TRAILBLAZING NATIVE AMERICAN JOURNALIST

Tim Giago, the founder of the first independently owned Native American newspaper in the United States, has died at age 88, his former wife said.

Giago, who died Sunday at Monument Health in Rapid City, S.D., created an enduring legacy during his more than four decades of work in South Dakota journalism, his colleagues said.

He was born July 12, 1934, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Giago was a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He 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, she said.

Launching the paper, even years after the 1973 Wounded Knee siege between U.S. marshals and the Native American Movement, was challenging because wounds still existed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and in South Dakota, Doris Giago said.

Tim Giago blamed the American Indian Movement for violence on the reservation. Windows at the paper were broken and the office was firebombed.

“And through it all, Tim never backed down,” said Doris Giago, who was married to him from 1979 to 1986.

The Lakota Times was eventually renamed Indian Country Today, and later became ICT. In a July 2021 interview with the paper, Giago recounted that tense period and “some of the hard things that came out of work.”

“One night got in my pickup and somebody put a bullet through my windshield and just missed my head,” Giago told the newspaper. “So, I mean, if that’s what it took to get the freedom of the press going on the reservation, I guess that’s what it took.”

Giago, a 1991 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, wrote years later that while he was working as a reporter for the Rapid City Journal, he was bothered by the fact that although he had been born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, he was seldom given an opportunity to do news stories about the people of the reservation.

“One editor told me that I would not be able to be objective in my reporting. I replied, ‘All of your reporters are White. Are they objective when covering the white community?’ ”

Giago 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.

Survivors include his wife, Jackie Giago; a sister, Lillian; 12 children and numerous grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were pending.