Samantha Michaels’ longform story—rendered in a breathtaking 10,000-word article, and accompanied by a riveting short film and an hourlong podcast episode—is at once a deep examination of a mother’s heartbreaking journey to uncover the details of her son’s death on the Crow Nation reservation and a sweeping look at a broken system that has failed to protect Native American communities.
In 2020, Blossom Old Bull learned that her 17-year-old son, Braven, had died in a car crash after an officer in the newly formed Crow police force engaged him in a high-speed chase. But when Old Bull went to the police headquarters for information about what had happened, nobody was there; the entire department had closed shop without any explanation. Old Bull is one of countless Native parents around the country who have faced a startling lack of information from law enforcement after mysterious deaths on tribal land.
Michaels spent two years investigating the incident and following Old Bull’s legal case and quest for answers. She interviewed witnesses and policing experts; scoured court records; filed public records requests to get a large trove of reports from the Bureau of Indian Affairs; and gained access to and scrutinized dash-cam footage to better understand the lead-up to Braven’s death and the botched investigation that followed. In tandem, she interviewed tribal historians, lawmakers, Crow community members, and former officers to stitch together the historical struggles with law enforcement on the reservation. Policing there had been oppressively handled by the BIA for centuries, and efforts to address a huge deficit in officers and create a new tribal police force were hasty and under-resourced from the start. As Crow historian Alden Big Man Jr. reflects in the piece, the story of the police force is not just a local one—it underscores the federal government’s repeated failures “to keep families informed, to conduct thorough investigations, to keep the reservation safe.”
Brilliant narrative reporting and writing that adds a surreal dimension to the powerlessness that minority communities often feel when policing goes wrong. The tale shows just how urgent and vital local investigative reporting is in America’s news vacuums. The tragedy which ended Braven’s young life will stay with readers for a long time, as will the jaw-dropping systemic inequities of the tribal police system. The reporter does an excellent job moving between the specifics of one case and zooming out to situate it in the broader context, The reporting team did significant legwork to get this in front of the communities most affected through republishing, and media appearances, thus amplifying its impact.
