Plainsman1963

Native American Times | By Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji) | 10-11-04

As Cheney and Edwards debated, an important election was held at Pine Ridge

While Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator Jon Edwards were throwing spitballs at each other on national television on Tuesday night, a very important Primary Election was taking place on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

As Cheney and Edwards lambasted each other, many Lakota people were sitting by their radios listening to the election results on their own radio station KILI-FM.

Late into the night the blow-by-blow tallies of the latest precinct sprang from the lips of Tom Casey, the Irishman radio manager of KILI.

After all was said and done two improbable, but highly different politicians rose to the surface. The two candidates who will be fighting for the presidency of the Oglala Sioux Tribe will be the activist and movie star, Russell Means, and a dedicated and hard fighting woman, Cecilia Fire Thunder.

Means will bring his high visibility to the race. He has starred in several movies such as The Last of the Mohicans and has been an activist for Indian rights since the 1970s. He is most famous in Indian country for making outlandish comments as he did in 1976, the year of the 200th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence when he said that the American Indians would "blow out the candles on America’s birthday cake." His participation in the takeover at Wounded Knee is will documented.

Means was a celebrant of the "soundbyte" before the word took on a national flavor.

Fire Thunder, on the other hand, does not have the celebrity of Means. She is, however, well known throughout Indian country as one of the foremost activists in Indian health. A former nurse, she has taken her knowledge about the horrific problems in health on the Indian reservations and has made it her life’s ambition to bring about some positive changes. Her weekly radio show on KILI discussing the problems in the Indian Health Service in America is one of the stations’ most listened to shows.

Speaking of vice presidents, the candidates going into the General Election on November 2 are Eileen Janis and Alex White Plume. Janis is an activist who fought the tribal government for its lack of accountability to the people and was a part of the grass roots movement that occupied the tribal headquarters a few years back.

She fought the tribal government from the outside of the fence and has now decided to climb over the fence and see what she can do to bring about accountability from inside.

Alex White Plume is a quiet man on a mission. He has stood toe-to-toe with the federal government and watched them grind his crop of hemp plants into fodder. White Plume saw the economic opportunities of the byproducts of hemp, but found that it violated the archaic Marijuana laws. He has stubbornly planted his crop of hemp every year knowing full well that it would be plowed into the ground by the feds.

One year the current two-term President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, John Steele, stood with his hand in his back pockets and watched as the feds ran tractors over White Plume’s crop of hemp. Steele finished far back in the race to retain his seat as president this year. White Plume was devastated that Steele did not stand up for his rights as a citizen of a sovereign nation.

The General Elections on the Pine Ridge Reservation were held at odd times of the year that did not coincide with the national elections until several years ago when a vote by the Oyate (the People) changed all of that. The election is now held on the same day as the national elections.

The turnout for tribal elections is always very strong. The Oyate do care about whom they elect to serve them. In years gone by the turnout for the national elections was not a priority. There was little interest in who was elected president of the United States or who was the next South Dakota senator. That all changed when the people began to consider the important impact members of Congress had upon their very lives. This reality was brought home to them time after time by early Indian newspapers like the Lakota Times and radio station KILI.

They soon realized that in a very tight race, the Indian vote can and will make a difference. Take the very close election between former South Dakota House of Representatives candidate John Thune and Senator Tim Johnson in 2002. Johnson retained his senate seat by a mere 524 votes and those votes came in from the last precinct to be counted, Shannon County on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

And so there will be two very important elections on Pine Ridge on November 2. Foremost in the minds of the Oglala Lakota people will be the race between Russell Means and Cecilia Fire Thunder. There has never been a woman elected to the presidency of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Both candidates bring new ideas and strong personalities to an Indian reservation that demands powerful changes.

The voters at Pine Ridge are sick and tired of the same old faces with the same old ideas. They want to see people in office with fresh ideas and with the connections, strength and the honesty to see them through.
[Plains' Note: Aren't we all sick and tired and looking for fresh ideas? Seems everybody is in the same boat.]

On the national scene there is little doubt that the Indians will vote overwhelmingly Democrat. It has been this way since 1924 when the Lakota were first given the right to vote. The first debate between Means and Fire Thunder will be aired on KILI and thousands of Lakota will be glued to their radios proving once again that reservation politics easily surpass that of the national parties.

(Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, was the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association. He can be reached at giagobooks@iw.net)