A00008 - Attakullakulla ("Little Carpenter"), The First Beloved Man of the Cherokee

 Attakullakulla (Cherokee”Tsalagi”, (ᎠᏔᎫᎧᎷ) Atagukalu^[a] and often called Little Carpenter by the English) (c. 1715 – c. 1777) was an influential Cherokee leader and the tribe's First Beloved Man, serving from 1761 to around 1775. His son was Dragging Canoe, the first leader of the Chickamauga faction of the Cherokee tribes.

Attakullakulla was "...a man of remarkably small stature, he was noted for his maturity, wisdom, and graciousness..."^[2] Attakullakulla knew some English but was not fluent. He was, however, considered the most gifted Cherokee orator from the 1760s to the 1770s.^[3] He first appeared in historic records in 1730, noted as accompanying Alexander Cuming, a British treaty commissioner, and six other Cherokee to England. He was one of the signatories of an early Cherokee treaty with Great Britain.

By the early 1750s, Attakullakulla, renowned for his oratorical skills, had been appointed a principal speaker for the Cherokee tribes.^[4] In the 1750s and 1760s Attakullakulla dominated Cherokee diplomacy. Although he usually favored the British, he was a consummate diplomat, always hoping for a peaceful resolution to problems but looking out for the best interests of the Cherokee.^[5]

Early in his life, he was first known as Onkanacleah.^[6] According to anthropologist James Mooney, Attakullakulla's Cherokee name could be translated as "leaning wood", from ada meaning "wood", and gulkalu, a verb that implies something long, leaning against some other object. His name "Little Carpenter" was related both to the English meaning of his Cherokee name and a reference to his physical stature. Naturalist William Bartram described the chief as "a man of remarkable small stature, slender, and delicate frame."^[7] "...his ears were cut and banded with silver, hanging nearly down to his shoulders. He was mild-mannered, brilliant, and witty..."^[8]

Contemporary Felix Walker also described Attakullakulla by the following: just “as a white carpenter could make every notch and joint fit in wood, so he could bring all his views to fill and fit their places in the political machinery of his nation”.^[9] He was known to excel at building houses.^[10]

Attakullakulla is believed to have been born in the territory of the Overhill Cherokee, in what is now East Tennessee, sometime in the early 1700s, although it is not known exactly when.^[11] His son, Turtle-at-Home, said that he was born to a sub-tribe of the Algonquian-speaking Nipissing in the North near Lake Superior. He was captured as an infant during a raid in which his parents were killed, and brought south to Overhill territory, where he was adopted by a Cherokee family, and raised as Cherokee. Attakullakulla believed he was of Jewish descent. ^[12] He married Nionne Ollie, the daughter of his cousin, Oconostota. She was said to have been a Black, French speaking Natchez captive adopted by his cousin's wife. The marriage was permissible because the individuals were from different clans; he was Wolf Clan and she was Paint Clan.^{[citation needed]}

In 1730, Attakullakulla was a member of a delegation of Cherokee leaders who traveled to England.^[13] In 1736, he rejected the advances of the French, who had sent emissaries to the Overhill tribes. Three or four years later, he was captured by the Ottawa, who were allies of the French. They held him captive in Quebec until 1748. Upon his return, he became one of the Cherokees' leading diplomats and an adviser to the Beloved Man of Chota, which had become the primary town of the Overhill settlements.

In the 1750s, Attakullakulla worked to provide a steady supply of trade goods for his people. When the French and Indian War began in North America, Cherokee warriors traveled to the Pennsylvania frontier to serve in British military campaigns against French and their Native American allies' strongholds.

