Q&A: Bryan Pollard on building global collaborations with Indigenous journalists
Bryan Pollard is a grants manager at The Associated Press (AP), and the former president of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), which is now the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA).
Pollard recently helped organize a Global Indigenous Journalists Convening in partnership with IJA, AP, and Grist, where Indigenous journalists from around the world came together to discuss the possibility of expanding reporting collaborations.
We caught up with Pollard to hear about the major takeaways from the convening and what a global Indigenous journalism collaboration might look like.
WF: How did you get involved in journalism?
BP: I’ve been in journalism for about 25 years. I started out as a photojournalist for a small newspaper in Portland, Oregon. The person who ran that newspaper suddenly left and it presented an opportunity for me to step in and run the organization. I had no management experience at that time. My aspiration was to be a great photographer. I was thrust into a role of needing to learn how to manage a nonprofit, a newsroom, a group of vendors, volunteers — all the things that were required to manage and grow the entire operation. I went from nothing to executive in a manner of weeks and had to learn all those skills on the job very quickly. Because of that, I now have a repertoire of skills that include journalism, business operations, grants, and fundraising.
I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I was the executive editor of the Cherokee Phoenix for about a decade. I lived and worked in that community. Cherokees have an interesting role in Indigenous journalism — we have always adapted to technology so that our words, voices, and language can be expressed. We published the first Native American newspaper in 1828, which was also the first bilingual newspaper in North America, in English and Cherokee. Being Cherokee and having that experience in journalism has been really important to me — it’s pushed me to have a leadership role in moving Indigenous journalism forward.
WF: How did the idea for an Indigenous journalists collaboration come together?
BP: It goes back to when I was president of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), which is now the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA). I had a really good relationship with Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, the executive director. It came out of conversations that she, Tristan Ahtone (now editor-at-large at Grist), and I had about how we can expand the footprint of the organization to be more inclusive of Indigenous journalists in other countries. At the time it was primarily serving Native American journalists, so journalists within the contiguous U.S. and Alaska. We started reaching out to communities in Canada because we knew there were many journalists there doing great work and we wanted to make sure they knew NAJA could be a good home for them. From that effort, we developed more relationships in Canada, and we hosted a conference in Winnipeg in August 2023.
We also worked with the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) to sponsor a cohort of IJA fellows to attend their September 2023 conference in Sweden. That was a very positive experience. It was an opportunity for us to not just connect with journalists around the world, but to also get a clear understanding of what our commonalities and shared challenges were. That group really gelled and showed us there was a lot of potential to keep it going. That was where the idea for a Global Indigenous Journalists Convening came from, which we organized with partners from the IJA, AP, and Grist in Oklahoma City in July 2024. It included participants from Indigenous populations across the U.S., Canada, Polynesia, and Australia.
An important part of this is that we also had funder support. The convening would not have happened if the Doris Duke Foundation had not supported us. There were a handful of Indigenous journalism organizations that had separate conversations with Doris Duke about funding, and that led them to ask us, ‘What’s the best way to do this? Is it for us to give out small grants to multiple organizations? Or is there a way that we might give a larger amount to a central organization that supports a network?’ They didn’t know the answer, and we didn’t either, but we thought the convening might be a good way to explore that.
WF: What were some of the major takeaways from the convening?
BP: We didn’t enter the convening with any assumptions. The number one takeaway was that overwhelmingly, unanimously, everyone wanted to collaborate. There was pretty quick recognition that we have far more in common than we do differences. And not just when it comes to journalism, but also in many of the same struggles our communities are facing — keeping our languages alive, the extraction of resources, and the ongoing effects of colonialism. We have so many resources to share with each other as Indigenous outlets. There’s a real opportunity for sharing to help lift all boats. We also have a lot to offer when it comes to helping our colleagues in mainstream journalism do better reporting, whether it’s through knowledge-sharing or collaborations our outlets might have with mainstream outlets. We have so much to offer. We are the experts in telling our stories. We can offer that expertise to our communities, and the world at large.
Overall, the most important outcome from the convening was that we were able to document the aspirations of the group, how we wanted to collaborate moving forward, and some of the possibilities. We’re going to use what we’ve documented to deliver a full report, develop a funding proposal, and begin to create a structure that will facilitate sustained collaborations across a very broad network of Indigenous outlets around the world.
Collaborations are often extra work for journalists who already have a very full plate. The piece that is often missing is a person or team that can handle the administrative burden so that the reporters and editors can really just do their jobs of reporting and editing. We understand that we will need some sort of administrative structure that can project manage these collaborations — which will not only provide support to anyone participating but can also ensure the collaborations are sustainable over time.
WF: How have you seen interest in collaboration change over time for Indigenous journalists?
BP: I think there’s always been a willingness to collaborate, though now I think it’s a product of having a broader view of the Indigenous world and having more ability to communicate. When I was at the Cherokee Phoenix, probably around 2006, there was an interest in collaborations — the first time I met Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, she was at the Muscogee Nation News (now MVSKOKE Media), one of our neighboring tribes in Oklahoma. I reached out and we actually set up a picnic at our tribal headquarters in Tahlequah. It was most of the staff from our two newspapers. It was just a get-together, mostly social, but we also talked about coverage and the things we had in common. So many seeds were planted at that meeting. Rebecca and I are still good friends to this day and what started as a collaboration between two small tribal outlets has now expanded to global aspirations.
There was a willingness to collaborate then. I think the technical ability to stay connected across geographies has increased so much. It’s opening a lot of people’s eyes to the fact that we can collaborate with an organization that’s on the other side of the world. We all leverage technology to maintain communications and relationships, and to be able to share our resources and do more impactful storytelling. When you’re talking about a scattering of Indigenous outlets around the world, who individually in most cases have very little internal capacity, having that technology and the ability to meet over Zoom or share stories across Google Drive are game-changers for small outlets. The fact that it is available and affordable is such an important factor in making these Indigenous collaborations work.
WF: What is one of the most important lessons you’ve learned that continues to drive your work?
BP: For me, it’s continuing to keep in the front of my mind that the priority is lifting and centering Indigenous voices and the Indigenous lived experience. That is often the piece that’s missing in mainstream coverage. It is the thing that Indigenous journalism does better than anyone else in the world. Those voices and perspectives, I believe, hold the keys to us living in a more sustainable way on the planet — managing our resources in a way that is directly going to inform our survival as a species on this planet. To me, it’s not just about good journalism. It’s about how we are going to live with each other on this planet in a way that is sustainable for all life. That’s very big, but for me, it all starts with that very simple premise of lifting and centering authentic Indigenous voices and making sure that they are platformed for the world to hear.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
