Red Lake tribal chairman speaks about school shooting
Boy, he says, do I have a story to tell you.
Floyd Jourdain Jr. knows the people he's talking to know this story — or think they do — because they've seen it in the news.
The story of a depressed high schooler who shoots to death his grandfather and the grandfather's girlfriend and then goes to his high school in a black leather coat and kills a security guard, a teacher and five students, then himself.
It happened this spring on a reservation in Red Lake, Minn.
But, the chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa Nation says, there's more to the story.
"I inherited one of the worst tragedies in the history of the modern era. It devastated my community.
"We were under a microscope, under the world's eye after the tragedy. … It was really scary."
And so he's going to tell what it was like to be a community "under siege" by the media — depicted as a horrible, desolate place full of despair. He knows it's not.
He's going to tell it to people who write stories all of the time, journalists gathered for the national Native American Journalists Association convention, held in Lincoln this year at the Embassy Suites Hotel.
The story, told Friday afternoon in a panel discussion, sounds at times like a war story.
"An army" of TV trucks blew into town that Monday in March, he says. Within a few hours, satellite dishes and cameras and reporters were everywhere.
The reporters were knocking on the doors of families who'd lost loved ones.
It was scary, he says, for him and his people — a private people who like to be left alone in their isolated area in the woods of northern Minnesota.
While he was juggling the world's attention, he was trying to make sure his people would be OK, especially the victims' families.
He was one of them.
He lost three family members that day, including Jeffrey Weise, the 16-year-old shooter.
Jourdain says he can't talk about one part of the story most devastating to him — the part in which his own 16-year-old son, Louis Jourdain, was arrested in connection with the tragedy.
Louis Jourdain was arrested a week after the killing spree, the only person charged so far in the killings.
Newspapers have reported sources saying one of the charges involves conspiracy and that Jeffrey Weise and Louis Jourdain, cousins, sent e-mails and instant messages to each other in which they planned the killing spree.
Jourdain says he's optimistic that his son will not be held responsible.
"My son was in school that day, equally terrified."
As a father, he feels numbness, nausea.
There's a bedroom down the hallway of his house, he says, where a 16-year-old used to play video games and listen to music and hang out like any other teenager.
The room is empty now.
He says Weise was a troubled kid, not a demon as some people in the media portrayed him initially.
As a tribal leader, he feels he did the right thing to limit reporters' access to the reservation, a sovereign land.
He kept them to mostly a parking lot outside the tribal council's headquarters. He had some kicked off the reservation. He had equipment confiscated.
He remembered the intense media attention on the school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and did what he thought was best to protect his people.
Another panelist, Holly Cook, a tribal member who works as a public affairs advisor for a firm in Washington, D.C., returned home right away to help with the media storm.
She says one of the biggest misconceptions to come out of the coverage was that the reservation's isolated location played a big role in the tragedy.
The real story, she says, it that it could happen anywhere.
It happened at Columbine High in Littleton, Col., an affluent, mostly-white suburb of Denver.
She says that like at Columbine, there were some students at the Red Lake school who knew about it ahead of time.
She, too, was appalled by some in the media.
She said Jourdain and other tribal leaders were more concerned with how to get through the day than whether the New York Times got its story for the day.
Jourdain said some reporters were sensitive to the tragedy and the Chippewa culture. But many weren't.
He heard one reporter say, "I'm embedded here in Red Lake, Minnesota," as if it were Iraq.
He remembers the Fox News people were talking about Barry Bonds and laughing like they were at a big party.
"I'll never watch Fox News again," he says. "And I used to think they were pretty cool."
Red Lake is an isolated community, yes. But it's a good community where a lot of good things are happening.
But sometimes, he says, it seemed like that wasn't a story people wanted to tell.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
Floyd Jourdain Jr. knows the people he's talking to know this story — or think they do — because they've seen it in the news.
The story of a depressed high schooler who shoots to death his grandfather and the grandfather's girlfriend and then goes to his high school in a black leather coat and kills a security guard, a teacher and five students, then himself.
It happened this spring on a reservation in Red Lake, Minn.
But, the chairman of the Red Lake Chippewa Nation says, there's more to the story.
"I inherited one of the worst tragedies in the history of the modern era. It devastated my community.
"We were under a microscope, under the world's eye after the tragedy. … It was really scary."
And so he's going to tell what it was like to be a community "under siege" by the media — depicted as a horrible, desolate place full of despair. He knows it's not.
He's going to tell it to people who write stories all of the time, journalists gathered for the national Native American Journalists Association convention, held in Lincoln this year at the Embassy Suites Hotel.
The story, told Friday afternoon in a panel discussion, sounds at times like a war story.
"An army" of TV trucks blew into town that Monday in March, he says. Within a few hours, satellite dishes and cameras and reporters were everywhere.
The reporters were knocking on the doors of families who'd lost loved ones.
It was scary, he says, for him and his people — a private people who like to be left alone in their isolated area in the woods of northern Minnesota.
While he was juggling the world's attention, he was trying to make sure his people would be OK, especially the victims' families.
He was one of them.
He lost three family members that day, including Jeffrey Weise, the 16-year-old shooter.
Jourdain says he can't talk about one part of the story most devastating to him — the part in which his own 16-year-old son, Louis Jourdain, was arrested in connection with the tragedy.
Louis Jourdain was arrested a week after the killing spree, the only person charged so far in the killings.
Newspapers have reported sources saying one of the charges involves conspiracy and that Jeffrey Weise and Louis Jourdain, cousins, sent e-mails and instant messages to each other in which they planned the killing spree.
Jourdain says he's optimistic that his son will not be held responsible.
"My son was in school that day, equally terrified."
As a father, he feels numbness, nausea.
There's a bedroom down the hallway of his house, he says, where a 16-year-old used to play video games and listen to music and hang out like any other teenager.
The room is empty now.
He says Weise was a troubled kid, not a demon as some people in the media portrayed him initially.
As a tribal leader, he feels he did the right thing to limit reporters' access to the reservation, a sovereign land.
He kept them to mostly a parking lot outside the tribal council's headquarters. He had some kicked off the reservation. He had equipment confiscated.
He remembered the intense media attention on the school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and did what he thought was best to protect his people.
Another panelist, Holly Cook, a tribal member who works as a public affairs advisor for a firm in Washington, D.C., returned home right away to help with the media storm.
She says one of the biggest misconceptions to come out of the coverage was that the reservation's isolated location played a big role in the tragedy.
The real story, she says, it that it could happen anywhere.
It happened at Columbine High in Littleton, Col., an affluent, mostly-white suburb of Denver.
She says that like at Columbine, there were some students at the Red Lake school who knew about it ahead of time.
She, too, was appalled by some in the media.
She said Jourdain and other tribal leaders were more concerned with how to get through the day than whether the New York Times got its story for the day.
Jourdain said some reporters were sensitive to the tragedy and the Chippewa culture. But many weren't.
He heard one reporter say, "I'm embedded here in Red Lake, Minnesota," as if it were Iraq.
He remembers the Fox News people were talking about Barry Bonds and laughing like they were at a big party.
"I'll never watch Fox News again," he says. "And I used to think they were pretty cool."
Red Lake is an isolated community, yes. But it's a good community where a lot of good things are happening.
But sometimes, he says, it seemed like that wasn't a story people wanted to tell.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
Copyright © 2002-2008 Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved.