Leah Lemm: Musicality and Native Storytelling

 

Leah Lemm is a radio and podcast journalist and producer who now leads coverage of Native culture in Minnesota as part of the inaugural staff of Minnesota Public Radio’s (MPR) Native News branch.

When she first began working at MPR, as the master control specialist in the international control center, Lemm started to realize that Native voices were absent. Talking to family members, she also realized that the lack of representation in the media led Native communities to be politically disengaged. She made a Venn diagram to visually represent what she cared about in life: community, audio, and storytelling.

“Right in the middle, where they all intersected, was [the need to] help tell Native stories in radio,” Lemm says.

Lemm is a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. She was born in Minneapolis, where she wrote poetry, sang, and played the violin. After graduating from Anoka High School, she pursued an economics degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There she joined an a capella group, the Chorallaries. In her final year, she was in charge of recording the group’s album. This is when Lemm discovered her true calling was in audio.

“I fell in love with recording voice,” Lemm says. “Mixing voice together, editing and making things sound cool. My economics degree faded into the background.”

After completing her undergraduate degree in economics, Lemm went on to earn a diploma in music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music. She returned to Minnesota briefly to work at MPR before taking one more journey outside of the state, earning a master’s in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lemm ran into an old friend who encouraged her to get into contact with Minnesota Native News, a project led by Ampers Radio. She found herself landing in the middle of her Venn diagram. “I was doing audio editing, focusing on Native communities through storytelling, while being able to add in a little razzle-dazzle with my music,” Lemm says. “My musicality comes out in journalism by having the ears to help create radio pieces that sound great. There’s a musicality to weaving narration and interview and ambience and other sounds that can play off of the interview.”

In 2023, Lemm became the senior editor of the new Native News branch of MPR, which she joined along with reporter Melissa Olson. Together, they built a vision for what the team’s coverage would look like: telling foundational Native stories through expansive journalism. They aim to escape the common media trap of only discussing problems in the Native community. They cover solutions, events, and profiles.

The two also serve informally as MPR consultants. Colleagues who have questions about their own coverage of indigenous issues, such as approaches to stories and pronunciation, ask questions.

“We want to lower hurdles for other people to help tell nuanced Native stories,” Lemm explains.

For the general public, Lemm says, “I’m hoping that we are building vocabulary for our listeners — that foundational knowledge of who their neighbor is, who the tribes are in our state, what the acronyms mean: BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs], ICWA [Indian Child Welfare Act], MMIR [Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives].”

In the past decade, Lemm says, she has seen a significant shift in the amount of media made by indigenous creators telling indigenous stories. She sees this as important not only for Native people, but for anyone who wants to learn about the unique nature of different tribes and to understand Native people as modern citizens.

Leah Lemm encourages everyone to seek out and enjoy indigenous storytelling and culture, from TV shows to journalism to public events. “We’re right here, walking among the rest of society. Saying ‘hi’ and making a friend goes a long way. That slowly chips away at those barriers between people.”  Learn more: mprnews.org/native-news