George Polk Award and an
Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for their for their two-year investigation into the expropriation of Indigenous lands for the land-grant university system.
In “Land-Grab Universities,” published in our March 2020 issue, Tristan (Kiowa), now editor-in-chief of the
Texas Observer, and Lee, who is at Cambridge University, located 99% of the nearly 11 million acres taken from 250 tribes through broken treaties, illegal seizures and outright genocide, and then transferred to fledgling land-grant colleges under the Morrill Act of 1862.
This “well-documented account sent shockwaves through campuses across the country where students and faculty demanded that institutions like MIT, Cornell and Cal-Berkeley find ways to right a 150- year-old wrong,” the Polk Award press release noted. IRE judges commented, “This investigation produced a foundational piece of journalism that forces a reckoning with dark origins of many of our nation’s u
NEW YORK (Feb. 24, 2021) – Long Island University (LIU) has announced the winners of the 73rd annual George Polk Awards in Journalism, honoring journalists in 18 categories for their reporting in 2020.
Almost half of the awardees won for reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic, which dominated the judging process, accounting for one quarter of all submissions. This year saw a record total of 592 entries, work that appeared in print, online or on television or radio and was nominated by news organizations and individuals or recommended by a national panel of advisors.
“As always, we strive to identify individual reporters who do significant work, not just the news organizations themselves,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards. “We have never seen a story on the scale of the pandemic. In large part it fell to the press to inform the public about it and the press performed admirably. Our eight Polk winning entries represent the best of the best.”