Joe Starita, 75, is an educator on several levels. As a professor in the College of Journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he has been an educator in the literal, most traditional sense. He also, however, has educated the general public through investigative reporting of current events and publishing books about Native American history, a particular interest of his.
“If you grow up in Nebraska, you grow up in a place where there is a large Native American footprint,” said Starita. “You get exposed to Native American things just by virtue of growing up in a state that is named after an Oto word.” In the Oto language, “Nebraska” means “flat water,” named in reference to the Platte River.
Starita’s first exposure to Native American history was learning about Chief Crazy Horse when his family visited Fort Robinson. At age 10, Starita became “a Crazy Horse groupie,” and in the fall of his 6th grade year, Starita’s class was tasked with writing a four-page paper about someone they admired. Starita wrote a 40-page paper about his newfound hero. “It was the lead domino that set off a chain of dominoes that has run through the course of my life,” he said.
That course has taken him not only on physical journeys across the world, but educational ones as well.
“I would say there are basically five different chapters in my life,” Starita said. The first was as a young athlete; Starita went to UNL on a baseball scholarship and pitched for two years until he tore his rotator cuff. After that, he played professional basketball in Turkey. When the basketball season ended in Turkey, Starita became a “global roustabout, seeing the world and doing a lot of pretty wild things.” One of these wild things was working on a kibbutz in Israel. “The first night I ate dinner in the communal dining room, I sat next to an elderly Yugoslavian woman who had lost eight members of her family at Auschwitz,” Starita recalled. “She had lost both her mother and father and four brothers and two sisters. She was the only survivor. And that was a whole new world for a 20-year-old from Lincoln, Nebraska, to be sitting next to an elderly Yugoslavian Jew whose family literally went up in smoke in a crematorium in Germany.” Starita spent seven years traveling the world, visiting Ethiopia, Italy, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and every country in Europe.
Chapter three involved Starita’s continuing education. “There were three things I was interested in in life: I loved travel, I loved talking to people, and I loved writing,” he said. The combination of those interests naturally turned him to the field of journalism. After graduating with a master’s in journalism from UNL, Starita got a job at the Miami Herald in Florida as a journalist and investigative reporter.
Fate took an interest in Starita and his journalistic ability while in Florida, as he heard of a local scandal by happenstance and wrote a story that eventually became a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the category of Investigative Reporting. A lawyer had learned of his company’s malfeasance, and, obeying his conscience, attempted to do something about it. “[He] went to the American Bar Association and told them this story, and they didn’t do anything, so he got frustrated and went to the local chapter of the American Medical Association,” Starita explained. “They also turned a deaf ear on him, and so out of frustration, he called the city desk of the Miami Herald and I just happened to answer the phone.” Starita met with the lawyer that night and spent the next five months investigating, writing, and exposing the story.
The scandal in question was one of medical malpractice in 1990-1991; certain doctors and lawyers were colluding to physically damage patients, then use MRI scans to extort money from insurance companies.
“I proved that they made millions of dollars over the course of a number of years surgically removing perfectly healthy discs from illiterate, poor Haitians in south Florida and then using the MRI scans to show insurance companies how badly their clients were damaged,” Starita explained. “They would warn [the insurance companies] that south Florida juries were notoriously liberal, and they could stand to lose an awful lot of money if they brought a poor Haitian mother on the stand and explained to the jury that this mother of five children who is impoverished, now is also physically impaired for life because of the damage that she suffered in this alleged auto accident. And time after time, the insurance companies would settle out of court rather than risk a major damage award in a liberal south Florida court.” Starita has a photo of the doctors involved being handcuffed and led out by police officers; a talisman of immorality coming to justice, hanging on a wall in his Lincoln home. “So in the end, it was the local newspaper who provided the story that ended this horrifically corrupt and heinous operation between this law firm and this medical practice that was grossly abusing innocent human beings,” Starita said proudly. “And that’s what good journalism is supposed to do.”
After his stint in Florida, Starita returned to Lincoln and began writing his first book, “The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge.” This began the writing chapter of his life. “Dull Knifes” was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History. This book put five generations of a single Lakota family under a microscope and looked at the narrative arc of what each of those generations had to do to survive. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Starita said. “The stories are unbelievable.” Kieth Dull Knife walked from Oklahoma back to Montana. His son, George Dull Knife, was a member of Buffalo Bill Cote’s wild west show who went to England to perform.
