At The Republic, a new effort to explore tribal issues at the heart of the news
High in the San Juan range, a defunct mine leaks toxic water. A mustard-yellow plume spills heavy metals into the San Juan River and flows across Navajo land.
Farther downstream, at the edge of the Colorado River, a shuttered coal plant is dismantled, leaving cleaner skies above, but an unknown future for the land below and for the hundreds of employees and the Navajo and Hopi budgets that depended on mining revenue.
Farther still, river water flows through a canal toward the Gila River Indian Community. Tribal leaders have put their share of the water to work in restoring agricultural traditions, but also face decisions on how to leverage their rights to a priceless commodity in a drier future.
Now, in the midst of a pandemic that has ravaged large cities, the rural Navajo Nation faces a disproportionate outbreak of COVID-19 as tribes call for more federal support.
For years, we’ve worked at The Arizona Republic to bring you stories like these. They touch the farthest reaches of Arizona and reach up and down the Colorado River basin. They involve the challenges of environment and climate, the big business of industries like energy, the politics of essentials like water, the human basics of food and health — in short, life itself.
Native American tribes sit in the midst of these issues, often the most vulnerable to a changing climate and the challenges of commerce. But tribes, their water, land and traditions, may also hold new solutions.
That’s why The Republic is devoting a new team to examining those issues.
Thanks to philanthropic support — and your readership — we will spend the next two years examining tribes in Arizona and the Southwest. We will explore their roles at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce, helping Arizona understand the historical context and the road to the future.
An experienced team
Heading up the reporting is Debra Krol. Since last year, Krol has been an environmental reporter at The Republic as a member of our Nina Pulliam fellowship program, covering a range of issues including uranium, gray wolves and the controversy over a planned copper mine at Oak Flat.
For years before that, she has been an awardwinning journalist at publications large and small, with an emphasis on native, environmental and science issues, and has been a contributor to two books on native traditions.
She is an enrolled member of the Xolon, or Jolon, Salinan Tribe from the Central California coastal ranges. Anyone who has met her knows it’s hard not to be drawn into a story about her family’s land, the food traditions she has explored across the West, or the countless connections she reveals between hotbutton environmental stories and underlying Native American issues.
Krol will partner with photographer and multimedia journalist Cheryl Evans, who has worked for The Arizona Republic for more than 20 years. Evans was part of our Pulitzer Prize winning team on the special report “The Wall“in 2017, and has been a key part of big storytelling efforts such as our special report “Into the Water,” and environmental reports including our team’s work on dust storms.
This week, we had a team conversation about launching this effort, and their passions were clear.
“This is a great opportunity for us to help share Native American cultural traditions, and explore environmental issues on tribal lands,” Evans told us later.
“I learned storytelling at my grandparents’ knees as they taught me about my Salinan heritage,” Krol said. “I’m excited to spend the next two years finding and sharing more stories about Indigenous peoples in the Southwest, some of which have yet to be told in mainstream media.”
Their work will be directed by our environment and storytelling editor, Shaun McKinnon.
Before becoming an editor, McKinnon was a reporter writing deep narratives about the people of Arizona, including award-winning coverage of the 2011 Tucson shooting.
As a beat reporter, he spent more than a decade covering water and the environment at The Republic. He has lived and worked in Utah, Nevada, Washington, D.C., and on the Navajo Nation.
There’s hardly a journalist in our newsroom — or anywhere, for that matter — with a better mix of experience and expertise to help us lead this effort.
Investing in journalism
This new team will add to our longstanding commitment to these issues. Our three-person environment team and our indigenous communities reporter continue their important work.
Our newest tribal effort is supported by a generous grant from two funding partners: Catena Foundation, dedicated to restoring human and ecological systems, and the Water Funder Initiative, a collaborative effort to identify promising water solutions through strategic philanthropic investments, starting in the West.
Their support will help The Republic shed more light on these issues at a crucial time.
While this financial support makes more reporting possible, it never changes our commitment to journalism. The Republic has been a pioneer in philanthropic partnerships to help inform our communities. In recent years, we have partnered with the Arizona Community Foundation, the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust and the Flinn Foundation for multiyear efforts to examine central or developing issues in our community.
In every case, our reporters and editors make all of the decisions about what, and how, we publish. Our journalistic independence never changes. Our partners invest in the work not just with their money but with their trust: They believe in the power of independent, local, long-term reporting.
We know you do, too, and you support it by reading and continuing to subscribe to The Republic and azcentral.com. Without your readership and your subscriptions, even grant-funded reporting wouldn’t succeed on its own.