ABSTRACT
Critical race media literacy asks us to identify areas of political and cultural exclusion based on race, as well as the implications of these exclusions. For Native Americans, racialized lack of access to mainstream media coincides with colonialist policies and cultural norms that work to undermine Native American sovereignty and activism. Native Americans have long been disproportionately excluded from mainstream media. When mainstream news does discuss Indigenous people, it has historically portrayed Indigenous peoples as distinctly “other” and their issues have been reduced to stereotypical cultural differences. By comparison, Indigenous news sources have pushed back against these reductionist portrayals and provided depth to political issues facing Native American people and nations. The differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous coverage were particularly notable in the Standing Rock water protection movement of 2016–2017. Using primary sources and word frequency analysis, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the disparities between how Indigenous activism around the Dakota Access Pipeline was portrayed in Indigenous-created versus non-Indigenous-created news media in 2016, highlight the importance of Indigenous authorship and media sovereignty, and offer classroom activities that approach the issue of media bias.
