75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
Giago founded the Lakota Times (now Indian Country Today), the first independently owned Native American newspaper in the U.S.
I first entered Walter Lippmann House filled with fear and anticipation. But after meeting several of the other Fellows, I relaxed and opened my eyes and ears to my surroundings. I soon discovered that even the American journalists from newspapers like the (New York) Daily News and The Washington Post were curious about Native Americans. The curiosity was even greater among the journalists from foreign countries, and I soon found myself in private sessions answering questions about Wounded Knee, the Little Bighorn, poverty on the Indian reservations. I found myself as much of a teacher as a student.
“Dances with Wolves” came to Harvard Square and I took the entire Class of 1991 to see it. After the movie, several Fellows had tears in their eyes. Some came up to embrace me and to apologize for the things America had done to my people. It was one of the most moving moments of my Nieman year. I left Harvard hoping that some Fellows would return to their newspapers and help educate readers about the people who are “the least understood and the most misunderstood of all Americans,” as John F. Kennedy put it. Several did.
I first entered Walter Lippmann House filled with fear and anticipation. But after meeting several of the other Fellows, I relaxed and opened my eyes and ears to my surroundings. I soon discovered that even the American journalists from newspapers like the (New York) Daily News and The Washington Post were curious about Native Americans. The curiosity was even greater among the journalists from foreign countries, and I soon found myself in private sessions answering questions about Wounded Knee, the Little Bighorn, poverty on the Indian reservations. I found myself as much of a teacher as a student. “Dances with Wolves” came to Harvard Square and I took the entire Class of 1991 to see it. After the movie, several Fellows had tears in their eyes. Some came up to embrace me and to apologize for the things America had done to my people. It was one of the most moving moments of my Nieman year. I left Harvard hoping that some Fellows would return to their newspapers and help educate readers about the people who are “the least understood and the most misunderstood of all Americans,” as John F. Kennedy put it. Several did.
