At Indigenous Sacred Sites, Seeing Things I’m Not Supposed to See

by B. “Toastie” Oaster, High Country News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with High Country News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

I’m standing at an Indigenous sacred site, looking at something I’m not supposed to see. Signs of ceremony are all around: little animal skulls, ribbons, a stump of freshly burnt sage stems in ashes, tied together with red yarn. It looks like a ceremony happened in the last week.

I’m here with a source who wants their story told — who wants to expose the harm that the public and private sectors are inflicting on tribal cultures in pursuit of renewable energy development. But the source also wants to protect these cultural sites from public exposure. So I don’t take any photos. I don’t record it in my notes. I walk away and do not publish what I see.

Another month, in another part of the Pacific Northwest, I’m at a tribal community event, not reporting, exactly, but relationship building — an important component of establishing trust in Indigenous journalism. I overhear an elder talking about a ceremonial rite of passage that takes place at a location where I have been reporting, a location sited for renewable energy development. The public isn’t supposed to know about this ceremony, which means I’m not supposed to know either. So I pretend I didn’t hear.

I’m engaged in a yearlong investigation, a partnership between two newsrooms, documenting how proposed developments are threatening sacred lands and Indigenous cultural resources. I usually write for an Indigenous editor, but none of my editors are Native right now on this story. I return to the virtual newsroom, and they’re eager to hear about what makes these sites sacred; we need to be able to communicate this to readers, they say, particularly when we dig into the legal and political mechanisms threatening the sites.

I want the public to understand the importance of these places, and part of me wants to tell my editors everything. But if I do, and the information escapes, it will be on me. I’m Native, too, and I have to handle this information responsibly, without selling out my kin. In the Native world, we tend to view each other — and all living things — as relatives. At the same time, my tribe is not from here, and I’m still learning about the cultures I’m reporting on. Language that would bring the location vibrantly to life is right there in my mind, but I don’t feel right about using it. The most I seem to be able to tell my editors — speaking accurately and honestly while respecting cultural concerns — is that tribal leaders won’t share that information with me.

I mention some rock features. My editors ask what the features are used for. A variety of purposes, I say, thinking carefully — hunting, storage, cooking. I’m leaving information out, but everything I say is true. Even mentioning the archaeological features could endanger them, putting them in the crosshairs of looters and vandals. Write one too-specific article, and tribal historic preservation officers might find themselves fighting off new age gatherings of non-Natives appropriating Indigenous worship. Or worse: Western scientists destroying ancestral remains for anthropological “research.”

During our discussion, my editors seem to believe that sharing as much information as possible is a public good. It’s a value assumption of investigative journalism — a very American value, and one I sometimes share. Transparency is what empowers the watchdog press. And of course we aren’t withholding information that’s critical to the investigation. But tribal cultures don’t necessarily put such a premium on transparency. In many Indigenous cultures, information is carefully guarded by storytellers, shared orally and only with select people or at certain times, if at all.

I sit down at my laptop to write, thinking again about words. How do I write about plants and sites and ceremonies I can’t write about?

During my reporting, a tribal government sends me, at my request, a set of guidelines about cultural information it doesn’t want published, like the names or pictures of the first foods that grow where I’m reporting. On the one hand, I don’t work for tribal governments, so I don’t have to do what they say. And I’ve worked with neighboring tribes who publicly identify some of the very same plants, which are threatened by renewable energy development. Yet I know I’d be responsible to the community if that information got out.

My own tribal citizenship impacts the reporting process, too. “Toastie, where are you from originally?” began a conversation I recently had with a Chickasaw legal expert. “You’re Choctaw. We're kind of cousins.” I’m still taken aback sometimes when I hear a question like this from another professional. Normally, I wouldn’t feel obligated to talk about my family history at work. But this part of our conversation is how we recognize each other and orient ourselves in relational space. My conduct as a reporter will reflect on my community. So we talk like Natives a bit before settling into our official roles.

I sit down at my laptop to write, thinking again about words. How do I write about plants and sites and ceremonies I can’t write about? And then one of my editors forwards me a note from another, paraphrasing a third editor: “Readers may say: They are only roots. How do we get them to think beyond that?”

I leave my desk, play some guitar, go for a walk, trying to shake off frustration. I know my editors are speaking for a readership we can’t assume is educated about Native issues like food sovereignty — the ability of a people to govern its own food sourcing. But I have to walk a narrow line between educating and oversharing. I find myself wishing everyone in America, myself included, had learned more about Native issues in school. Then we could avoid situations like this.

The problem haunts me over the dinner stove. “Root gathering,” a phrase I’ve heard Natives use, might be the simplest language to choose. But it sounds primitive, like something hunter-gatherers do; “civilized” people “harvest vegetables.” I pace around my apartment, searching for wording that might clarify what’s at stake. Indignation flashes through my mind as I reflect on how terms like “heirloom” are applied almost exclusively to European foods — Italian tomatoes, say, even though tomatoes were originally engineered by Indigenous scientists in South America.

I find myself wishing everyone in America, myself included, had learned more about Native issues in school. Then we could avoid situations like this.

What would these Indigenous roots be called if they were in rustic-looking display crates at Whole Foods? Finally, I think I’ve found a solution: I write “endemic, heirloom, organic root vegetable harvests.” True, it’s a word salad, but the plants themselves remain anonymous, and non-Native readers could better understand why they’re valuable.

I Slack the phrase to one of my editors. She laughs, understanding the jab at bourgeois vernacular. Few of those modifiers will make it past top edits; what remains in the final draft is simply a “root vegetable harvest.” Not as obvious, but at least we avoided “root gathering.”

It’s difficult to write for Natives and non-Natives at the same time. If a non-Native editor puts the term “first foods” in quotes, that could alienate Native readers. But a non-Native reader may never have encountered the term, and the quotes might help explain that it’s a common phrase.

It’s even more difficult when terms mean different things to different audiences, like the word “sacred.” Natives use it a lot, but I’ve seen it spark scorn in some non-Natives. (“Sacred land? It’s 2024!” reads a social media comment on one of our most recent stories.) Others seem to use it with a shallow understanding.

Handling information amid these tensions, created by different value systems, is the challenge and responsibility of a journalist. Of course, we can’t get into all this in the draft itself. So the challenge remains: How do you write about a sacred site without saying why it’s sacred, in a way that will help non-Natives care? There’s no clear dividing line between too much information and not enough. It’s the liminal space in which a lot of Indigenous affairs reporting takes place.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by B. “Toastie” Oaster, High Country News.