November 13, 2008

By Annie Greenberg

Top of Form

The elections may be over, but Rhonda LeValdo needs your vote.

The 34-year-old graduate student at the University of Kansas is one of 10 semifinalists in Youtube.com’s Project: Report — a national competition for aspiring journalists. To move onto the next round, LeValdo’s video news story on Native students’ efforts to prevent the wetlands in Lawrence, Kan., from being developed into a new roadway must be among the top-five vote getters from viewers.

“I think it’s important to highlight a Native issue, that we’re always having to fight to keep our land — even our littlest bit,” said LeValdo (Acoma Pueblo). “And this time we’re not even fighting to keep it, but to make sure it’s not destroyed.

The semifinalists were asked to tell the story of a local issue with global ramifications. LeValdo, vice president of the Native American Journalists Association, said deciding on the wetlands was easy.

Native perspective tied more to storytelling and the land

Ronnie Washines, president of NAJA, said he believes her story has the potential to benefit many.
“I had the chance to skip through a few of the other videos, and it was a common thread with everyone else’s that it was about crime, money or that sort of thing,” he said. “But as Natives, our stories become unique because they are tied more to storytelling, to our natural resources and our land. This really showed the differences.”

Washines (Yakima) said that, as someone sent away to boarding school, he could relate to the Native students on the video who explained their connections with the wetlands that border Haskell Indian Nations University.

He said when he was in boarding school in Oklahoma, he would walk through a nearby museum exhibit of traditional Native housing structures for an artificial taste of home.

Washines added that LeValdo’s entry also affected him as a Native journalist.

“It made me think about the way we cover certain tribal issues…I know my priorities and that I’m not going to through myself in front of a casino to protect it, and I think tribal members across the country have their own insights into that as well,” he said. “If we have the capability…as Native American journalists we should speak on behalf of those who cannot instead.”

Video maker says she owes it all to her grandmother

While LeValdo is thrilled to have made it this far into the competition, if you ask her, she says she owes it all to her grandmother’s unique culinary tastes.

She said that for her qualifying entry, which was supposed to be a piece on someone the entrant felt people should know about, she profiled her grandmother.

“She was talking about how they used to use clay instead of paint in their houses on the reservation, and that she used to love the smell so much she’d lick the walls – and then she did it,” laughed LeValdo. “I think that video right there’s the only reason I made it past round one.”

The 10 semifinalists were chosen by the Pulitzer Center, a non-profit journalism group. You can watch LeValdo’s “A Fight for the Land” and vote for it or one of the other finalists at www.youtube.com/projectreport.

Voting ends Sunday, Nov. 16.

Annie Greenberg, Eskimo, is a journalism student at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She worked as a reporter at the Navajo Times for one year and interned as a reporter at the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

http://www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/native-students-youtube-video-needs-votes-24680