Starita, Joe 1948-

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STARITA, Joe 1948-

PERSONAL: Born November 13, 1948, in Lincoln, NE; son of Michael (a grocery store manager) and Helen (a homemaker; maiden name, Hansen) Starita; married Melissa Malkovich (a television producer), August 30, 1983; children: Jesse Daniel. Education: University of Nebraska, B.A., 1978, M.A., 1995. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, movies, music, hiking, tennis, skiing, fishing.

ADDRESSES: Office—College of Journalism and Mass Communications, 239 Anderson Hall, P.O. Box 880443, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0443. Agent—Frank Weimann, The Literary Group, 270 Lafayette St., Ste. 1505, New York, NY 10012. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, educator. Worked as a professional basketball player in Ankara, Turkey, a volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz, a dishwasher in Switzerland, and held a variety of odd jobs in such European cities as Paris, London, Rome, Athens, and Barcelona; collected water samples from polluted New Jersey rivers; worked on the loading docks of a Pepsi bottling plant in Lincoln, NE; operated a jackhammer for a construction crew in Oakland, CA; worked at a box factory in San Francisco, CA; Miami Herald, Miami, FL, reporter at Naples bureau, 1979–80, city hall reporter at Fort Lauderdale-Broward bureau, 1980–81, city desk reporter in Miami, 1981–83, New York bureau chief, 1983–87, member of investigations team in Miami, 1987–91; freelance writer in Lincoln, NE, 1991–97; Lincoln Star Journal, city editor, 1997–2000; University of Nebraska College of Journalism, associate professor, 2000–. Guest lecturer at the University of Nebraska and Nebraska Wesleyan University, 1992–95; coached youth league basketball and organized toy and clothing drives for Native Americans, 1992–95.

MEMBER: Nebraska State Historical Society, Morrill Hall Natural History Museum, Friends of the Sheldon Film Theater, Sigma Delta Chi, Kappa Tau Alpha.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Hearst Award for college news writing, 1977, for a profile of a death row inmate; Sigma Delta Chi Award, 1978, for college editorial writing; Florida Society of Newspaper Editors award, 1981, for a five-part series on the plight of migrant farm workers in Collier County, Florida; first place award from Sigma Delta Chi for deadline reporting, 1982, for coverage of the kidnapping of a six-year-old Vero Beach boy, and 1983, for coverage of civil disturbances after the fatal police shooting of a black Miami youth; Green Eye Shade Award, Atlanta chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and Florida Society of Newspaper Editors and the Inter American Press Association grand prizes, all 1985, all for a series on the importation of drugs from South America into South Florida; Media Award from the Florida Bar Association, 1987, for a story about the questionable legal settlement of a brain-damaged child's civil suit; National Headliner Award, Heywood Broun Memorial Award, Green Eye Shade Award, Florida Society of Newspaper Editors Public Service Award, and Florida Bar Association grand prize, all 1988, all for a series on unethical lawyers and doctors; first place for in-depth reporting, Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, 1990, and National Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, 1991, both for a series on a corrupt Dade County judge; Green Eye Shade Award, 1992, for a series on a corrupt Miami social service agency director; Hitchcock Fellowship, University of Nebraska Graduate School of Journalism, 1993; Maude Fling Scholarship, University of Nebraska, 1994.

WRITINGS:

The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey (nonfiction), Putnam (New York, NY), 1995, reprinted with new afterword, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.

Contributor of articles to newspapers, including Miami Herald, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free Press, Dallas Morning News, Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News, and Guardian.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Researching a book/photo project on the history and cultural significance of powwows among Northern Plains Native tribes.

SIDELIGHTS: Joe Starita had been a journalist with the Miami Herald for well over a decade—winning several awards in the course of his coverage of such subjects as the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the sex scandal that hampered Gary Hart's candidacy for president of the United States—when he decided to return to the University of Nebraska in pursuit of his master's degree. He studied the Native American nations of the Great Plains and, in the course of his education, completed his first full-length book, The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey. This volume tells the story of one family from the Lakota nation that has lived on the Pine Ridge reservation for five generations. A contributor for Book of the Month Club News hailed it as "an unusually intimate portrait of Native American life, and of a remarkable family."

For The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, Starita's main interviewee was the nonagenarian Guy Dull Knife, Sr. At the time of the book's preparation, Dull Knife, Sr. lived predominantly in a nursing home in Colorado. He told Starita not only of his own life but of his grandfather, Chief Dull Knife, who led his tribe from U.S. government captivity on a dreadful Oklahoma reservation back to their native lands on what became the Pine Ridge reservation. Dull Knife, Sr. also relates the experiences of Chief Dull Knife's son, his father, George Dull Knife. George Dull Knife, though not present at the battle itself, actually saw the results of the carnage that took place between Native Americans and the United States government at the original conflict at Wounded Knee in the 1890s. Following this, he traveled Europe as a performing "wild Indian" with Buffalo Bill Cody's famed Wild West Show. The book opens in a Colorado nursing home. A Wind Speaker contributor noted that "running about the huge old man, who remembers his father's stories of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, and Custer, is his great-granddaughter. She knows all about music videos, Lego, and deep-dish pizza."

