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Joe Starita holds an endowed professorship at the University of Nebraska College of Journalism and Mass Communications. Previously, he spent 14 years at The Miami Herald – four years as the newspaper’s New York Bureau Chief and four years on its Investigations Team, where he specialized in investigating the questionable practices of doctors, lawyers and judges. One of his stories was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. Interested since his youth in Native American history and culture, he returned to his native Nebraska in 1992 and began work on a three-year writing project examining five generations of a Lakota-Northern Cheyenne family. The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge – A Lakota Odyssey, published in 1995 by G.P. Putnam Sons (New York), won the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Award, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history, has been translated into six languages and is the subject of an upcoming documentary. Starita’s most recent book – “I Am A Man” – Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice – was published in January 2009 by St. Martin’s Press (New York) and has gone into a seventh printing. The book tells the story of a middle-aged chief who attempted to keep a death-bed promise to his only son by walking more than 500 miles in the dead of winter from Oklahoma to Nebraska to return the boy’s remains to the soil of their native homeland. En route, the father unwittingly ended up in the cross-hairs of a groundbreaking legal decision in which a federal judge in Omaha declared - for the first time in the nation’s 103-year history - that an Indian “is a person” within the meaning of the law and entitled to the same Constitutional protections as white citizens.
In the last 3 ½ years, Starita has given more than 150 talks on Chief Standing Bear, the legal significance of the landmark legal ruling for Native people and why this powerful story still resonates in the 21st century. Those talks have included invited appearances at the Miami International Book Fair, the Chicago Tribune Literary Festival, C-Span’s Book Talk, a joint appearance with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the Smithsonian Institution, a presentation to 5,000 National Education Association members and a speech to more than 500 minority lawyers and judges at their 2011 annual conference. In July 2011, the NEA presented Starita with the Leo Reano Award – a national civil rights award for his long-standing work on behalf of Native people.
Recently, he has completed a new book project – a biography of Dr. Susan La Flesche, an Omaha Indian born in a buffalo hide tipi in 1865, who graduated as the valedictorian of her medical school class in 1889 at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, becoming the first Native doctor in U.S. history. The book will be released by St. Martin’s Press in November 2016.
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