Buffalos Fire Senior Editorial Team
Jodi Rave Spotted Bear is the founder-director of the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, a 501-C-3 nonprofit organization, located on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. The organization publishes on Buffalo’s Fire, an independent digital news site. Buffalosfire.com is the first Native American news site to become a member of The Trust Project, an international consortium of news organizations dedicated to integrity, transparency and accountability in the news industry. The project assists the public in making informed news choices within a free and responsible press.
Jodi is an award-winning journalist and opinion writer whose recognition and awards arise from the mainstream, military, university journalism programs as well as the Native American Journalists Association. She was selected in 2021 as a Bush Fellow for leadership, a recognition of her decades-long commitment to journalism and her vision for well-informed Indigenous communities. In 2021, Jodi was also named a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow of Stanford University.
After reporting for daily newspapers for nearly 15 years., she returned to her ancestral homelands of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. She served as the executive director of the Fort Berthold Communications Director — overseeing the Three Affiliated Tribes newspaper and radio station – before starting a non-profit dedicated to Freedom of Information and open records. She also enjoyed being a Native American Studies instructor at the Nueta, Hidatsa and Sahnish College in New Town, N.D. where she taught courses on the media and tribal governance.
Prior to that, she worked more than a decade as national reporter on American Indian issues for Lee Newspapers. She was based at the Lincoln Journal Star in Nebraska and the Missoulian in Montana. Jodi has been awarded a number of fellowships, including an MIT Knight Science Journalism fellowship in 2021-2021. In 2003, she received a Nieman Fellowship for journalists at Harvard University.
She is also the recipient of national awards and honors for news and opinion writing, including the Society of Professional Journalists Pacific Northwest, Native American Journalists Association, Montana Newspaper Association, Columbia University School of Journalism and the University of Nebraska. She was also awarded the Paul D. Savanuck Military Journalist of the Year in 1999. Her writing is featured in “The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity,” published by Columbia University Press.
Jodi is Mandan-Hidatsa and Lakota. She lives in Twin Buttes, N.D. with her husband and daughter.
Talli Nauman is co-founder and director of the international bilingual media project Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, initiated with a MacArthur grant in 1994. She is the Contributing Editor at Buffalo’s Fire-Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance and at The Esperanza Project.
She is the Editor of her own publication Meloncoyote, a bilingual newsletter that teams prize-winning environmental journalists and aspiring youth in training sessions to advance media coverage of sustainability issues in Northwest Mexico and Southwest U.S.A. She served as Society of Environmental Journalists Diversity Associate, co-authoring the organization’s Guide to Diversity in Environmental Reporting. She wrote the first guide to Environmental Journalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, originally published in 2018.
Her experience encompasses 45 years in major media outlets in the Americas, including The Guardian, Reuters, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, UPI, and AP in Los Angeles and Mexico City.
She has an MA in International Journalism from University of Southern California and a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard-Radcliffe.