This year, as part of the Year of North American Indigenous Peoples, the Hill Freeman Library & Spruill Learning Center has obtained a subscription to Native Sun News, a weekly newspaper committed to, in its own words, "bringing freedom of the press to Indian Country."Native Sun News is in its first year of publication, but its founder and editor Tim Giago is hardly a novice in the world of journalism. Giago, a member of the Lakota Nation, has been in the newspaper business for more than three decades. He began his career at the national Native American newspaper Wassaja, then worked as a reporter and editor with other publications before starting his own paper The Lakota Times, in 1981. During the Times' years of operation, the offices were firebombed and their windows were shot out three times. Giago received numerous death threats and survived at least one attempt on his life, but he maintained his commitment to investigative journalism. The Times was renamed Indian Country Today in 1991. Giago started another publication, the Lakota Journal in 2000, and "retired" in 2004.
He came out of retirement this year to start the Sun, seeing the need again for a solid investigative newspaper to serve the indigenous Nations of America.
In a world that often trumpets the demise of print journalism, Native Sun News is a rarity. There is no online edition, because, as Giago says, many of his readers have no access to the Internet. This is a publication by the Native community for the Native community.
This blogger is inviting you to power down your computers for a few minutes, come out of your dorm rooms and offices, blink into the light, and actually walk to the library, pick up the Native Sun News and give it a good read. Get Native news from a Native perspective.
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