Virginia frontiersmen killed some Cherokee on their way home after these campaigns. Attakullakulla journeyed to Pennsylvania, to Williamsburg, and then to Charles Town, securing the promise of British trade goods as compensation for participation in fighting. But this was not enough to satisfy young Cherokee who wished to honor their cultural obligation of "blood revenge" and sought social status. Throughout 1758 and 1759, Cherokee warriors launched retributive raids on the southern colonial frontier. Hoping that matters might be forgiven, Attakullakulla led a Cherokee war party against the French Fort Massiac, and tried to negotiate peace with the British.^[14]

These efforts proved unsuccessful. In late 1759, some Cherokee leaders went to Charleston to try to negotiate with South Carolina authorities for peace. The colonial governor, William Henry Lyttelton, seized the delegates as hostages until the Cherokee surrendered those men responsible for killing white settlers. Having raised an expeditionary force of 1,700 men, Lyttelton set out for Fort Prince George, with the hostages in tow, and arrived on December 9, 1759. Attakullakulla was forced to sign a treaty agreeing that the Cherokee would deliver suspected "murderers" in exchange for the nearly two dozen hostages confined at Fort Prince George.^[15]

Attakullakulla returned to Fort Prince George in early 1760 to negotiate for the release of the hostages, but to no avail. As peaceful negotiations failed, Oconostota lured Lt. Richard Coytmore out of the fort by waving a bridle over his head. He incited Cherokee warriors hiding in the woods to shoot and kill Coytmore. The garrison in the fort retaliated and executed all the remaining Cherokee hostages.

In response, the Cherokee launched an offensive against settlements on the southern frontier. Many Cherokee blamed Attakullakulla for the murders of the hostages. While he worked to try to bring about peace, later in 1760, British and South Carolina troops invaded the Cherokee Lower Towns and Middle Towns. They were forced to retreat, and the Overhill Cherokee besieged Fort Loudoun, gaining its surrender in August 1760. The Cherokee killed many of the garrison as they retreated to the East.

Attakullakulla again attempted to negotiate a peace, but this was not achieved until 1761, when the British and South Carolina military conducted a punitive expedition against the Middle and Lower Towns. Attakullakulla signed peace terms in Charles Town on December 18, 1761. He was robbed and harassed by angry frontiersmen on his journey home. Throughout the 1760s, he would work in vain to stall white settlement in the western Carolinas and Overhill Territory and was a frequent guest of colonial officials in Charles Town and Williamsburg.^[16][17]

In the 1750–1760s, Attakullakulla dominated Cherokee diplomacy. Although he usually favored the British, he was a skilled diplomat, always looking for a peaceful resolution to problems but looking out for the best interests of the Cherokee.^[18] After Connecorte died, Attakullakulla, the diplomat and peace chief, and Oconostota, the war chief, shared power at Chota; they led the Cherokee for a generation.^[19]

In the Treaty of Broad River (1756), Attakullakulla agreed to a Cherokee land cession to the English, in exchange for their promise to build forts in Cherokee territory to protect their women and children while the men were fighting with the British in the French and Indian War. He honored treaty promises to the English but was opposed by fellow Cherokee for doing so. He also played the colonies of South Carolina and Virginia against each other in order to secure fair trading practices for his people.^[20]

The Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed by William Henry Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, Governor of South Carolina, and Attakullakulla, stated that there would “be firm peace and friendship between all His Majesty's subjects of this province and the nation of Indians called the Cherokees, and then said Cherokees shall preserve peace with all his majesty's subjects whatsoever”.^[21]

On June 2, 1760, he left the fort and was expelled from the Cherokee Council. He moved into the woods, finding it impolitic to be among either the ones who lost or the victors of the 1760 Cherokee War. In June 1761 a British expedition dispatched by General Jeffery Amherst and commanded by Colonel James Grant destroyed several Cherokee Lower and Middle towns in the Carolinas. The Cherokee recalled Attakullakulla to the council to negotiate peace with the British. Attakullakulla also influenced the selection of John Stuart as Superintendent of Southern Indian Affairs.^[19]

In 1772 Attakullakulla leased lands to the Watauga Association, an organization formed by Anglo-American settlers who wanted to create an independent community in what is now the upper eastern corner of Tennessee. In 1775 he favored the so-called Transylvania Purchase, by which North Carolina colonel Richard Henderson bought twenty million acres in present-day Kentucky and Middle Tennessee from the Cherokee.^[19] In May 1775, Attakullakulla, Oconostota and other elderly chiefs relinquished the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation (now roughly the states of Kentucky and Tennessee) for £10,000.^[22]

