On 8 November 2018, the employees of Mvskoke Media, the tribal-affiliated news outlet for the Muscogee (also Mvskoke) Creek Nation in Oklahoma, arrived at work to news that free press on their reservation was in immediate jeopardy. The speaker of the national council, whom the outlet had just investigated for sexual misconduct, introduced an emergency measure to the tribe’s autonomous governing body to repeal its landmark free press bill, thus bringing oversight of the reservation’s only media outlet in house. The staff of Mvskoke Media, being good journalists, immediately started documenting their concerns, as captured in the breakout Sundance documentary Bad Press.

The film, directed by Rebecca Landsberry-Baker (Muscogee Creek) and Joe Peeler, quickly explains that, although the US constitution guarantees the right to a free press, Indigenous nations’ hard-won rights to sovereignty allow them to craft their own laws and constitutions. And in part because of decades of racist stereotypes, derision and cruelty – the Muscogee Creek were forcibly moved to their seat in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, on the trail of tears in the 1830s – many tribal governments are wary of perceived negative coverage. Only five out of 574 federally recognized Native American tribes – less than 1% – have a law guaranteeing a free press, and the pressure to maintain rosy coverage of the government, which controls their budgets, is intense.

As Angel Ellis, a hard-charging and terrifically blunt reporter for Mvskoke Media, puts it in the film: “Do you want a friend who will lie to you and leave you walking out the door with a booger hanging out your nose or toilet paper on your shoe? Or do you want a friend who will stop you and say, ‘Hey, check your face.’ That’s how I view my job as a journalist. But it’s a very fragile system now. Even with the free press law, it’s still fragile.”

Indeed, free press for the Muscogee crumbled in a day – Lucian Tiger III, the speaker who introduced the emergency session to repeal the free press bill, secured a simple majority from the national council that evening, and “in less than 12 hours, free press was gone”, says Ellis. The paper’s editorial board, on which Landsberry-Baker sat, was immediately dissolved, giving council members – whom the paper had investigated for embezzlement and mishandling of tribal funds, among other allegations – the ability to edit stories. As executive director of the Indigenous Journalists Association, Landsberry-Baker felt like “I have to do something to document the journalists’ side of this story, because so many times it’s just been swept under the rug,” she said. “I really felt the weight of that moment, not only as the editorial board was disbanded but as a journalist being like, what do we do now? What does this mean for us?”

It was not Landsberry-Baker’s first experience with the capriciousness of tribal media. She worked as an editor for Mvskoke Media from 2008 to 2013, before the passage of the free press bill, and experienced the gutting of her entire staff when a new administration took office. This time, she felt called to document the threats to free press for the Muscogee – and, by extension, for Indigenous journalists – for a wider audience. Through her husband, Garrett Baker, she connected with Joe Peeler, a documentarian based, at the time, in California. “My initial response was: ‘I can’t believe that this is happening,’” said Peeler, who is white. The two began filming in Okmulgee within a week (and, at times, overlapped with the filming of Reservation Dogs, the superlative Okmulgee-set comedy series that just wrapped on Hulu).

Landsberry-Baker and Peeler primarily followed Ellis as she continued to work for the diminished paper after the repeal, while campaigning for a constitutional amendment to protect the press. The film captures all the thorny complications and mundane work of local politics and hardscrabble local journalism – community meetings, national council votes, campaigns for a new chief, an election annulled by the tribal supreme court and observed by outside election managers. More meetings (“we got kicked out a fair number of times,” said Landsberry-Baker). Eventually, an election to ratify the free press amendment behind closed doors.

It’s never boring. There are the usual perverse incentives and placating promises of power, and also conundrums specific to the tenuous position of tribal nations. Bad Press succinctly surveys the history of Indigenous journalism dating back to the 19th century – its role as a measure of accountability for Indigenous people in sovereign nations, and the fear of negativity for people who, for centuries, were denied the ability to craft their own image.

That tension animates the film, which is firmly on the side of journalists though understanding, to a point, of its opposition. “It’s so complex because we need more representation of Indigenous people in the mainstream media,” said Landsberry-Baker. But that needs to include, as she put it in a line cut from the film, “the good, the bad and the fugly”.

“You have to have a full picture of what’s going on so you can hold those government officials to account. And really, it’s a true exercise of tribal sovereignty,” she said. “It’s really important to not just have the fluff, but also the hard news. And sometimes, that’s really tough for Indigenous communities, because we’re so close-knit, to grapple with.” Much of filming occurred during the supreme court case McGirt v Oklahoma, which concerned tribal sovereignty, “so there’s this extra push by tribal officials going on that want to really put us in a power position, no bad press coming out”, said Landsberry-Baker, while journalists and others argued for access to information as a citizen’s right. “The journalists and the tribal officials are really after that same thing, which is ultimately trying to protect sovereignty, just going at it in two different ways,” she said.

The fraught election process in Muscogee country only underscored the importance of Mvskoke Media; if the outlet can’t cover the tribal government, several reporters note, no one will, as mainstream US outlets often lack experience or interest in covering tribal issues. The film, likewise, toggles between local specificity and an awareness that most viewers won’t know anything about Native American tribes, let alone the Muscogee Creek. “From day one, the discussion was ‘we don’t want this to get swept under the rug,’” said Peeler. “And so we want to shine a light on this for as wide an audience as possible. But also, we wanted to read as true and real and of the community for Native – particularly Muscogee Creek nation, obviously, but for other Native journalists, other Native citizens.”

Peeler and Landsberry-Baker credited that balance to their partnership – one outsider, one insider – and their mixed team of many first-timers. (Notably, the credits delineate who is Indigenous, as well as tribal affiliation.) “Credit to Becca for this,” said Peeler, “the idea was that there are so few Native creatives in the documentary space, and particularly there are a lot of Native journalists who have incredible stories who want to move over in the same way that Becca did, that it [became] ‘who can we foster while we’re doing this?’ It’s basically everyone’s first movie.”

Both directors see the film’s larger resonance for the 569 federally recognized Native American tribes without a free press law, and the evergreen struggle for press independence. Mvskoke Media has “built this roadmap to constitutional reform in Indian Country”, said Landsberry-Baker. “There’s so much power in documentary, and bringing these Indigenous stories to the screen so people can connect with our modern Indigenous people who are journalists, who are regular people fighting the fight every day, coming to work and doing everything they can to serve their community.”

• Bad Press is out in Los Angeles cinemas on 27 October, in New York cinemas on 1 December and in UK cinemas on 10 November