Trailblazing Native American journalist Tim Giago dead at 88

Tim Giago in May 2022

Longtime journalist Tim Giago, who founded the nation's first independently owned Native American newspaper, died on July 24 at his home in Rapid City, S.D. He was 88.

"Giago, who was a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, founded The Lakota Times with his first wife, Doris, in 1981, and quickly showed that he wasn't afraid to challenge those in power and advocate for American Indians," Gretchen Ehlke reports for The Associated Press.

He started the paper in 1981 out of frustration that the Rapid City Journal, where he was a reporter, rarely allowed him to cover the reservation, Alex Williams reports for The New York Times. An editor told him he wouldn't be able to remain objective in his coverage. Years later in an essay, Giago recalled that he replied to the editor: "All of your reporters are white. Are they objective when covering the white community?"

"The newspaper, run out of a former beauty salon on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, started out as a hyperlocal community weekly. But it quickly found an audience and by 1992 had shifted to a national focus and changed its name to Indian Country Today," Williams reports.

In 1998 he sold ICT to the Oneida Nation. "Two years later he founded The Lakota Journal and in 2009, he founded the Native Sun News, based in Rapid City," Tanya Manus reports for the Rapid City Journal. He later "founded the Native American Journalists Association and served as its first president. He was also the first Native American to be inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. . . . Giago’s legacy is that of a champion who used his career to confront the issues facing the Native American community. His byline on Notes from Indian Country, the column he wrote for the Rapid City Journal from 1997 to 2020, read 'Tim Giago Nanwica Kciji – Defender'."

Though the longtime mistreatment of Native American children at government boarding schools made headlines this spring, Giago tried to bring attention to the issue for years. In 2006 he published a book recounting his own tragic experiences at such a school, including digging a grave for a friend who died at age 16 from an ear infection. "Giago took a lot of heat over the book both from Catholic leaders as well as his own people but in typical fashion, he stuck to his guns, refusing to sugarcoat or walk back any of his reporting," Jourdan Bennett-Begaye and Mary Annette Pember report for ICT.