On Standing Rock, local news is teetering.

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In January, the Lakota Times, a newspaper based in southwestern South Dakota, on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, abruptly announced its closure, citing “unforeseen circumstances and health issues.” Avis Red Bear, an Indigenous journalist based in McLaughlin, a small town in the center of the Standing Rock reservation, took the closure of the Lakota Times especially hard: it’s where she began her career, in 1990, at a previous incarnation of the publication. Red Bear felt wistful about her years spent at the Lakota Times—and it hit her, too, that Red Bear could just as easily have been announcing the closure of her own paper, the financially strapped Teton Times, which has covered the Standing Rock Sioux since 2002. 

Standing Rock, one of the largest Native American reservations in the United States, straddles the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. Cattle roam the rolling plains, where crops of soybeans grow. Red Bear knows that if her newspaper were to close, the region would be left with just one other outlet, KLND Radio. And KLND is facing its own challenges: it lost roughly half its funding in 2025 after Congress clawed 1.1 billion dollars back from public media. “We are like living ghosts. With the internet and social media, society looks right through us. Soon we will disappear altogether,” Red Bear said.

In the United States, the landscape of Indigenous media is complex. For one thing, the First Amendment does not apply on sovereign reservations. For another, tribal governments own and fund most of these outlets—an arrangement that often creates a chilling effect for reporting. Many of these newsrooms, several Indigenous journalists told me, are effectively barred from publishing anything that casts tribal officials in an unflattering light. 

“First Amendment rights on tribal reservations in the US are not guaranteed,” Angel Ellis, the vice president of the Indigenous Journalists Association (IJA), said. In 2011, she was fired from Mvskoke Media, which is owned by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, after reporting on an alleged embezzlement scheme in the tribal government. She returned in 2018, the same year the Nation ended up repealing its free press act, a three-year-old tribal law that safeguarded Mvskoke Media’s independence. 

In 2021, the Nation enshrined press protections in its constitution, thanks in part to Ellis’s efforts. But it is in the minority. According to an analysis by the IJA, of the 575 federally recognized tribes, fewer than a dozen either have codes protecting press freedom or courts with a record of defending the media. “The path for free speech and press freedom is never clear and easy for tribal citizens,” Ellis said. “Tribal media is actually more of a propaganda tool,” Mary Annette Pember, an Ohio-based national correspondent at ICT News, said. “Imagine that—people in leadership want to influence what gets out. It’s not like Native people are so different from anyone else.”

Against this backdrop, the Teton Times—one of the few independently owned and -funded Indigenous outlets in the US—is an especially vulnerable outlier. Newspapers serving small, often impoverished communities can’t rely on robust advertising markets. Survival is a challenge. Still, Red Bear holds her newspaper’s independence dear. “Nobody gets to say what we put in our paper,” she said. 

In the late 1980s, Red Bear read an article in the Lakota Times about the Black Hills mountain range, seized from the Sioux Nation by the US government in 1876. Unlike most mainstream coverage of Native Americans, the article examined the story’s importance to Indigenous people, she recalled. “It really touched me and my heart,” she said. 

As a journalist at the Lakota Times, Red Bear reported a landmark ten-part series about con artists masquerading as Indigenous healers. “It was a bastardization of our culture,” she said. In response to her stories, she received death threats. Tim Giago, the newspaper’s founder, later called the series “one of the major accomplishments in Indian journalism.” In 1998, Giago (who passed away in 2022) sold the newspaper. Red Bear stayed on for a short time and later briefly worked for KLND before launching the Teton Times. 

“We needed to continue to provide the news to our people from our perspective,” she said. Coverage focused on everything from sports and healthcare to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016. At its peak, around 2008, the paper had about five staffers and a circulation that numbered in the thousands. Since some local residents lack reliable internet access, the paper doesn’t have a website. Instead, each Tuesday, Red Bear prints twelve hundred copies, priced at a buck-fifty an issue. Annual subscriptions cost sixty dollars. Red Bear believes social media facilitated the paper’s decline. 

To other Indigenous journalists, Red Bear helped pioneer the importance of independent Indigenous media. “She stands as a beacon of tenacity and commitment to producing local news,” said Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, founder of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, which publishes the independent news site Buffalo’s Fire.  

To save money, Red Bear has forgone a salary; in 2017 she closed the paper’s office. Since she now runs the operation from home, the publication’s budget covers her electric and internet bills. In 2023, she established the newspaper as a nonprofit, making it eligible for grants. She hopes to fund a reporter through Report for America. “I want it to be stable and sustainable. And then I can leave peacefully,” she said. 

Red Bear sometimes considers closing up shop, but then she remembers what would be lost if she shuttered the newspaper. “There would just be this huge, gaping void of nothingness,” she said. “I’m hanging in there until the last dog is hung.” 

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