George’s son, Guy Dull Knife Sr., joined the United States Army during WWI, narrowly avoiding death by mustard gas. “This was seven years before Native Americans were considered worthy enough to be citizens in their own country, in lands they had lived upon for 10,000 years,” Starita said. “And here’s Guy Dull Knife Sr. fighting trench warfare in France against the Germans, almost dying for a country that didn’t consider him worthy of being a citizen.”
Guy’s son fought in the Vietnam War. He was the point man in his army unit in the summer of 1968. “Walking point was probably the most dangerous job in the world,” Starita explained. “You had to walk 50-100 feet ahead of the main unit to make sure there were no mines, to make sure there were no Viet Cong ambushes, and he was the only Native in his unit. The C.O. of the unit selected him as ‘point man’ because he thought as an Indian, he could hear branches crackling or people talking better than a white man.” His son fought in the Gulf War against Sadam Hussein.
“The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge” was a big success—so much so that it was not only nominated for a Pulitzer, but was considered as the basis for a potential television series by Steven Spielberg.
Though the visual media adaptation of “Dull Knifes” did not work out, it did for Starita’s second book, “I Am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice.” This book will get a movie adaptation in the near future, beginning production in 2025.
“I am so honored and very thrilled that this is now going to go from something you hold in your hands and read to something you sit in a theater and watch,” Starita beamed. “It’s going from page to screen. And it’s very exciting to think about the people who are involved.”
The people involved include Jim Sheridan, a filmmaker from Dublin, Ireland, and Andrew Troy, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, director, and producer. Sheridan’s movies have generated 16 Academy Award nominations for films like “My Left Foot,” for which actor Daniel Day Lewis won the Best Actor award. Troy, another veteran in the filmmaking industry, is passionate about the project, as he is of Apache descent.
“I think when you put together an Irishman and an Apache working on a project, good things are going to happen,” said Starita. Currently, the filmmakers are finalizing the script, interviewing A-list actors for the roles, “some of the biggest names in Hollywood,” according to Starita, and researching locations for filming. They plan to shoot at least partially along the Niobrara River in Northeast Nebraska, which is the homeland of Standing Bear and the Ponca Tribe. Starita is fed up with the “cliches and Djangoistic gibberish” that usually define movies about Native Americans. “That’s going to end with this movie,” Starita averred. “It’s not going to be some cliche of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. It’s the real deal.”
Starita hopes the film will inspire young Native children. “The thought of a 14-year-old boy or 14-year old-girl being able to sit and watch the true story of a true hero who looks like them is what is really exciting about this project,” he said. “It’s going to make these Native children all over the country feel very good about themselves and very proud of their history and their people, and they have not had enough of that.”
Starita’s third book, “A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America’s First Indian Doctor,” is a deep dive into exactly what the subtitle suggests. This remarkable story is another in Native history of incredible courage and determination. As both a Native American and a woman living in the 1880s, La Flesche had two major strikes against her in her pursuit of a medical degree. At the time, it was a ludicrous aspiration—to add some perspective to the timeline, women in the United States were not given the right to vote until 1920, and Native American women were not allowed the right until 1924, nearly 150 years after the founding of the country in 1776. Still, La Flesche persisted until she overcame these barriers. With an official degree in hand, she ignored her colleagues’ pleas for her to stay and build a wealthy, comfortable life to return to her home on the Omaha reservation, a community neglected by white doctors. “Again, a powerful, spiritually enriching story that seems almost too good to be true,” said Starita.
All of Starita’s books highlight that common thread that runs in most Native American stories: the combination of selflessness, determination, and family. “They’re really important stories, for all kinds of reasons,” Starita said. “Stories for not only Nebraskans to know, but for all people to know, because they represent the best of humanity.” That selfless mindset is more than apparent in the culture and lore of Native American tribes. “They are a ‘we’-based culture,” Starita explained. “Crazy Horse was revered for going out on hunts and coming back with a couple of deer and giving them to the elders of the tribe who had no sons or any means of getting their own meat. He would give everything away. That was one of their values: the more you gave away, the richer you became in their culture.”
