Award-winning Native American Journalist Myron Dewey, Founder of Digital Smoke Signals, Passes Away

Award-winning Native American Journalist Myron Dewey, Founder of Digital Smoke Signals, Passes Away

Details By Darren Thompson September 26, 2021

YOMBA, Nev. — Myron Dewey, a filmmaker, professor, and journalist, passed away in a fatal car accident early Sunday morning in Yomba, Nev., sources confirmed to Native News Online. He was 49.

Dewey founded Digital Smoke Signals, a media production company that shared live frontline footage during the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. His drone footage of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline garnered recognition for the cause and elevated his status as a journalist covering environmental and Indigenous issues.

Dewey was arrested while covering the Standing Rock resistance and faced a class A misdemeanor charge related to his use of the drone. He faced up to a year imprisonment and $2,000 fine. The charge was eventually dropped.

Dewey received numerous awards for his journalism and media production, including the Michelle Moor Award for Community Journalism and the Man of the Year Award from Medicine Winds News. In 2018, he was given an Award of Merit by the University of Kansas Department of Film & Media Studies. In 2017, he was a winner of the New York City Drone Film Festival in the category of News/Documentary for a short film monitoring North Dakota police at the NoDAPL protest site. Dewey also co-directed the award-winning 2017 film Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, which tells the story of the native-led peaceful resistance and fight for clean water, the environment, and the future of the planet on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

Dewey is Shoshone and Pauite from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation, 35 miles northeast of Reno, Nev. He leaves behind an 11-year-old son.

Details on the funeral arrangements will be published when they are announced by the family.

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