Native Daughters magazine

Groundbreaking Mag Celebrates Native Women; Now in Multiple Platforms for Classrooms

By Scott WinterTo create Native Daughters magazine, Jordan Pascale, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) journalism student, stepped into a Pine Ridge, South Dakota sweat lodge in the fall of 2009 hoping to figure out a world he longed to understand.

To build the Native Daughters website, Molly Young, another UNL journalism student, drove through a blizzard to film teens in Santee, Nebraska talking about suicide and escaping the reservation.

To build the free curriculum companion for Native Daughters, 14 educators—half of them enrolled tribe members from Native schools—spent a week in the summer of 2011 breaking down the content to make the stories connect to students and teachers both on and off the reservation.

The result was a journalistic, multimedia study of a story that hadn’t been told enough, if at all. The onetime product, Native Daughters—Who they are, where they’ve been and why Indian country could never survive without them, came off the presses and hopped online in the spring of 2011. Now, it needed an audience.

By January 2012, the Nebraska Humanities Council, Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) and UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications had produced a Native Daughters curriculum companion free to all K-12 educators. By February, Native Daughters had sold out its second printing.Comment:  For more on Native magazines, see Red Ink Magazine Loses Sponsor and Hunting the Rez Magazine.