Tim Giago: Some of our own people are guilty of racial prejudice too

Monday, July 30, 2018  

Fighting racial prejudice among our own people
By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji – Stands Up For Them)

After being in the news business for more than 35 years I suppose nothing should surprise me.

But watching some of the Lakota people go backwards in time when it comes to race relations still bothers me. Several weeks ago I wrote a column about the faces on Mount Rushmore and how all of the Presidents on the mountain expressed harsh feeling towards American Indians. Perhaps it was something that some people with thin-skin and even thinner knowledge of history did not want to know.

One indignant writer attacked me as a phony because of my name, Giago. He wrote that my grandfather’s first name was Jesus and therefore that makes me a Mexican. He wrote as if he was revealing some deep, dark secret that I had tried to keep under wraps. I have never been ashamed to write about my heritage and I go into depth about it in the preface of my book Children Left Behind.

Let me educate this hateful writer further. The Pueblos of New Mexico and the city of Santa Fe were settled by Spain in 1610, more than 100 years before the settlers reached the tribes of the Northern Plains. One of the first things they did was to remove the children from their parents, take away their hard to pronounce Pueblo names and give than all Spanish surnames. Even the Pueblo villages themselves were given the names of Saints from the Bible. San Juan, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and so on. San Juan leaders have since taken back their traditional name of Ohkay Owingeh.

My great grandfather was from the Pueblo of Isleta near Albuquerque and he came to South Dakota on a cattle drive to bring beef to Dakota Territory. He met a beautiful Lakota woman named Lucy Good Shell Woman, fell in love and married her. He spent the rest of his life living amongst the Lakota. That is where my Spanish surname came to be.

Using the misguided deductions of this troll that would mean that if one was named LeBeau, Bordeaux, or Mousseau that would mean that they are not Lakota but French. The same can be said of the O’Rourkes and O’Briens; they must be Irish instead of Lakota.

One of my employees is Lakota and African American. She attended high school on the Pine Ridge Reservation and she probably experienced more racial prejudice from her own Lakota people than she did from the White people. It seems that so many of us can complain about racial discrimination and yet we never look in our own backyard because we Indian people can be as bad or worse when it comes to racial discrimination.

When I was going to school at a reservation boarding school we had a family of Lakota children enroll one year and they were all fair-haired and mostly blue-eyed. There were four brothers in this family and they had to fight nearly every day because of their fair skin.

One tormentor of mine was pretty outspoken and he would yell out whenever he saw me, “Hey Giago, where is your sombrero and white pajamas.” Of course back then I didn’t know what in the hell he was talking about, but I knew it wasn’t good.

My grandfather may have had a Spanish surname, but at home he and my grandmother spoke in the Lakota language only. My father and all of my Grandmother Sophie’s children spoke Lakota before they learned English.

And while I am at it I want the troll to know that those folks born and raised in Mexico did not come over on the Mayflower. They were all from indigenous stock that were converted to Catholicism, had their names changed and were indoctrinated into another culture. That did not change the fact that they were indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.

The Lakota people have every right to speak about and against racism, but they must also refrain from becoming a part of those who would espouse racist comments against another simply because they are different.

Perhaps racism is contagious in that it came ashore with the first settlers and spread across America as the settlers moved west. African Americans were brought over on slave-ships and treated as beasts of burden on the southern plantations and along with American Indians were not even considered to be human beings.

It is easy to be racist when one considers people of color to be sub-humans.

Tolerance and acceptance are probably two of the hardest words in the English language to define. These two words also opened the floodgates to the settler onslaught because the indigenous people were tolerant and accepting. Let’s not lose sight of who we were.

Contact Tim Giago at najournalist1@gmail.com. Tim will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on October 5, 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.