Connecotre (Old Hop), the headman of the Cherokee during the 1750s, was his maternal uncle. Attakullakulla's son Dragging Canoe led a resistance to the United States in the 1780s. His niece, Nancy Ward, was a ‘beloved woman’, who had the power to free war captives.^[9]

During the Revolutionary War, Attakullakulla was one of a party of elder Cherokee leaders who ceded lands to Virginia, contrary to the wishes of younger warriors. Attakullakulla's son, Dragging Canoe, the Chickamauga Cherokee leader during the Cherokee-American wars, split with his father during this time.^[23][24]

After the Cherokee massacred much of the garrison from Fort Loudon, Attakullkulla realized that Capt. John Stuart, Superintendent of Indian Affairs under the colonial government, had escaped death. In order to save Stuart, Attakullakulla purchased him from the Cherokee who had taken him. Attakullakulla gave his rifle, clothes and all he could command to purchase Stuart. After this act, by Cherokee custom, Stuart was to be considered his eldest brother. Their lifelong friendship proved to be profitable to the English.^[25] The life of Capt. Stuart being again menaced, for refusing to aid in the mediated reduction of Fort George, Attakullkulla resolved to rescue his friend or die trying. He told his fellow Cherokee that he intended to go hunting and take his prisoner with him to eat venison. The distance to the frontier settlements was great. The expedition was necessary to prevent being overtaken by those in pursuit of the Cherokee. Nine days and nights they traveled through the wilderness until they fell in with a party of rangers sent out for protection of the frontier, who conducted them in safety to the settlements. Attakullakulla had a daughter named Rebecca "Nikiti" Carpenter with his first wife Nionne Ollie and another known as "Weena" with one of the survivors of the Loudon battle.^[26][27][28]

Attakullakulla is believed to have died between 1777 and 1780 in North Carolina, in territory that would later become Tennessee.^[29] He was succeeded as First Beloved Man of Chota by Oconostota.

A00007 - Ahaya, Chief of the Alachua Band of the Seminole Tribe

 Ahaya (c. 1710 – 1783) was the first recorded chief of the Alachua band of the Seminole tribe. European-Americans called him Cowkeeper, as he held a very large herd of cattle. Ahaya was the chief of a town of Oconee people near the Chattahoochee River. Around 1750 he led his people into Florida where they settled around Payne's Prairie, part of what the Spanish called tierras de la chua, "Alachua Country" in English. The Spanish called Ahaya's people cimarones, which eventually became "Seminoles" in English. Ahaya fought the Spanish, and sought friendship with the British, allying with them after Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, and staying loyal to them through the American Revolutionary War. He died shortly after Britain returned Florida to Spain in 1783.

The chief of the Alachua band of Seminoles was usually called "Cowkeeper" by the British while they ruled East Florida. William Bartram, who visited the Alachua Seminoles and has provided much of what we know about the man, refers to him only as "the Cowkeeper". John Richard Alden, in his 1944 book John Stuart and the southern frontier, gives Cowkeeper's Oconee name as "Ahaya". ("Ahaya" is a rare Seminole name.)^[1] Boyd and Harris also state that the leader of the Alachua Seminoles was known to the English as "Ahaya" or "Cowkeeper".^[2]

Some sources state that the Oconees moved to Florida under a chief named "Secoffee", and that it was Secoffee who was called "Cowkeeper". Kenneth Porter argues that Cowkeeper and Secoffee were different people, and finds "nothing to support the claim [that Cowkeeper was Secoffee] and much to disprove it".^[3][a]

