The Bulletin is banned from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. The ban comes as people have lost their homes in the County Line 2 Fire. Smoke from the blaze drifts across Central Oregon. Federal dollars are being spent to fight it.

But The Bulletin can’t report much of what’s happening. A Bureau of Indian Affairs official has told The Bulletin it is banned.

Is it an attempt to dictate news coverage? To conceal how federal money is being spent? To avoid difficult questions? We don’t know.

Two weeks ago, a Bulletin reporter was told she was trespassing and compelled to leave a community meeting about the fire. Other media were allowed to interview victims that same day. When a photographer tried to get permission this week to take pictures and interview families, he was told The Bulletin is banned from the reservation, and he was directed to BIA Warm Springs Agency Superintendent John Halliday.

We called Halliday. Halliday told us he didn’t ban The Bulletin. “It’s the tribe.” He said it was Secretary-Treasurer Mike Collins.

We asked him when this happened. He said, “You are banned, so there is no reason for us to converse.”

He then hung up.

We tried to contact Collins and were told he is on vacation. We tried other tribal offices. No luck.

Halliday previously told Bulletin city editor Sheila Miller that The Bulletin was reporting on the tribe’s private business, violating the tribes’ cultural norms and profiting off the tragedy. He said The Bulletin’s reporting was inaccurate. She asked for an example. He declined to provide one.

What The Bulletin’s Beau Eastes reported earlier was that the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General was investigating claims of financial mismanagement at the tribes. And an article also raised questions about Halliday’s claim in March that Collins was cleared of any wrongdoing by a “federal investigation.”

What investigation was Halliday talking about? Stanley Speaks, the BIA Northwest Region director, said in May his office did not investigate Collins.

Those are difficult issues. Banning The Bulletin does not resolve them.

The ban may serve a narrow interest, but it also hurts. It may hurt tribal members because other Oregonians can’t learn of the damage the fire has done and won’t be motivated to help them. It hurts the ability to track the fire’s impact on the rest of Oregon. And it raises questions about how much oversight there can be of federal money spent on the reservation. None of that is good for the reservation.