Post by Okwes on Jan 22, 2008 23:19:53 GMT -5
South Dakota Indian journalist gave voices to a people long ignored
Jim Carrier
t's still a rare thing in South Dakota for an Indian face to be honored in bronze, let alone be mounted amongst 98 white countenances in the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. But this is one visage that multiplied, not only in South Dakota, but across America.
Tim Giago's mug went up in the Hall in recent weeks - the first American Indian in a state with nine Indian reservations and 59,000 Indians.
Giago, a 73-year-old Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, told the assemblage that he was surprised, after all the disparagement he'd heaped on white colleagues for their racist, ignorant and unresponsive coverage of Indians and their issues.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tim was among a handful of struggling Indian writers in the United States. A few articles and a small book of angry poems about his abusive education at a Catholic mission had been published by Jeannette and Rubert Costo of San Francisco. The Costos, pioneering Indian historians and publishers of the monthly Wassaja, were famous for a Thanksgiving gathering for writers at their Haight-Ashbury home.
A South Dakota editor saw Giago's byline, invited him to drive off the reservation for coffee and offered him a column for $10 a week. Giago's one request was that it be printed on Fridays, the edition favored on the "res" for its TV schedule.
"Notes from Indian Country" in the Rapid City Journal was the first native voice in a South Dakota newspaper - this at a time, 1979, when Indian news was the state's biggest story. The 1973 Wounded Knee siege between U.S. marshals and the American Indian Movement had been followed by a Pine Ridge civil war. Two FBI agents and more than 60 Indians were slain in the next three years.
Remarkably, none of the state's 11 daily newspapers or 145 weeklies covered the mayhem in any depth, relying instead on the Associated Press or printing nothing at all.
A year after the column's premiere, the editor hired Giago as a full-time reporter, a stint that lasted but a few months, marked by heavy editing to separate fact from opinion, and Giago's frustration with a front-office attitude that an Indian couldn't cover Indian issues objectively. He quit - several times - but not before learning how a newspaper works.
Back on the reservation in an empty hairdresser's shop, Giago and his wife, Doris, borrowed $4,000 against her cousin dick Brewer's 1946 Chevy coupe and bought a used typesetter. The hair washing sinks became layout tables.
Giago - whose only experience had been at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard when his commander barked, "You type pretty good. You're going to be editor of the base newspaper" - became editor and publisher.
The Lakota Times, launched July 1, 1981, was the first independently owned Indian newspaper in the United States. The idea was so radical that Giago couldn't sell one-year subscriptions. No one thought he'd last a year.
In today's age of blogooglebabble, it's hard to imagine an information desert. But that's what Pine Ridge was, and Giago's paper was a steady rain every Wednesday. Meetings, menus, basketball scores, election results - people stood in line and snatched papers from carriers' hands just to read about - themselves! For once, there was something about Indians in a newspaper beyond drunks and welfare and violence.
But the first place they looked was the editorial page, where every week Giago squeezed a bit more of his anger into a column, soon syndicated by Knight Ridder.
When he blamed the American Indian Movement for violence on the reservation, the paper was firebombed and shot-gunned. He exposed redlining by banks and discrimination by stores, columns that brought investigations and fines. He also criticized health care and tribal "economic development" scams.
A 1990 column challenged Gov. George Mickelson to change Columbus Day to Native American Day, and the South Dakota Legislature approved a unique holiday in the United States. He was also the first national voice to take on Indian sports mascots.
For his powerful words, Giago won the H.L. Menken award, the University of Missouri distinguished journalism award and a Neiman fellowship at Harvard.
And by the time he sold the paper to the Oneida Nation in 1998, his paper, renamed Indian Country Today, was printing 24,000 copies, far and away the largest of South Dakota's weeklies, and grossing $1.9 million in ad sales annually.
Giago, semiretired, still fires his columns with wrongs to be righted. But at the induction in Brookings, S.D., a mellower elder called his proudest achievement the staff he'd nurtured.
Avis Little Eagle, once a secretary, had read one of Giago's columns about the Sioux claim to the Black Hills, and thought, "I can do that." At Giago's encouragement, she went to college, and he hired her to write obits under the tutelage of Amanda Takes War Bonnet, who had started as a janitor and worked her way to managing editor. Both women now own weeklies of their own, two of six Indian papers in South Dakota.
Doris Giago, who had learned with her husband how to run a paper, and divorced under the strain, went on to become the first Indian journalism instructor at South Dakota State University, where she has recruited and taught 20 Indian journalists.
There are more than a dozen other Indians who Giago can name off the top of his head - online, on the air, teaching college, publishing papers and magazines - who came out of his shop, or who read his column and, inspired, took up writing and Indian advocacy.
They are a chorus of storytellers who, in my view, affirm affirmative action. Clarence Thomas and his court notwithstanding, I believe in it now as I did 28 years ago, when I offered a column to a South Dakota native.
