Before joining Buffalo’s Fire, Gabrielle Nelson worked as an environmental reporting intern at the nonprofit publication Bridge Michigan, covering climate change, renewable energy and the Great Lakes. At Bridge, she broke the story on an International Energy Forum report about a looming copper shortage, which prompted discussion in the mining and EV industries. Nelson loves learning something new with every environmental story she writes, but before she found this love for environmental journalism, she wrote for her college radio station, Impact89FM, covering entertainment news. She also trained as a live DJ for the station where she often played songs by Pearl Jam and Coldplay. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in journalism and minors in global studies and gender studies. Nelson hopes to combine her love of environmental journalism with her narrative writing style from entertainment news to tell the stories of North Dakota’s indigenous communities and their deep ties to the land at Buffalo’s Fire.
Beat: The Missouri River Basin, including tribal nations along the river
Tribal Nations along the Missouri River have a long and storied history with the sacred waters of the Missouri, from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Reservation, just south of Bismarck, N.D., to a series of dam projects north and south of the NoDAPL protest sites. This beat will tell the stories of how agricultural and multiple uses along the Missouri River basin environmentally impact tribes. The impact of the energy industry, especially regarding the hydraulic fracking industry's influence on the Missouri River, particularly around the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, will be explored.