Native American journalist and professor Mark N. Trahant will organize a previously denied journalism lecture series, bringing reporters who covered the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock to the University of North Dakota (UND).
After Trahant garnered media attention last Thursday for his decision to leave his endowed professorship following his proposal’s earlier denial, UND announced Friday that it would move forward with the journalist’s lecture series.
“This is an important conversation for North Dakota,” Trahant said of the Standing Rock demonstrations. “They’ve really got to come to an understanding of what happened, and then there has to be a healing process. This is still a very divided state, and this is where the university can play just a key role.”
Before the university switched its position to host the journalism lecture series, Trahant, an independent journalist and the Charles R. Johnson Endowed Professor of Journalism at UND, claimed that it was a fear of retaliation from the state legislature that influenced senior administration at UND to put his series on hold.
Last year, Trahant proposed hearing from journalists who covered Standing Rock after the university asked him to coordinate a journalism lecture series. This series was “put on hold,” he said. This year, the professor proposed a conference on technology and society that would lead with conversations on social media’s role in shaping the Standing Rock narrative.
Demonstrations at Standing Rock started as a grassroots movement in April 2016 to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, where Standing Rock tribe members saw the pipeline as a threat to regional lands and water sources. Protests sparked the social media hashtag “#NoDAPL.”
The second proposal’s denial prompted Trahant to express his disappointment with the university, which he thought should be an institutional leader and “beam of light, shining on the protected realm of rational discourse,” an October 26 Facebook post said.
