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About Native News

Native News is a publication of the University of Montana. It is an honors course for seniors and graduate students, and has won national accolades for its yearly "tab." Teams of print, photojournalism and broadcast students work together, focusing on a Native American issue such as education, sovereignty or health.

About this Year's Topic

On reservations, economy is everybody’s business

Nowhere in Montana is economic development a more urgent concern than on the state’s seven Indian reservations.

While Montana’s statewide unemployment rate is less than 5 percent, on many of the reservations, two-thirds of the labor force is without a job.

Several tribal councils have come up with a variety of business plans, but while there are some notable successes, many tribal businesses have gone belly-up, victims of political instability, poor management, or just a populace that can’t often afford more than bare necessities.

On several reservations, residents who do make a comfortable living are forced to spend their wages elsewhere because so few reservation businesses exist to satisfy their needs.

Across the state, hundreds of tribal members are working to help themselves by starting cottage business, putting their talents to work to make a living in places where they have strong ties, on lands where their ancestors struggled to survive.

And many tribal councils are looking at new ways of doing business and coming together to learn from one another how to find new paths to success. Some tribes have plans to harness wind power for electricity generation, for example, and others have taken advantage of technology to bring jobs and substantial contracts to the reservation.

Twenty journalism students at The University of Montana, five of whom are Native American, set out in January to study economic development on the state’s seven reservations. The students are part of a UM School of Journalism class, now in its 10th year, that asks students to look at an issue of concern to Montana’s Indian population and, after months of research, to report their findings in a publication.

The students report stories that tell of failures and what hardships they engender, but they also tell several stories of success and report on many promising business plans.

If you have comments about this series, we’d like to hear from you. Write us at: Native News Honors Project, School of Journalism, University of Montana, Missoula, MT. 59812