40.440]If there are any within that list
[00:13:42.330]that we want to write ourselves.
[00:13:44.040]Now typically, we don't do that.
[00:13:45.715]There's only two of us that work for the section,
[00:13:47.883]I should mention that.
[00:13:49.080]There's my editor, Acee Agoyo.
[00:13:51.110]He's doing Pueblo.
[00:13:51.970]He lives in Washington D.C.
[00:13:53.800]He's actually an M.I.T. grad, pretty amazing guy.
[00:13:58.499]He works in Washington D.C.
[00:14:00.073]And so he does most of that kind of technical work.
[00:14:02.660]My job is more to find stories
[00:14:04.590]that nobody else is writing about.
[00:14:07.660]Make, you know, Indianz.com kind of a destination
[00:14:10.630]for people for news that they can't get anywhere else.
[00:14:13.560]So, that's kind of my deal,
[00:14:16.175]hopefully I'm doing okay with it.
[00:14:18.191]I will say that Indianz.com is just a great place to work.
[00:14:22.441]It allows me to travel,
[00:14:24.520]actually I was in Northern California about two weeks ago.
[00:14:26.870]I got to write about these 30 indigenous leaders,
[00:14:29.330]from Latin America, from Central and South America
[00:14:33.220]who were on a Yurok reservation
[00:14:34.920]just outside the Redwood Forest.
[00:14:37.740]And they came here to learn about the Yurok tribe's efforts
[00:14:40.080]to preserve their wildlife and their forests.
[00:14:43.153]So I got to be there for three days
[00:14:45.270]to learn about this tribe.
[00:14:47.020]This Yurok tribe and what they do there
[00:14:49.342]in Northern California.
[00:14:50.175]It was an amazing trip.
[00:14:51.761]It was right on the coast,
[00:14:54.350]the Redwood Forest is right there.
[00:14:57.233]It's just an amazing place to be.
[00:14:59.563]This Saturday, or actually Sunday,
[00:15:01.000]my son and I, Samuel,
[00:15:02.640]we're going to be traveling to Alaska.
[00:15:04.670]We're going to be going to Anchorage, Alaska.
[00:15:06.090]And, we get to cover a conference there.
[00:15:10.060]It's a Alaska Federation Natives conference
[00:15:13.978]and so that's pretty cool.
[00:15:15.940]Never been to Alaska before
[00:15:17.150]and I wanted to take my son too, so good.
[00:15:19.935]'Course I'll be leisure too.
[00:15:22.133]But anyway, it just allows me to travel.
[00:15:24.258]It allows me to sort of experience
[00:15:25.091]things that I wouldn't experience otherwise probably.
[00:15:27.870]A lot of other professions
[00:15:28.740]wouldn't allow me to experience so.
[00:15:31.237]But my journalism has taken me all over.
[00:15:33.784]I've been to Bosnia.
[00:15:35.020]I've been to Paris, France.
[00:15:36.140]I've been, you know, all over the country
[00:15:38.190]on various reporting trips.
[00:15:39.780]And so I really love what I do.
[00:15:42.030]Unfortunately journalism is suffering right now.
[00:15:43.940]As many of you may know, newspapers are really struggling.
[00:15:48.456]It's tough to compete with the internet.
[00:15:51.120]You can get everything, almost everything
[00:15:53.530]you want online anymore.
[00:15:55.580]And so what incentive is there to spend fifty dollars
[00:15:58.090]a month on a newspaper subscription?
[00:16:00.539]When you can get almost everything you
[00:16:02.556]want for free and more?
[00:16:04.126]So that's the conundrum the newspapers are facing.
[00:16:05.540]That's part of the reason I had to leave,
[00:16:07.166]that instability.
[00:16:08.620]You know, constantly losing colleagues.
[00:16:10.610]When I started back in '99, we had 30 some reporters.
[00:16:13.430]When I left, we had 10.
[00:16:15.540]And that's how newspapers are all over the country.
[00:16:17.990]They keep shrinking and shrinking.
[00:16:19.560]That kind of journalism is going away,
[00:16:20.900]which is very unfortunate.
[00:16:22.750]You know, for a society, we have fewer and fewer reporters,
[00:16:26.280]watchdogs, watching what government is doing.
[00:16:29.520]What officials are doing.
[00:16:31.200]Are they spending our money wisely?
[00:16:34.037]Are they, you know, scamming us?
[00:16:35.040]What are they doing?
[00:16:36.220]It's unfortunate to see that kind of decline.

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2018 MATC Scholars Program: Mr. Kevin Abourezk

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