The Crazy Horse Memorial, a 563-foot stature of Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, located outside of Custer, South Dakota, is the ideal setting to introduce the fundamentals of journalism to Native American youth. Not only are the Black Hills of South Dakota inspiring and beautiful but standing next to the 87.5 foot-tall face of Crazy House is magical. I’ve been going to the Crazy Horse Journalism Workshop for 5 years now and I can only imagine what the first time students must have thought and felt.

Working for Vision Maker Media as a Project Coordinator allowed me the opportunity to teach multimedia storytelling skills to four high school students on April 19-23, 2010. I mentored two students a day on taking photographs and audio to produce a two-minute sound slide for the web. We were able to view these sound slides later that day in our group. Our first story was on a mountain blast, that removed 615 tons of rock and the other was following The Des Moines Register staff photographer Justin Hayworth around as he provided photography tips to the students.

The most exciting aspect of mentoring for me was the bright, eager-to-learn students I worked with. Sharing my passion of visual storytelling was a rewarding experience. I found that I needed to teach communication skills between the student photographer and audio engineer so the sound slide matched up in the editing room.

I had the opportunity to meet up and network with peers from other Freedom Forum workshops such as the American Indian Journalism Institute (AIJI) and Chips Quinn Scholars. The Ziolkowski family allowed the workshop students and mentors unlimited access to the grounds--at one point our group of students were able to report from the 300 bench of the mountain after the blast. This was the first time in the five years of the program I’ve been attending that we were able to see and report from this area. I came to the workshop for three years as a student and then for another two years as a mentor. We interviewed Ruth Ziolkoski, Korcazk the Crazy Horse sculptor’s wife, and their two children, Anne and Casimir, who both work on the mountain. They were gracious and very hospitable to the young eager students.

Multimedia Stories:
http://freedomforumdiversity.org/native-american-journalism-career-conference/

Print Stories:
http://freedomforumdiversity.org/native-american-journalism-career-conference/2010/04/22/crazy-horse-journalism-workshop-story-links-day-two/

Downloadable Native Journal Newspaper produced by the students:
http://freedomforumdiversity.org/native-american-journalism-career-conference/2010/05/03/native-journal-2010/

Facebook: Crazy Horse Journalism Workshop 2010:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Crazy-Horse-Journalism-Workshop-2010/119376888078456