The name "Alachua" derives from la Chua, the name of the largest ranch in 17th century Spanish Florida. The center of the hacienda de la Chua was located on a bluff overlooking a sinkhole, now called the "Alachua Sink", that drains Paynes Prairie. There is evidence that the Timucua word for "sinkhole" was chua, meaning that the ranch was named after the sinkhole. The Spanish called a large area in the interior of Florida west of the St. Johns River, tierras de la Chua. English-speakers who ventured into interior Florida called the area "the Alachua Country".^[6][7]

The name "Seminole" likely is derived from the Spanish cimarones, meaning "wild or untamed", as opposed to the christianized natives who had previously lived in the mission villages of Spanish Florida.^[b] Some of the Hitchiti- or Mikasukee-speakers who had settled in Florida identified themselves to the British as "cimallon" (Muskogean languages have no "r" sound, replacing it with "l"). The British wrote the name as "Semallone", later "Seminole". The use of "cimallon" by bands in Florida to describe themselves may have been intended to distinguish themselves from the primarily Muskogee-speakers of the Upper Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy (called the "Creek Confederacy" by the British). The term "Seminole" was first applied to Ahaya's band in Alachua. After 1763, when they took over Florida from the Spanish, the British called all natives living in Florida "Seminoles", "Creeks", or "Seminole-Creeks".^[9]

While the name "Seminole" was commonly applied by whites to all Native Americans in Florida, even as late as 1842, at the end of the Second Seminole War, US Army officers referred to various bands in Florida as Seminoles, Mikasukis, Tallahassees, Creeks, and Uchees, with "Seminoles" or "Alachua Seminoles" often referring only to the people who had lived around the Alachua Prairie prior to 1813, and owed allegiance to Ahaya and his successors, King Payne, Bolek (Bowlegs) and Micanopy.^[10][11]

Ahaya was born to the Hitchiti-speaking Oconee, who lived in a town at a site now called "Oconee Old Town", on the Oconee River, in what is now central Georgia. In the late 1720s the Oconee people moved to the Chattahoochee River, among the Hitchiti- and Mikasuki-speaking Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy.^[c] The Oconee move has been attributed to a desire by the Oconees to distance themselves from whites encroaching on their town and hunting grounds.^[2][12]

After the decimation of the Apalachee and Timucua people and the collapse of the Spanish mission network in Florida at the beginning of the 18th century, many peoples of what is now the state of Georgia, including the Oconees, used Florida as a vast hunting ground.^[13] Ahaya may have become familiar with the lands surrounding the Alachua Savanna (now known as Paynes Prairie) on hunting trips into Florida.^[14][13] In 1740, James Oglethorpe, the governor of the Province of Georgia, mounted an invasion into Spanish Florida, laying siege to its capitol, St. Augustine. Ahaya, who had become chief of his town, led 45 men to join the siege.^[15]

After their defeat in the Yamasee War (1715–1718) against the Province of Carolina, many of the Yamasee people moved to Florida and settled in the vicinity of St. Augustine. The Spanish government tried to entice peoples from the Lower Towns of the Creek Confederacy to move to unoccupied lands in Florida, but were unable to supply enough gifts to satisfy them. The bands of the Lower Towns found the gifts and trade goods of the British to be much more desirable than those of the Spanish, and many continued to join the British in raids into Spanish Florida.^[16]

The Oconee became unhappy living among the Lower Towns of the Creek Confederacy, perhaps because too many close, sometimes hostile, neighboring towns made it hard to find fresh agricultural land when it became necessary to relocate to new fields. About the year 1750, Ahaya led his people south to Florida, intending to settle somewhere near the Atlantic coast. The Oconee's migration reached the country around the Alachua Savanna, or Paynes Prairie, where they stopped.^[12][17] The area around Paynes Prairie is part of the Middle Florida Hammock Belt, a series of mixed hardwood and pine hammocks with the best soils in central Florida.^[18] The Oconee found abundant game and fish in the area, as well as many feral cattle and horses, descendants of the herds on Spanish ranches which had been abandoned early in the 18th century. The herds the Oconee gathered from those feral cattle led the British to call Ahaya "Cowkeeper."^[19] The Oconee established a town, called "Alachua", "Latchaway" or "Latchewie", on the edge of the savanna or prairie.^[12][2]

