The AIPA's Marie Potts Journalism Award

Jerry Gambill (aka Rarihokwats), Managing Editor of Akwesasne Notes, was the first recipient of the Marie Potts Journalism Award, an honor created and bestowed by the pioneering American Indian Press Association (AIPA). The inaugural ceremony took place at the Denver Indian Center on November 16, 1972. The Rocky Mountain News covered the story, reporting that "The Award includes a $500 prize and is the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Mrs. Marie Potts, the award's namesake is the 77-year-old editor of 'Smoke Signals' [sic], a Sacramento, Calif. monthly news magazine. She was instrumental in the founding AIPA." Note: The Smoke Signal was often, and continues to be, inaccurately referred to in the plural; and while Potts was indeed one of approximately 10 co-founders, the driving figure behind development of the AIPA was Charles "Chuck" Trimble.)

Marie Potts and Russell Means

The passing of Russell Means today, at the age of 72, inspires a post that leaps decades beyond 1948 and the FIC's Freedom Train appearance. The year is 1971, the location is Spokane, Washington, and the occasion is the meeting of the American Indian Press Association (AIPA), organized the year before by Charles Trimble. Russell Means, then editor of the Cleveland Crier, and 76-year-old Marie Potts, longtime editor of FIC's Smoke Signal newspaper, were founding members of the AIPA. 

American Indian Press Association, 1971, Spokane, WA.
Potts is seated at center,  Means is second from R,
Trimble is on the far L.

Potts and Means represented different generations and traditions of the American Indian press. The pioneering efforts of Marie Potts inspired the organization to create "The Marie Potts Achievement Award" (inaugurated the following year in Denver, Colorado) as a way to recognize up-and-coming American Indian newspapers and journalists.  The younger members of the organization inspired Potts to assume a more authoritative American Indian and Mountain Maidu voice in her Smoke Signal editorials. Two years after the Spokane meeting, Means was making national and international news for his role in the American Indian Movement. When a reporter from the Sacramento Bee asked Marie Potts what she thought about AIM and the siege at Wounded Knee, her response revealed just how far she had come from her years as a dutiful and dedicated student at California's Greenville Indian School  (1900-1912) and Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Class of 1915): 

We were subjugated, beaten down, then our people began to study law…we work now through Congress and the courts whenever we can—but, of course, we have to have militants to bring about these things…to get the attention of Congress and the courts.

  -Sacramento Bee 4/22/73