Happy Indigenous People’s Day
Honoring the first people on these mountains, and the Native press that tells their stories
Before it was West Virginia, it was home
These mountains are the ancestral lands of the Shawnee, the Lenape (Delaware), the Cherokee and the Haudenosaunee, including the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora, and many other indigenous peoples.
After going to press in February, 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix became the first Native American newspaper to be published in the United States. Originally printed in the Cherokee Nation capital of New Echota – located in what is now the State of Georgia – the Cherokee Phoenix still publishes the news, both in print and online. Just one-year earlier, in 1827, Freedom’s Journal became the first Black newspaper.
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Telling their own stories
Crow journalist Luella Brien launched Four Points Press in 2021 to provide coverage of the Crow Reservation from the inside. She was tired of mainstream stories about “powwows and dead Indians.”
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s newsroom (MVSKOKE Media) won free press protections in 2015, lost them in 2018 and won them back in 2020.
From one community press to another
Read, follow and support Native journalism. Their stories are our history.
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