ABC’s new series “Alaska Daily” features Hillary Swank as a reporter for a large urban Alaska media outlet, based on the Anchorage Daily News. Swank plays a journalist attempting to rehabilitate her reportorial reputation by investigating and writing about the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women.Because the series’ central plot is about the impacts of our continued colonization, it features a couple of Native reporters.This, to my knowledge, is not indicative of practices at Alaska news media organizations nor Alaska’s professional world in general.
Excepting Native corporations and tribal governments, Native workers are often restricted to blue-collar or service positions, even when we have degrees.
I’m Tlingit from Southeast Alaska. I graduated magna cum laude in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and immediately signed a contract as the Alaska correspondent for Indian Country Today Media, while making inquiries at Alaska’s urban daily newspapers. None responded to my inquiries or my follow-ups. A profession dominated by and embracing the values of white middle-class America simply would not hire a Native reporter who wrote about Native issues middle-class white Alaskans might find disturbing or distasteful.
It is ironic that now a major network’s TV series starring a mega-movie star features a reporter writing about murdered Indigenous women.
— Dave Stephenson
Juneau
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