Why I Became an Investigative Reporter

The summer of 1999 changed everything for me.

I was twelve years old, spending a few weeks at Camp La Junta on the banks of the Guadalupe River near Hunt, Texas — about twelve miles from my hometown of Kerrville. Founded in 1928, Camp La Junta was the kind of place where boys learned to paddle canoes, tie knots, and tell stories around a campfire.

Our cabin counselor was Thomas “Tommy” Redhorse, a 24-year-old graduate student in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Tommy was Cherokee Nation, from Oklahoma, and he brought an approach to summer camp that nobody had seen before.

He required us to keep daily journals. Every evening, he gathered us for “story circles” where we’d share what we’d written. He introduced us to the works of Ida B. Wells, Bob Woodward, and Seymour Hersh.

“Every person has a story worth telling,” Tommy told us. “And the powerful depend on the silence of the ordinary.”

Tommy died in a car accident in 2004. He was 29. In 2015, I established the Thomas Redhorse Memorial Scholarship at Camp La Junta to honor his memory.

That summer taught me that writing could be an act of witness.