The most recent chapter of Starita’s life has come to reflect those values of Native culture. While teaching at the College of Journalism at UNL, Starita started a scholarship fund called the Chief Standing Bear Journey for Justice Scholarship Fund. “I kind of have a hyper-aggressive, hyper-competitive personality from playing baseball,” he said. “Now, as I am getting a little mellower, I am just wanting to do really good things. I want to give back now, and I’m in a position to be able to do that.” For the last 10 years, the scholarship has awarded between $1,500 and $2,000 a year to Nebraska Native American high school graduates. In 2024, Starita and his scholarship committee (four of the five of whom are Native American women) awarded 22 scholarships totaling $40,000 to Native Nebraska students.
“There’s not much that makes you feel any better than being able to help somebody to achieve their goal, who does not have the financial means to achieve their dream,” Starita said. “And that’s exactly what has happened with dozens and dozens of Native students through this scholarship that hundreds of people have donated to.”
In his 21 years of teaching, Starita developed close relationships with his students, leading them to success and taking them on field trips to places like Sri Lanka. “The high point of those 21 years was a year-long project that a magnificent group of 12 students did,” he reminisced. “They spent an entire year working on a project that we called ‘The Wounds of White Clay.’” White Clay is a town on the border of South Dakota near the Pine Ridge reservation, a dry reservation whose community, the Ogallala Lakota, was being damaged by the liquor stores in White Clay. The project was entered in the College category of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism and Books Award in 2017, and won not only in the College category, but won the grand prize—meaning it beat out all the entries in the Professional category as well. “This college entry by 12 snot-nosed college kids beat out the New York Times, the Washington Post, HBO, The Guardian—it beat out all the professional entries,” Starita said with pride. “This was the only time that has ever happened in the 57-year history of the award.”
Starita’s pride in his students never wavered and kept him returning to the classroom year after year. “I always tried to make my students feel like they were very important, and that they were doing not only good work, but important work,” he explained. “I was very pleased and proud of all the things we were able to accomplish during those 21 years. It was a real honor to work with these young students who are now out in the real world doing wonderful things…I always felt like a proud father.”
After retiring three years ago, Starita now focuses on writing. He is currently working on an investigative story for the Flatwater Free Press. “[It’s] a very in-depth look at the deleterious health damage that the North Omaha coal fire power plant is causing,” he shared. “That plant has been burning coal for 70 years and has been releasing all this toxic poison into the air that blows over North Omaha, helping to create the lowest life expectancy rate in Omaha at just over 70 years. It’s helping to create a situation where the asthma rate in North Omaha is 48% higher than anywhere else in Douglas County.
“In the background, there is another book that I’ve started research on,” he said. “The working title is ‘Mr. Lincoln’s Prisoners.’ It is a harrowing account of the largest mass execution in the history of the United States…where 38 Santee Sioux warriors were hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 5,000 Minnesotans.” In the fall of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed off on these executions, which, Starita said, “may give you a false suggestion that Abraham Lincoln was perhaps a villain, but in fact that’s what makes his story, in one way, so powerful; I believe he is the only president in the history of this country, given what he was facing, given his mental state, given the state of the country, who would have taken the time to read through more than 300 death sentences…if they had their way, there would have been more than 300 Santee Sioux men hanged instead of 38.”
On May 12 of 2023, Starita was pleased to see the reveal of a new stamp depicting Chief Standing Bear at the Centennial Mall, across from the College of Journalism at UNL. This location was an apt choice, given the home of a statue of Chief Standing Bear, an exact replica of the one in Statuary Hall in the United States Congress—statistically the most popular statue of the collection of 100 (each state has two). “The artist did a fantastic job, he captured Standing Bear really well,” Starita marveled.
Starita continues to write and report, no doubt inspired by the myriad of artwork, photographs, and books lining the walls of his cozy Lincoln home. Though he has accomplished much throughout his life, he still has much to give to Nebraskans, and to America. “There are so many things that we as Americans, we as a country, could have learned from Native Americans if we were only listening, if we were only a little bit smarter,” he opined.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
