Mary Annette Pember: Media continues to tell Native stories without our input

My latest rancor is directed at the Wall Street Journal and PBS’ “Frontline.” The outlets partnered over a two-year period to produce the recently-aired “Predator on the Reservation.” The film is an investigation into the decades-long failure of the Indian Health Service (IHS) to stop Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber from sexually abusing Native boys under his care. Weber began his alleged abuse on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana and then moved on to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

The work is very important and is especially poignant as it focuses on the terrible toll that childhood sexual abuse takes on peoples’ lives. And the reporters from the Wall Street Journal—Dan Frosch, Gabe Johnson and Christopher Weaver—did a better job than most non-Native people reporting on Indian Country. Thankfully, they bucked the trend of painting Pine Ridge with the familiar brush of poverty porn and focused instead on the crimes within the IHS.

However, there are missing pieces in their reporting, and I can’t help but wonder what insights and knowledge a Native American journalist would have added to the story.

To truly show how an abusive White doctor could continue to work on reservations, you need to take a deep dive into the history of U.S. policy toward Native peoples. If I were on the team, I certainly would have highlighted the huge disparity in funding between Medicaid and IHS. For decades, Congress has chastised IHS for poor quality healthcare. But IHS, which was added to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s list of high-risk agencies in 2017, doesn’t receive enough money from the federal government to fully fund healthcare for tribes. While Medicaid pays an average of $6,300 per patient annually, IHS only spends $3,851.

This story also demands a closer examination of the federal government’s historic failure to meet its treaty obligations to provide health care for Native Americans. These treaty obligations date back to 1787. It’s fundamental to understand how the United States’ colonial mindset continues define its relationship with tribes. That mindset normalizes a culture of abuse and substandard treatment of Native people in many areas.