01 June 2009
Native-Owned Newspaper Wins Battles with Torch of Truth
By Tim Giago
Tim Giago is an Oglala Lakota journalist and editor who founded the Lakota Times on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1981. Later renamed Indian Country Today, it became the largest independent Indian newspaper in the country. Giago has trained and mentored numerous American Indian journalists. An award-winning journalist, he was founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association, has worked in both print and broadcast media, is the author of several books, and writes a nationally distributed weekly column, “Notes on Indian Country.” Emerging from retirement, Giago started the weekly Native Sun News in April 2009, to “go back to the traditional way of providing news for Indian country,” in print and not online, he wrote in his Huffington Post blog.
In 1980, 29 years ago, there wasn’t a single independent, Native American-owned weekly newspaper in the United States. I didn’t know that when I decided to start a weekly newspaper on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the spring of 1981.
A business plan? What was that? I failed to realize until I went to a bank in the reservation border town of Rushville, Nebraska, that interest rates at the time hovered around 20 percent. The 1980 U.S. Census had just been released and it named Shannon County, the heart of the Pine Ridge Reservation, as the “poorest county in America.”
In the face of all these negatives, I started a weekly newspaper. I started the paper because it was vitally needed. Gossip and rumor and lies were rampant, and I believed that the people deserved to know the truth. Truth was my torch, and truth is what made this small startup newspaper a success. Within two years our circulation had spread to all nine reservations within South Dakota’s borders. Our circulation had gone from the initial 3,000 to nearly 12,000 weekly within the first three years.
Guns vs. Words
There was a lot of violence on the reservation following the Wounded Knee occupation (an armed, 71-day, activist takeover of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, which drew law enforcement, publicity, and attention to Native American issues). Factions fought factions and it was a terrible time in our history. The murder of two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1978 exacerbated the situation. I decided that my newspaper, the Lakota Times, had to address this continuing violence and condemn it. Strong editorials pointed out the damage this violence was doing to the future of the tribe. The newspaper covered the violent incidents in depth. The truth upset the violent ones. Attacks began upon the Lakota Times. Office windows were blasted out with guns on three occasions. The newspaper was firebombed with Molotov cocktails in 1981, just before Christmas.
One dark and drizzly night, after I had put the paper to bed and walked out in the rain and climbed into my car, my windshield was shattered by a bullet that ripped past my head. Phone threats of death menaced me, my wife, and my children. The president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Joe American Horse, called a special session of the tribal council after my building was firebombed. American Horse said, “Starting with now, anymore attacks upon the Lakota Times will be considered an attack upon the Oglala Sioux Tribe.” The attacks stopped.
Only one newspaper editor in the entire state of South Dakota had the courage to speak out about the attacks upon me and my newspaper. His name was Jim Carrier and he was managing editor at the Rapid City Journal. Although I was a fellow newspaper editor and publisher in this state and although the attacks on my newspaper were published on my front page, all of the other non-Indian editors totally ignored what was happening to one of their own. Carrier was fired not too long after he stood up for me.
We weathered this horrific storm, and the attacks only made us stronger, but more than that, it brought the Lakota people to our side. It quelled some of the fear that permeated the reservation in the early 1980s. At first people were afraid to write a letter to the editor, until one brave Lakota woman from the Pejuta Haka (Medicine Root) District, my home district, wrote a letter to our newspaper condemning the violence. She wrote, “If Tim Giago, a Lakota man I have known since he was a small boy, can stand up and fight this violence, we Lakota winyan [women] must do the same.”
Pen Mightier Than Sword
After her letter it seemed that the floodgates opened and letters poured into our newspaper speaking up about all of the issues that have plagued our tribal government for years. At last the people had a forum through which they could express their opinions.
For more than 100 years every newspaper in South Dakota had had the opportunity, or I should say the obligation, to cover the largest minority in their state, the Native Americans. They chose not to do this, and so my small weekly newspaper, started on a shoestring, soon became the largest weekly newspaper in the history of South Dakota. It succeeded because it filled a void and it opened the doors for the Native American people to finally move into 20th-century media.
The Lakota Times became the watchdog for the Indian people. When we saw the disparity in justice, one for whites and one for Indians, we attacked it. When we stood up with editorials urging the state legislators and the governor to create a Native American Day as a legal holiday in this state, we won. South Dakota became the only state in the Union to celebrate Native American Day, and this would never have happened if a small, independent Indian-owned newspaper, the Lakota Times, had not fought to see it happen.
We won many battles without using a gun, and we proved indelibly that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