The new town of Alachua soon was one of the three largest established in Florida by people from the Muscogee Confederation. The Oconees in Alachua were joined by Hitchiti-speakers from the towns of Sawokli, Tomathli, Apalachicola, Hitchiti and Chiaha. The various Muskogean-speaking bands, who were coming to be known as Seminoles, continued to harass the Spanish, pushing them back into St. Augustine and San Marcos (on the Gulf coast south of the old Apalachee Province). Ahaya and his band fought the Yamasees and remnants of the Timucua, who were allied with the Spanish. A Seminole tradition held that the Seminoles had killed most of the Yamasee men in a battle near the St. Johns River and married their women. The Alachua Seminoles still owned many Yamasee slaves when Bartram visited them in 1773.^[20][21] In 1757, Ahaya visited the Governor of the Province of Georgia and expressed his hatred both for the Spanish and for any Indian tribes allied with them. He explained that he had had a vision that he would not find peace in the afterlife unless he killed 100 Spaniards.^[22]

The smell of decaying fish and swarms of mosquitoes drove the Alachua Seminoles to abandon their original town site, and move to a new town, called "Cuscowilla", a couple of miles from the Alachua Savanna.^[12] A town named "Lockway" was reported to be on the edge of a savanna (presumably the Alachua Savanna) in 1767. This may have been the original site of the town.^[20][d]

In 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to the British following the Seven Years' War, in exchange for territory west of the Mississippi River, Ahaya was overjoyed.^[25] Ahaya traveled to St. Augustine in 1764 to meet with John Stuart, Indian Superintendent of the Southern Department of British North America.^[20] The new governor of East Florida, James Grant, convened a conference with towns of the Muscogee Confederation in 1765 at Picolata, near St. Augustine, resulting in the Treaty of Picolata. Representatives of 30 towns in the Muscogee Confederation attended the conference, with Cuscowilla and Apalachee Old Field (Tallahassee) being the only towns in East Florida represented.^[26]

The British believed that the Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederation controlled the land and people of Florida. The Treaty of Picolata ceded 2,000,000 acres (810,000 ha) in Florida to the British. Cowkeeper was not present for the conference at Picolata, and Weoffke signed the treaty for Cuscowilla. Ahaya reportedly missed the conference because of family illness, but he may have been separating himself from the Muscogee Confederation. The British gave medals, two great and four small, to some of the chiefs at the conference, in proportion to their importance.^[27][20]

In late December 1765, Ahaya traveled to St. Augustine with 60 of his people, and stayed there for eight days. Ahaya received a great medal and other gifts and provisions from the British. Governor Grant was impressed with Ahaya's intelligence, and reported that he and Ahaya had "parted on the best terms."^[28] In 1767, two British traders were killed when they tried to interfere with Seminoles who were stealing cattle. The British called a conference to deal with the killings. The British wanted to maintain good relations with the Seminoles. Philoke, from Ahaya's town of Cuscowilla, who was the father of two of the Seminoles involved in the killing, was given a great medal by the British.^[29]

In the early 1770s, Jonathan Bryan of Georgia hatched a scheme to acquire a large area of land in Florida. Bryan persuaded chiefs of the Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederation to cede lands in Florida, including the area around the Alachua Savanna, to him. Ahaya was shocked when the bold man traveled as far south as Payne's Prairie to carve his name into a red oak tree, but his allies quickly intervened. Governor James Wright of Georgia informed the Lower Town Muscogee of Bryan's trickery, and Governor Patrick Tonyn of Florida issued an arrest warrant for him. The British felt it necessary to ask Ahaya and other chiefs in Florida if they intended to go to war over the issue. Bryan backed down, saying that he had not purchased a large amount of land, but had merely leased grazing rights to a small area.^[30][31] According to the Indian Superintendent John Stuart, Ahaya was no longer connected with the Muscogee Confederation by 1774.^[32]