Jim Carrier, former news editor of the Rapid City Journal, is a freelance writer in Madison, Wis. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
Jim Carrier
t's still a rare thing in South Dakota for an Indian face to be honored in bronze, let alone be mounted amongst 98 white countenances in the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. But this is one visage that multiplied, not only in South Dakota, but across America.
Tim Giago's mug went up in the Hall in recent weeks - the first American Indian in a state with nine Indian reservations and 59,000 Indians.
Giago, a 73-year-old Oglala Sioux from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, told the assemblage that he was surprised, after all the disparagement he'd heaped on white colleagues for their racist, ignorant and unresponsive coverage of Indians and their issues.
Twenty-eight years ago, Tim was among a handful of struggling Indian writers in the United States. A few articles and a small book of angry poems about his abusive education at a Catholic mission had been published by Jeannette and Rubert Costo of San Francisco. The Costos, pioneering Indian historians and publishers of the monthly Wassaja, were famous for a Thanksgiving gathering for writers at their Haight-Ashbury home.
A South Dakota editor saw Giago's byline, invited him to drive off the reservation for coffee and offered him a column for $10 a week. Giago's one request was that it be printed on Fridays, the edition favored on the "res" for its TV schedule.
"Notes from Indian Country" in the Rapid City Journal was the first native voice in a South Dakota newspaper - this at a time, 1979, when Indian news was the state's biggest story. The 1973 Wounded Knee siege between U.S. marshals and the American Indian Movement had been followed by a Pine Ridge civil war. Two FBI agents and more than 60 Indians were slain in the next three years.
Remarkably, none of the state's 11 daily newspapers or 145 weeklies covered the mayhem in any depth, relying instead on the Associated Press or printing nothing at all.
A year after the column's premiere, the editor hired Giago as a full-time reporter, a stint that lasted but a few months, marked by heavy editing to separate fact from opinion, and Giago's frustration with a front-office attitude that an Indian couldn't cover Indian issues objectively. He quit - several times - but not before learning how a newspaper works.
Back on the reservation in an empty hairdresser's shop, Giago and his wife, Doris, borrowed $4,000 against her cousin dick Brewer's 1946 Chevy coupe and bought a used typesetter. The hair washing sinks became layout tables.
Giago - whose only experience had been at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard when his commander barked, "You type pretty good. You're going to be editor of the base newspaper" - became editor and publisher.
The Lakota Times, launched July 1, 1981, was the first independently owned Indian newspaper in the United States. The idea was so radical that Giago couldn't sell one-year subscriptions. No one thought he'd last a year.
In today's age of blogooglebabble, it's hard to imagine an information desert. But that's what Pine Ridge was, and Giago's paper was a steady rain every Wednesday. Meetings, menus, basketball scores, election results - people stood in line and snatched papers from carriers' hands just to read about - themselves! For once, there was something about Indians in a newspaper beyond drunks and welfare and violence.
But the first place they looked was the editorial page, where every week Giago squeezed a bit more of his anger into a column, soon syndicated by Knight Ridder.
When he blamed the American Indian Movement for violence on the reservation, the paper was firebombed and shot-gunned. He exposed redlining by banks and discrimination by stores, columns that brought investigations and fines. He also criticized health care and tribal "economic development" scams.
A 1990 column challenged Gov. George Mickelson to change Columbus Day to Native American Day, and the South Dakota Legislature approved a unique holiday in the United States. He was also the first national voice to take on Indian sports mascots.
For his powerful words, Giago won the H.L. Menken award, the University of Missouri distinguished journalism award and a Neiman fellowship at Harvard.
And by the time he sold the paper to the Oneida Nation in 1998, his paper, renamed Indian Country Today, was printing 24,000 copies, far and away the largest of South Dakota's weeklies, and grossing $1.9 million in ad sales annually.
Giago, semiretired, still fires his columns with wrongs to be righted. But at the induction in Brookings, S.D., a mellower elder called his proudest achievement the staff he'd nurtured.
Avis Little Eagle, once a secretary, had read one of Giago's columns about the Sioux claim to the Black Hills, and thought, "I can do that." At Giago's encouragement, she went to college, and he hired her to write obits under the tutelage of Amanda Takes War Bonnet, who had started as a janitor and worked her way to managing editor. Both women now own weeklies of their own, two of six Indian papers in South Dakota.
Doris Giago, who had learned with her husband how to run a paper, and divorced under the strain, went on to become the first Indian journalism instructor at South Dakota State University, where she has recruited and taught 20 Indian journalists.
There are more than a dozen other Indians who Giago can name off the top of his head - online, on the air, teaching college, publishing papers and magazines - who came out of his shop, or who read his column and, inspired, took up writing and Indian advocacy.
They are a chorus of storytellers who, in my view, affirm affirmative action. Clarence Thomas and his court notwithstanding, I believe in it now as I did 28 years ago, when I offered a column to a South Dakota native.
Jim Carrier, former news editor of the Rapid City Journal, is a freelance writer in Madison, Wis. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.