Tim Giago

Tim Giago, also known as Nanwica Kciji (born 1934), is an American Oglala Lakota journalist and publisher. In 1981, he founded the Lakota Times at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he was born and grew up. It was the first independently owned Native American newspaper in the United States. In 1991 Giago was selected as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. In 1992 he changed his paper's name to Indian Country Today, to reflect its national coverage of Indian news and issues.

Giago sold the paper in 1998. Two years later he founded The Lakota Journal, which he sold in 2004 while thinking of retirement. In 2009, he returned to papers and founded the Native Sun News, based in Rapid City, South Dakota. He is also a columnist for the Huffington Post. He founded the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) and served as its first president. When hired in 1979 to write a column for the Rapid City Journal, Giago was the first Native American writer for a South Dakota newspaper.

Giago, whose Lakota name is Nanwica Kciji, was born in 1934 and grew up at the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He attended the Holy Rosary Indian Mission school. He later wrote poetry and articles about the anger he felt at having his Lakota identity and culture suppressed. He attended San Jose Junior College in California and the University of Nevada, Reno.

Giago served with the US Navy at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard, where he started writing because his commander noticed "he typed well" and assigned him to produce the base newspaper. Giago also wrote personal articles and poems about his mission school experience, first published in the monthly journal Wassaja, run by Jeannette and Rubert Costo of San Francisco during the 1970s.

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