An Indian Education : When the Tiny Lakota Times Went to Washington, Its Bureau Chief Got a Course in Bureaucratese, Evasion and Public Relations Puffery

It was an intense week on the Hill. The federal budget had just been released and thousands of journalists were scrutinizing the massive document, trying to determine how it would affect their beats.

Bunty Anquoe (pronounced ANN-cue), Washington bureau chief for the Lakota Times--”America’s Indian Newspaper”--was on a fiscal hunt too. And when she found that the Indian Housing Authority had essentially been eliminated, she got on the phone.

After leaving a week’s worth of unanswered messages at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, she got lucky. By coincidence, the director of HUD’s Office of Indian Housing invited her over for a chat. He wanted to meet Anquoe, who had been on the job for only two months, and to schmooze about a Native American Youth Weekend, partly sponsored by HUD.

Anquoe listened politely for about 30 minutes. Took a few notes. Looked respectfully at the brochures, photos and press releases. Then she struck.

“What’s this Home Program?” Anquoe asked, referring to a new item in the HUD budget that significantly reduced funding for Indian housing. The director started to answer, then looked at Anquoe with a sheepish grin. “Am I giving you background information here? Because if I am, I should call the public affairs office and tell them you’re here. We wouldn’t want Jack (Kemp, secretary of HUD) to get upset.”

And that was all the director had to say on that subject.

Was Anquoe ticked? Hardly.

As a one-woman bureau covering HUD, DOL, HHS, BIA and the other acronymic bureaucracies that oversee much of American Indian life, she has learned to roll with the punches. She has gotten used to 11-hour days, writing as many as 15 stories a week, running around town, tracking down leads and working weekends.

She puts up with it because she likes the crash course in government obfuscation, evasion and public relations puffery. It’s a rush to cut through the hot air and get the story, to develop the sources that will make her an insider.

Besides, this is more than a job, it’s a mission. For the Lakota Times Washington bureau chief, the political is truly personal.

“I am a responsible journalist,” says Anquoe, “but as a Native American I have a unique perspective on certain issues that other news organizations do not. Because they are insensitive or not culturally aware, they might miss important points to issues that affect Native Americans. That’s why I’m here.”

The weekly Lakota Times was founded in 1980 by Tim Giago, a former reporter for the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal who was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Named after the dominant Sioux language, the paper has been voted best weekly in the state four years running, and Giago has won an H. L. Mencken award for his column. In October, with a $100,000 loan from the Freedom Forum, an Arlington, Va.-based media foundation, the Lakota Times adopted a national focus and set up its Washington bureau.

Sixty percent of its circulation of 12,000 is still in South Dakota, which makes the paper an interesting mix of the regional (“Area Community Mourns Big Crow,” about the accidental death of a high school basketball star) and the national (“Supreme Court OKs Tax on Fee-Patent Lands”).

Anquoe’s presence in Washington means the national coverage will become more comprehensive.

“Almost everything that affects Indian reservations in the United States has its roots in Washington,” says Giago. “A newspaper has to serve its readership, and our issues aren’t seen as that important by the mainstream press, but to us they’re life and death. Unless we have someone there, we’re not going to get the full story.”

Adds Bob Tenequer of the Washington, D.C.-based Americans for Indian Opportunity: “There is definitely a need for a national Indian paper. By disseminating information out to Indian country, people are better informed about the issues that affect them and the different strategies the tribes use when they come here to lobby.”

Anquoe works out of the Freedom Forum offices, where she has been given a desk, phone and computer. But she’s rarely at her workstation. She must not only cover a beat big enough for two or three people but also make in-person calls to introduce herself and her paper to the Beltway political community.

“I just can’t call on the phone and say, ‘Hey, I’m so-and-so from this paper,’ ” she says. “They have no idea who you are and what the paper is, and just like in anything else, if you associate a name and get to know somebody, then they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s this person,’ and they’ll call back. Just developing sources is a very slow process.”

Anquoe has to be on top of everything involving Native Americans. She keeps tabs on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, several nonprofit groups and the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and Interior.

She has to be up on issues ranging from nuclear waste to water rights, education to religious freedom, plus the one she considers most important: sovereignty--”the inherent right to self-government, because the Indian tribes are sovereign governments.”

In a town known for its indifference to fashion, Anquoe knows how to dress. She is a tall, thin woman in her 20s with long, straight black hair and glasses with red-tinted frames. She flashes a beguilingly toothy grin with regularity.

Anquoe, an Onondaga, grew up on a reservation in Upstate New York, near Syracuse. Her parents moved to Oklahoma about 10 years ago, where her mother is a tribal prosecutor and judge and her father is executive director of the American Indian Training and Employment Program in Oklahoma City. Anquoe attended a small private school, then Oklahoma University, majoring in political science and journalism.

She worked in the Oklahoma governor’s press office right out of college, then on the staff of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), for whom she wrote issue briefs on everything from civil rights to deforestation. She was back in Oklahoma writing free-lance articles for the Lakota Times when the paper decided to set up its new bureau. In December, she moved to Washington.

The beat keeps her hopping like a madwoman. During a recent two-day period, she:

* Went to HUD, where she tried to get information on the Indian housing budget.

* Attended a news conference on a bill that would reauthorize provisions in the Voting Rights Act meant to assist voters whose primary language is not English.

* Attended another news conference announcing a joint federal and state commission on policies and programs affecting Alaskan natives.

* Drove to her office, where she submitted a weekly story list to Rapid City headquarters, answered phone messages and made other calls.

* Went to the Department of the Interior and to a local attorney’s office to pick up documents for a story.

* Returned to her office to make phone calls and do background work for hearings that afternoon.

* Attended hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs on President Bush’s budget request for Indian programs for the 1993 fiscal year.

* Returned to her office, transcribed her notes and made phone calls.

Anquoe says she left “early” that evening: 7 p.m. Her dedication is obvious. So is her unnerving habit of lecturing about Indian issues.

Ask her about sovereignty and she adopts a stern manner, then proceeds to exhaust the subject. If she mentions the National Congress of American Indians in passing, she also notes when it was founded, how many tribes it represents and what it does.

But Anquoe isn’t a didactic monolith. She laughs when accused of lecturing, then says: “You know why? Because it’s so hard to get people to listen to you. We’ve been talking about, say, the mascot nickname issue (the controversy over team names like Washington Redskins) for years--since before I was born. And it’s just gotten more media attention now, like it’s something new. We have to keep trying to educate people about that.”

Anquoe pauses to catch her breath. She wants people to understand that for years, Indians had to count on unreliable sources for their news. Many important issues have gone unreported or have been filtered through mainstream news organizations that don’t understand the cultural implications. A lot of news has simply been passed down through tribal councils, word of mouth or Washington press releases. In other words, the nonexistent, the inadequate and the much too late.

“There’s never been a national communications device for Indians in this country,” she says.

“It’s really an exciting challenge, something that’s been necessary and needed for a long time. Our mission is to explore topics and news issues that affect all the Indian tribes in this country. And we’d also like to educate non-Indians about the realities of Indian life in the 20th Century.”