"Come Home Again," the Nez Perce Tribe's deadly exile to Oklahoma and return to Oregon, Nov. 1998

This three-part series, from November, 1998, won the 1999 National Edward R. Murrow Award for Best News Series from the Radio & Television News Director's Association and the 1999 Heartland Regional Emmy Award for Writing. It tells the story of the fabled Nez Perce Tribe, led by the legendary Chief Joseph, who were driven from their ancestral home in the Pacific Northwest by White settlement and the United Sates Army, to exile in Indian Territory, in present-day Kay County, Oklahoma. There, unaccustomed to the region's weather extremes and diseases, the Nez Perce suffered through eight years of misery, including the death of all the children born to the Tribe while in exile. One-hundred-twenty years later, we met the dear Lucille McWilliams, a Kay County historian who'd been working to preserve the dignity of the Tribe's dead, whose burial place had been desecrated by a local farmer. She'd been named "Guardian of the Children" by the Nez Perce because of her work on their behalf. And in Oregon, we were on-hand for the historic reconciliation of the ancestors of both the Nez Perce and the White settlers who took their land. Beset by economic stagnation and a century of bigotry, mistrust and hatred, it was an experiment in working together while still fighting the fear and anger that had draped the Wallowa River Valley for a hundred-twenty years. This series is also an example of the remarkable work we were doing at the time at KOTV/Tulsa in traveling the world and producing long-format storytelling, something you'd not see, in length or topic, even at the network level, at that time or today. The photojournalist/editor of this series is Harry Begay, who won two National Edward R. Murrow Awards in 1999. One, for this piece, and another for "Best Use of Video" for a beautiful photo piece he produced about his grandmother, who was still living an isolated life as she always had on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Harry, also known as Harrison, as of this writing, is a popular musician in the Phoenix area where he fronts the "Sir Harrison Band." It was also while shooting this story in rural Wallowa County, Oregon, that I remember standing in a run-down phone booth in the parking lot of a small general store and being told by Holly that she'd had a miscarriage. We cried together, and she told me to continue working, that there was no point in coming home early. Happily, Jack came along in December of the following year.