By Ryan G. Murphy, Digital Media Editor

On Wednesday RTNDA announced the winners of the 2009 National RTNDA/UNITY awards. Among the winners was a piece titled “The Evolution Of Native American Boarding Schools,” reported by NPR’s Charla Bear.

If you’ve yet to listen to the piece I highly encourage you to do so. The piece looks at the history of American Indian boarding schools and explores how they’ve evolved in recent years.

Bear, who identifies herself in part as an Alaska Native, recently took the time to speak to RTNDA about the award-winning piece.

How did this piece come to be? Where did you originally find the story?

It started out by having conversations with people I thought were smart, well informed journalists – talking to them about things that I took for granted – I’m Alaska Native – and grew up with friends going to Indian boarding schools. In talking to some journalists about these schools, they came back with a shocked response saying ‘wait a minute, the federal government still operates boarding school for Indians?’ and me saying ‘yeah, of course, it never stopped.’

These journalists asked if the boarding schools were horrible, awful places because they were familiar with them and why they were set up and I said to them ‘no, the students choose to go there now-a-days.’

So I came to realize that there was this lack of awareness. These schools are still in existence and still operated by the same federal government….that created them with the mission of isolating Indian children from their cultures and requiring them to speak and act like mainstream Americans.  There was a lack of awareness that these schools were still there…I said it seems like a fertile ground to mine out and help people to understand.

What were some of the difficulties in putting this piece together? It seems like a very comprehensive and sensitive topic.

Definitely finding elders who wanted to talk about it. It’s pretty accepted and well known in the American Indian community that people went to the boarding schools when they were bad. It was traumatizing and people don’t want to talk about such traumatic times. People were abused physically, mentally. They went through identity crises.

They were separated from their homes. They were depressed, and, in fact, one of the reasons that I really wanted to do the story was to get into the idea that there’s this cycle where a lot of people in the native community will attribute boarding schools for the problems on reservations now – the depression, alcohol abuse, or the fact that there may be physical abuse in a family. They’ll say ‘when I was in boarding school I was beaten so how do you expect me to treat my family and treat my kids? My language and my identity were taken away so how do you expect me to not be depressed when I came back to the reservation?’…Today people point to that as one of the reasons that reservations have so many issues and at the same time the schools have changed and they see them now as a refuge for young children….It’s a vicious cycle that hurts your head and your heart.

One of the biggest difficulties was finding elders who wanted to talk about these issues in such a public way – to have their voices on the radio and for me to sit there with a microphone in their face while they talked about it. It was really hard to find people who wanted to talk about it.

Was dealing with a story that encompasses such a sensitive topic an issue for you at all?

My approach was to try to take the role of the listener and try not to even pretend that I understood what these people are going through and what they’ve gone through and just let them tell their story…My role was to listen to what people had to say and to look at the federal reports and see if it matched up and to go from there, and ask people what their experience was. It was hard to not be affected by their stories but I just sort of opened the microphone and let them tell their stories. It was much bigger than me and my perspective.

How do you think your heritage played into the story, if at all?

I think in having the general awareness [of Native American] issues and the idea for the story. I don’t know that if I wasn’t Alaska Native if I would have been so aware. Very smart informed journalists that I knew that have been in the business for decades weren’t aware of some of the issues. I know that they’re following the news and abreast of a lot of things, so I think the inspiration for the story came from my awareness and I attribute that to being Alaska Native. Because I come from that community, I pay attention to those issues in general. I’ve pitched other ideas and other stories that come from that community and often there’s not a lot of coverage and when there is coverage it’s about something to me that seems very stereotypical whether it’s casinos or alcohol or drug abuse or something like that.

The RTNDA/UNITY award commends news coverage that goes beyond the surface and gives listeners a true sense of what a certain community is like. How do you feel that you were able to do that in this piece?

I spent a lot of time in the schools, or in one school in particular, Sherman Indian High School in California, and I think at one point I spent a 24-hour period there so I was able to hang out with students in their dorms. The school was amazing about giving me access to the students and teachers and administrators and dorm supervisors as long as everyone I talked to was 18…I was able to go to dorms and classes and into the lunchroom and a lot of times without an administrator with me. I had students ask me if I was a student…I felt like I got a really good window into people I saw. Many sat down and talked to me and in this piece I was able to talk to several generations and talked with them not only about the past but what they see now.

What does winning the RTNDA/UNITY award mean to you?

It means a tremendous amount and I think that having an award like this that specifically tries to seek out stories that involve communities that may not get a lot of attention or get stereotypical coverage is great because I think it will encourage news organizations to look at these communities and see that there is value.

When I was first thinking about this story I was wondering if it even fits on “Morning Edition” and I think that having an award like this says, ‘Yes, this story fits and we’re going to highlight them and encourage them’ –  to show people that these are important stories. It makes me feel good that I was able to play a part in this story but I hope it calls attention to the stories that you don’t hear about all the time and the communities that need to be covered more in mainstream media.