Guy Dull Knife, Sr., himself fought for the United States in World War I, and survived mustard gas poisoning. At the time of the book's publication, he was the last surviving member of the Lakota tribe who fought in World War I. His son, Guy Jr., fought in Vietnam, and like other Native Americans in that war was chosen to walk "point" at the head of columns. It was then purported that Native Americans' skill as hunters and trackers suited them better than men of other ethnicities for this dangerous job. Guy Jr. returned from the war with an alcohol problem, but the narrator reports that getting back in touch with the customs and beliefs of his Lakota people helped him cope. Now a gifted sculptor, he preserves his tribal culture for generations to come. Toward the end of the book, Starita writes of a series of events that began with Guy Jr.'s house being trashed while he and his family were away. The Ku Klux Klan made two visits, leaving their literature, then threats, and statements to the effect that the country belonged to whites and that Indians belonged on the reservation. Guy Jr. then moved his wife, who was eight months pregnant, and their two children from Loveland, Colorado to Hot Springs, South Dakota, rather than risk their safety from the racist Klansmen.

In a Boston Globe review, Katherine A. Powers called The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge "a living, heartbreaking account" and "a truly fine book rich in historical and personal detail of a family and a people." Patricia R. Wickman, reviewing the volume in the Miami Herald, judged it "a story of raw endurance and of a passion for the honorable freedom of mind, heart, and body that few who have not been born to it can understand." David Zimmerman in USA Today compared it to African American author Alex Haley's famed Roots, and concluded that "Starita's accomplishment is the tight weave of his own narrative with written records and oral history."

Starita told CA: "Stripped to its essence, writing embodies a simple concept: You are telling a story. A story that you hope will engage the reader while imparting some degree, some mixture of knowledge, empathy, insight, inspiration, humor, or entertainment. Through writing, I want people to see things from a different viewpoint, to think about things they had not, to feel something that may surprise them. To walk away from a book saying, 'Well, that's a helluva story.' And 'I guess I'll look at that a little differently now.' Or maybe 'That's the best investment I've made in a long time.'

"I write, too, because I am in love with words and the combination of words and how they can shape and carry a sentence—a sentence that will often dictate mood and feeling more by structure than content. At its best, pitching a baseball is pure rhythm. A fastball high and inside sets up a fastball low and away. At its best, writing is the same. The rhythm and cadence of a long sentence can set up a short sentence. Short paragraphs set up long paragraphs. And if the rhythm is right, the reader can be swept along without really knowing it. Can feel or sense the cadence without having to think about it. In the end, there is little that can surpass the exquisite feeling wrought by a perfectly crafted sentence or paragraph.

"Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Both knew more than a little about rhythm and cadence, the beauty of words, the telling of a good story, the imparting of insight and knowledge, inspiration and realism. They knew, too, about something else. They knew all about the relationship between the land and the people who live upon it, how they are often inseparable and how the landscape can become a dominant character within the telling of a good story. Both have been profound influences.

"I have an obsessive personality, so when I get into something I care about I go whole hog. I eat, sleep, and breathe it. This is often a liability in the normal flow of daily life, but it can be a wonderful asset when writing a book. In researching The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge, I read about seventy-five books related to the subject matter. I employed a full-time researcher and armed her with long lists of documents to unearth. I did the same at various libraries and historical societies in several states as well as conducting more than a year's worth of interviews. I slept with a notebook on the nightstand, frequently waking up in the middle of the night to jot down a question I neglected to ask, a document that I wanted, a fact that needed double-checking. Before writing, each of the twelve chapters was blocked out and all of the research material was identified, marked, and filed in a specific chapter folder. All of the interviews were typed up and color-coded by chapter. This involved an enormous investment of time and energy on the front end, but it paid huge dividends on the back end. Then I wrote each day, every day, Monday through Friday, from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon.

"Writing seven hours a day, at least five days a week, for a year is a physical challenge, and I trained for it much like a marathoner would for a race. I run or swim, play tennis or bike after almost every writing session, and I make sure to eat healthy foods and get plenty of rest. It is also important to keep the nonwriting hours as normal and balanced as possible. Friends, family, movies, music, social outings, coaching your son's basketball team are wonderful ways to unwind from the physical and emotional rigors of writing.

"The inspiration for writing The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge was relatively simple and straightforward. Growing up in Nebraska, I had been exposed to the culture of the Plains Indian as a boy and it had always fascinated me. I had read a great deal and criss-crossed the old homeland for years and, as an adult, I had long wanted to find a literary vehicle that would enable readers to understand what it has been like to be an American Indian for the last 150 years. In telling the story, I wanted to adhere to a personal writing philosophy: The best way to tell a story is to go from the specific to the universal. In other words, if I could get it right for one Indian family, I could get it right for many families. That what happened to one family of Lakota Sioux from the mid-nineteenth century to the present might also hold true—in general—for families of Cherokee, Seminole, Navajo, or Mohawk. I also was determined to write the book as much as possible from the viewpoint of the family. To let the story unfold through their eyes and their voices, to rely on a blend of oral history and historical records so that the actions and beliefs of each generation would emerge in context and with perspective.

"From the beginning, it was clear that most readers will never visit the Pine Ridge Reservation. The goal then was to bring the Pine Ridge Reservation to them—in language as simple, direct, and accurate as possible. To somehow make the history and culture of the Indian accessible to the teacher in Tampa, the factory worker in Detroit, the claims adjuster in Pasadena. If I have succeeded, by the time the reader hits the last paragraph, he or she should feel an overwhelming sense of what it has been like to be an Oglala for the last century and a half, to intellectually grasp and emotionally connect to their long struggle to maintain a history and culture. Because despite the slaughter of the buffalo and being forcibly removed from their land and taken to arid reservations, despite their language and religion being outlawed, their manner of dress and way of life forbidden, despite every attempt of government to culturally obliterate these people, they somehow managed to keep it alive for well over a hundred years. I found that remarkable and I hope readers will, too."