At the beginning of the American Revolution, the Muscogee towns (the "Upper Creeks") supported the British, while the Hitchiti- and Mikasuki-speaking towns, and other non-Muscogean-speaking groups (the "Lower Creeks") mostly gravitated to the emerging United States and to Spain. One exception was the Alachua Seminoles under Ahaya, by then the largest "Seminole" village in Florida, who remained loyal to the British. Ahaya always responded when called on by Governor Tonyn to help repel rebel invasions from Georgia, which were often led by the same Jonathan Bryan who had tried to grab the Alachua Seminole's land.^[33]

In 1783, when the British ceded Florida back to Spain following defeat in the American Revolutionary War, Ahaya asked the British to take him with them. He also told the British that he would kill any Spaniard that entered his territory. After Ahaya's death in 1784, relations between the Seminoles and the Spanish improved.^[32][29][34]

In 1774, the naturalist William Bartram of Philadelphia traveled to Cuscowilla in the company of traders who had established a store there. Ahaya welcomed Bartam, called him Puc Puggee, or "the flower hunter," and gave him free rein to explore his lands. Ahaya's people served Bartram a sweet "thin drink", and a jelly made from the roots of a local Smilax, related to sarsaparilla, and sweetened with honey. The Alachua Seminoles also consumed beef, and some pork and wild game.^[35][36]

Cuscowilla had about thirty wood frame dwelling houses arranged around a town square, with a council house in the middle of the square. Several hundred people lived in the town, with others in outlying villages. Each house had a garden, growing maize, beans and squash. Common fields stretched 2 miles (3.2 km) from the town to the edge of the Alachua Savanna. They gathered coontie and wild potato.^[37][36]

Bartram reported that Ahaya was waited on by Yamasee slaves. The Yamasee slaves at Cuscowilla spoke Spanish and wore Spanish-style crucifixes, indicating that they may have been previously resident at a Spanish mission village. According to Bartram, the Yamasee slaves were fairly well treated.^{[35][36][32][34]}

A00006 - Tim Giago, Lakota Sioux Journalist

 

Tim Giago, Native American Newspaperman, Is Dead at 88

The founder of the first independent American Indian newspaper braved gunshots and firebombs to provide an unvarnished look at life on the reservation.

Tim Giago’s newspapers reported on the government’s treatment of Native Americans but did not hesitate to cast a critical eye on tribal authorities as well.Credit...Eric Haase

By Alex Williams

July 28, 2022

Tim Giago, the outspoken founder of the first independently owned Native American newspaper in the United States, who challenged discriminatory government policies, American Indian stereotypes in popular culture and, at times, tribal leaders themselves, died on Sunday in Rapid City, S.D. He was 88.

The cause was complications of cancer and diabetes, Doris Giago, his first wife, said.

When he started as a local reporter for The Rapid City Journal in 1980, Mr. Giago was frustrated that he was rarely allowed to write about life on the reservation.

“One editor told me that I would not be able to be objective in my reporting,” he recalled in a 2005 essay for the newsletter of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, where he was a fellow in 1991. “I replied, ‘All of your reporters are white. Are they objective when covering the white community?’”

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To him, such attitudes were part of a larger problem: dismissive, and often skewed, coverage of Native American issues in the mainstream news media.

In response, he and Doris Giago took out a $4,000 bank loan using a cousin’s old Ford sedan as collateral to found Lakota Times in 1981. Their ambition was to create an independent newspaper for Native Americans by Native Americans, reporting news that stood “in contrast to the local and national media’s constant misrepresentation of Indian people.”

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.

Over the course of a celebrated four-decade career in journalism, Mr. Giago also wrote a syndicated column, “Notes From Indian Country,” and published four books, including “Children Left Behind: The Dark Legacy of Indian Mission Boarding Schools” (2006), in which he recounted the abusive conditions at a reservation boarding school, run by the Roman Catholic Church, that he had attended as a child.

The first Native American to be inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame, Mr. Giago (pronounced guy-AY-go) was also a founder of the Native American Journalists Association, a national organization, in 1984.

