Hearing the Whispers

I can’t remember when I first read Jason Stein’s byline, but I do remember thinking to myself that this guy had a future in writing. I knew his name from the UW–Madison journalism school where we’d both studied. He was a real talent and everybody knew it. Since 2003, Jason’s been a full-time reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal.

Last June, he wrote a series on Native American languages in Wisconsin called “Down to a Whisper.” It was an emotionally charged, beautifully crafted story about the vanishing languages of the tribes—what had happened to them and how, maybe, some of them could be saved, or at least preserved, in a way that future generations could appreciate and understand their heritage. It was published in print, and the online version was presented into a nicely crafted new media format with audio, slideshows, maps and graphics.

Jason’s piece was so good it recently won a national honor—the Freedom Forum/American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity—and two Milwaukee Press Club awards.

I asked Jason about why and how he decided to take on such a complex and multifaceted story—without much time off from his regular state government beat.

“It sort of germinated for a while,” he says. “It was just a little thing that led me to write the story.” And then he launches into the “little thing,” which like most big things has deeper roots once you start digging around in your mind for the seeds. Jason lived in Strasbourg, France, for a year, where residents speak a regional language called Alsatian, but like Native languages here it’s not being passed on to future generations as readily as it once was. He also spent time in a Mayan village in Guatemala. “Some of the languages have hundreds of thousands of speakers but I still noticed them weakening,” he says.

While he was in grad school at UW, he read about a professor’s language preservation work with the Menominee tribe, which piqued his curiosity. This was about five years before he would actually sit down to write the story.

“I reached out to a couple tribes and tried to break through and I really didn’t,” Jason explains. “For years I tried to reach out to people. I finally broke through and got to the right people. It’s not easy coming in from the outside to do the kind of story that I wanted to do.”

Before he started the research and reporting in earnest, Jason had a feeling he might not find evidence that any of the five languages had much chance for survival. Years of federal government assimilation practices and benign neglect by tribal elders who believed their children and grandchildren might be better off without it had taken their toll. But the further he delved, the more confident he became that solutions were out there, they just wouldn’t be easy. And in some cases, the spoken word might be preserved but not entirely restored or with total authenticity.

I asked Jason how the tribes, particularly the educators and advocates for the cause, reacted. “It was really gratifying. I was prepared for it not to be,” he says. “For you to spend your life working on preserving these languages, you have to really have a believe that you can accomplish that goal. And yet a real finding of the series was that the situation was dire. I was prepared for people to feel uncomfortable with that. But they weren’t.”

I’m always fascinated with the ritual of writing. For some the words spill onto the page like beer from a tap, and the writer returns to them only to revise, polish and send off to the editor. But for many more of us the words need coaxing before they trickle out like erratic drips from a leaky faucet. Writer’s block is real and menacing. I love Jason’s leads, so I asked him how he approached them.

“It comes very slowly and painfully for me,” he says. “On day one I went back and forth on a couple different leads. Up until the end that was one thing that I was prepared for people to object to because [the lead] comes out and states pretty explicitly that these languages are dying and that isn’t really their view of it.”

But the consummate journalist has only one master: “I felt an obligation to present things as a mainstream reader would see them,” he says.

At the same time, Jason took a measured and diligent approach to the story—it took about a year to write and produce for the web—that feels deeply respectful of the state’s Native American culture and experience.

“We ended up using a lot of historical photos. We did slide shows and a lot of them told stories that crossed over decades. Because of the nature of this particular story, I was very concerned about not having something perceived as just being taken and not adequately credited.”

While Jason says he’s skeptical about how much a newspaper story can affect the political process, he’s proud of the fact that his has had some impact. Gov. Doyle’s budget bill includes $250,000 a year for competitive grants tribes and school districts can apply for as part of a broader strategy on native language preservation that Jason details in his story.

Of course the funding is controversial in a recession, and Jason’s been reporting on the proposal’s fate from his desk at the state Capitol. Stay tuned.