Writing for seven generations, Spears creates space for Native voices | People

PORTLAND, Ore. – Cherokee Nation citizen Nancy Marie Spears has built a career covering Indigenous children and families, focusing on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), the lasting impacts of boarding schools and the efforts of tribes to preserve culture and keep Native families together. 

She attended the Indigenous Journalists Association conference July 22-24 in Portland, Oregon, to learn and share experiences of working in Indigenous journalism.  

Spears, 26, is an El Reno, Oklahoma, native but is now based in Denver. She writes for The Imprint, a national publication, as the only Native voice for the publication where she covers Indigenous children and families with a focus on ICWA.

“So, my work sort of sits at the intersection of a lot of different things,” she said. “I do a lot of writing about strengths and limitations to the Indian Child Welfare Act, legal challenges to that law.”

She focuses on the generational and intergenerational impacts of forced adoption, boarding school survivors and their descendants. She said she writes in this intersection because those are all things that deeply impact Native children and families to this day. 

In the U.S. and all over the world, residential schools or Indian boarding schools forcibly broke Indigenous cultures by systematically separating Native children from their families and communities. The abuse and indoctrination of those children into western culture left generational impacts of trauma in Indigenous communities that is still seen today. 

The ICWA is a federal law adopted in 1978 to keep Native children connected to their families and tribes. 

Although Spears did not receive any Indigenous Journalists Association awards this year, she attended the conference with the intent to connect and learn from many of the other attendees. 

“I’m here to fill my cup in a lot of ways,” she said. “I do a lot of heavy work, but I also have the privilege of getting to really dig into things that are a niche within a niche in most newsrooms and don’t really get to have the full robust exploration and investigative coverage that is needed.”

Spears said she feels privileged to be able to report on tribes and all of the ways they have continued to thrive as she gets to cover interesting stories that she believes people do not get to see elsewhere. 

“So, I get to have the privilege and honor of really examining and investigating and digging deeper into the rematriation and the reclamation of Indigenous child-rearing practices across Indian country, which I think is just a really beautiful, full circle story for our people,” she said. “Indian boarding schools, the entire impetus of them was really beyond cultural disconnection, beyond that stripping of our identity. What it was really about, at the heart of it, is family separation.”

For Spears, what informs her writing as a Cherokee person is the seven-generation concept. Under this concept, current tribal leaders and community members must consider how their decisions, actions and use of resources will impact their descendants seven generations into the future. This concept, she said, is the basis for how she thinks about the work she does.

“I just really take on this identity of, you know, we are a really big tribe. There’s a lot of tribes that I cover that are a lot smaller than us,” she said. “There’s an understanding that even though we are Indigenous people as a tribe, we have privileges that other tribes do not when it comes to infrastructure, when it comes to financial buy in. So, I really kind of take that to heart to just really being fair and accurate about the reporting I do – making sure that everything has that historical context. When I came into this, when I launched this national beat by myself four years ago, something that I really saw was missing in the media landscape was really a lack of that historical context.”

To read Spear’s work, visit www.imprintnews.org/author/nancy-marie-spears.