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A successful entrepreneur as well as a newsman, he founded The Lakota Journal, a weekly newspaper based in Rapid City, in 2000. Nine years later, he started Native Sun News Today, another Rapid City newspaper, which he owned with his subsequent wife, Jackie Giago, and wrote for until his death.

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In his memoir of life at a Catholic boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Mr. Giago accused the school of destroying Native American culture.

Timothy Antoine Giago Jr., a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, was born on July 12, 1934, in Kyle, S.D., on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of seven children of Tim Sr., who worked in a store in nearby Porcupine, and Lupita Giago, a homemaker. His Oglala name was Nanwica Kcjii, which translates to “He stands up for them.”

Mr. Giago attended the University of Nevada, Reno, before he began writing a column on Indian affairs for The Rapid City Journal in 1979, becoming the first regular American Indian voice in a South Dakota newspaper. The following year he was hired as a full-time reporter at the paper before striking out on his own.

With no precedent for a plucky, pugnacious reservation newspaper, Lakota Times was thought to have little chance of success. “Some people said, ‘I’m only going to take out a six-month subscription, because I don’t expect you to be around much longer than that,” Doris Giago recalled.

But the newspaper filled a void for Pine Ridge citizens.

“It was often the only way they could get information about what was going on,” said Rhonda LeValdo, a former president of NAJA who now teaches journalism at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan. “For us as Native people, our issues were rarely talked about in mainstream news unless it was about something affecting non-Natives.”

Under Mr. Giago’s leadership, the newspaper published investigative articles that “caused banks to be fined and rip-offs of the tribal government to be halted,” he wrote in the Nieman newsletter, Nieman Reports. In 1990, he spearheaded a successful campaign to get South Dakota to rename Pioneer Day, celebrated on Columbus Day, to Native American Day.

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Lakota Times also exposed sham medicine men and women, both “Indian and non-Indian, who are trying to make money on it, selling sweat lodges and vision quests,” he was quoted as saying in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “They’re bastardizing our spirituality.”

But while Mr. Giago championed Native American culture, he was no cheerleader. He chafed at what he saw as softball coverage of tribal affairs in traditional reservation newspapers owned by the tribal authorities.

“That’s what made it successful,” said Amanda Takes War Bonnett, a former reporter and editor for the newspaper. “He wasn’t censored, so he could say what needed to be said.”

Free speech, however, came with a price. In the early 1980s, deep divisions still remained among Pine Ridge citizens about militant activists like the American Indian Movement, whose 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., left two protesters dead and a U.S. marshal paralyzed.

“There were a lot of bad feelings,” Doris Giago recalled. “It was almost like a civil war. A lot of Indians were against Indians.”

Mr. Giago remained critical of violent protest.

“After I wrote a strong editorial in the fall of 1981, the windows of our newspaper office were blasted out with gunfire,” he wrote in another essay. “We came right back with another editorial challenging the ‘cowards who strike in the middle of the night.’ Two days before Christmas of that year firebombs were smashed against our building.”

As the reputation of Lakota Times grew, Mr. Giago became a recognized voice nationally.

He attracted reams of hate mail over a 1992 article in Newsweek titled “I Hope the Redskins Lose,” published before the Super Bowl game between the Washington Redskins, as the team was called then, and the Buffalo Bills.

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The headline missed the point of his essay, he argued, which was part of his long crusade against the use of Indian names for logos and mascots of sports teams, but he was undeterred.

“‘Redskins’ is a word that should remind every American there was a time in our history when America paid bounties for human beings,” he wrote in The Times the following year. “There was a going rate for the scalps or hides of Indian men, women and children.”

His survivors include his wife, Jackie Giago, who declined to be interviewed for this obituary; a sister, Lillian; 12 children; and numerous grandchildren.

Looking back on his career in a 2021 interview with Indian Country Today, Mr. Giago recalled the personal danger he faced at Lakota Times.

“One night I got in my pickup and somebody put a bullet through my windshield and just missed my head,” he said. “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.”