Board Profile:

Patty Loew

The newest addition to the NAPT Board of Directors is Patty Loew, who divides her professional time between Wisconsin Public Television and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A member of the Bad River Band of Chippewa, Patty's academic and professional careers have focused on a variety of issues related to Native culture and its relationship to mass media and popular culture.

Patty holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with continuing education experiences ranging from Lakota Studies at Sinte Gleske College in Mission, South Dakota, to Japanese Language Studies at Portland State University in Oregon. In her academic life, she is Assistant Professor at UW-Madison's Department of Life Sciences Communication, where she focuses on environmental reporting and video documentary production. Since 1993 Patty has also been an on-air personality at Madison's PBS affiliate, WHA-TV where she co-anchors Weekend, a live one-hour news, public affairs and interview program.

True to the academic tradition, Patty's list of presentations and publications goes on for pages, with topics ranging from sovereignty to treaty rights, from segregation in turn-of-the-century baseball to images of Indians in American popular culture. All over the country she's written and spoken about such topics as "The Hollywood Indian," "Effective Media Strategies in Indian Country," "Baseball and the Ojibwe in the 'UnProgressive' Era," "Yer Out: Segregation and Assimilation on Early 20th Century Baseball Diamonds," "Treaty Rights as a Mass Media Event," and "Television and Minorities."

Most recently Patty served on the Program Committee for the July Unity 99: Journalists of Color Conference in Seattle. She helped plan this international event for some 7,000 journalists of color who represented groups such as the National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, and Native American Journalists Association. In addition to producing the opening and closing ceremonies at Unity, coordinating workshops and panels, and providing on-site assistance, Patty was on two panels, contributing her ideas on Sovereignty and Self-Governance for Native Peoples as well as a panel presenting professional and academic options to aspiring journalists of color.

Patty's news and feature experience ranges from stations throughout Wisconsin and the Pacific Northwest, where she has served as anchor, reporter, and writer for over two decades. Some of the television documentaries that Patty has worked on include Nation within a Nation, which aired nationally on PBS in 1998; Bitter Harvest and the award-winning Spring of Discontent, both on Wisconsin's ABC affiliates statewide; and Wild Rice, which was funded in part by NAPT's PTV development fund and is now available for purchase through Vision Maker Video. Color-Blind Justice?, which Patty produced, wrote, and narrated prompted a federal investigation and civil judgments on racism in the Mendota Mental Health Institute Forensics Unit in 1979.

Her professional awards include a 1998 Media Excellence Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Best Continuing Coverage for migrant worker stories from the Associated Press in 1994, 1992 Woman of the Year, from the Eagles Auxiliary 730 and a Writer's Cup Award from Madison Professional Chapter of Women in Communications. Wild Rice, Bitter Harvest, and her PSAs for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission have all been honored at film and video festivals.

Patty's professional associations include the Native American Journalists Association; Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; Native American Council of Madison; Ethnic Advisory Committee for the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission; Dane County Heritage Center; UW Chancellor's Community Minority Advisory Committee; and the Dane County Chapter of the American Red Cross. And when she's not involved with any of these groups, you might find Patty gardening, playing softball, or hitting the powwow trail.

Patty had this to say about joining the NAPT Board of Directors, "As a longtime admirer of NAPT, I'm really excited to join the men and women who help guide its future. There are wonderful stories to be told in Indian Country with benefits, not only for the audiences, but also for the storytellers. I'm pleased and honored to be part of an effort that amplifies Native voices."