WHAT DOES TIOKASIN DO BESIDES TALK?????? Tiokasin is a working board member and/or an advisory member of the following non-profit organizations: CHANGING WINDS (www.changingwinds.org) especially with the year-round help for Lakota reservations and children. Please see their website for more information. CINEMINGA (www.cineminga.org) is a collective that links peoples East and West, and North and South through digital stortytelling. Our goal is to strengthen traditional cultures by supporting community media projects. LAKOTA YOUTH ARTS COUNCIL (a newly formed non-profit) working on suicide prevention and education, through cultural arts, environment and history. We are based in New York and our non-profit status is pending. Board members are Lance White Magpie (Oglala Lakota) from Pine Ridge, Hadrien Coumans (Lenni Lenape) New York and Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Mnicoujou/Oglala/Itazipco) from Cheyenne River. SIMPLY SMILES (www.simplysmiles.org) On the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota there exists poverty on a staggering scale. As our first domestic endeavor, Simply Smiles is honored to have been welcomed into this community and to be able to support these incredible children and their families. HONOR THE TREATIES (www.Honorthetreaties.com) Honor the Treaties is an organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of Indigenous communities through art and advocacy. We do that by funding collaborations between Native artists and Native advocacy groups so that their messages can reach a wider audience. We are committed to a vision to curtail suicides, to provide basic needs, to give children an alternative to the dangers of the streets, to preserve and cultivate the rich Lakota Culture, and to provide bright futures for these impoverished children. INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF MUSTANGS AND BURROS (www.ispmb.org) is an effective international leader in our field because we have earned the respect and credibility of the many diverse participants in the Wild Horse and Burro program. Our approach to problem solving is unique amongst organizations. Rather than capitalizing on fear as a motivator to produce change or create funding, we believe that fear must be dispelled to affect positvie changes accepted by all. our main thrust is one of education and of becoming a model, a way of "being" on this planet we call Mother Earth. One can make no greater impression than to lead by example. ISPMB honors the wild horse and burro and realizes teh interdependence of all living things in this universe. 
AARON HUEY www.emphas.is (Pine Ridge Billboard Project or go to: http://bit.ly/hVEeGm) and www.honorthetreaties.org - a Contributing Editor/photographer for Harper's magazine. Huey's Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation work recently rose to prominence after he was invited to give a lecture on the subject at a TED conference. Launched a campaign of awareness to the public eye regarding condtions on Native American reservations in the U.S. and the broken treaties legacy consequently forcing poverty and loss of culture. ************************************************************* This Message is Reprinted Under the Fair Use Doctrine of International Copyright Law: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ************************************************************* FROM: http://www.nativetimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4821:giago-freedom-of-the-press-not-exactly-alive-in-indian-country&catid=46&Itemid=22 GIAGO: Freedom of the press not exactly alive in Indian Country Written by Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji) © 2011 Native Sun News Monday, 17 January 2011 08:38 January 17, 2011 Ray Halbritter, Publisher and CEO of Indian Country Today weekly newspaper announced last week that the newspaper will become a weekly magazine to be called This Week from Indian Country Today. Let me give you a brief history of Indian Country Today as I know it. The Oneida Nation has owned Indian Country Today going on 13 years. I founded ICT and owned it for 18 years prior to selling the paper to them. ICT was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1981 as The Lakota Times. As the newspaper grew into a national paper a contest was held within the paper looking for a new name to be more expressive of its now national stature. Lakota Times managing editor Avis Little Eagle won the contest by naming the paper Indian Country Today. ICT was born and raised in Lakota country. Its founder was Lakota, not Oneida, but on its website you will see that Halbritter has completely erased the history of the great and wonderful years when ICT thrived among the Lakota people. Indian Country Today has a rich history generated from its humble beginnings in a former beauty parlor on the main street of Pine Ridge Village. My then wife Doris, our business manager, my lifetime friends Melvin “Dickey” Brewer, our first ad salesman, and his former wife Alma, Brother Scotty a member of the Marist Brothers, our photographer and darkroom specialist, and Mary Irving, our first typesetter, made up the team that cleaned up the old beauty parlor, converted the hair washing sinks to layout and design tables, changed an old closet into a darkroom, and set up our brand new Compugraphic Machine and cranked out the first issue of the Lakota Times and took it to the printer in Chadron, Nebraska on July 1, 1981. We started the newspaper because we wanted a vehicle that would report on the everyday activities of the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. We wanted a paper that was not afraid to report the truth. And above all, we wanted a paper that did not censor any writer, whether in a letter or in a column, that we did not agree with. And in the 18 years I owned the Lakota Times/Indian Country Today, we followed that golden rule. In the 13 years Ray Halbritter has owned Indian Country Today, the newspaper has never published a letter, a column or a news report that was critical of him, the Nation, or the newspaper. And that my friend, is known in the newspaper business as censorship. As a newspaper man, I applaud the direction Indian Country Today is taking. Any kind of growth in this industry is laudable. But the newspaper I founded in 1981 and sold in 1998 to the Oneida Nation, had the opportunity, nay the obligation, to continue the tenets held sacred by us, of freedom of the press and freedom of expression and they it not. How do I know this? As the former editor I began to receive letters shortly after I sold it, letters and emails that continue to come to me even today from Native Americans who were angry that letters and columns they wrote to ICT critical of Halbritter and of the newspaper, were never published. I am recognized as a fair Indian country columnist, but not a single column of mine has ever appeared in Indian Country Today since December of 1998, the month I sold it to ICT. As the former editor of ICT and now the editor of Native Sun News, I had a philosophy: I didn’t give a hoot whether I liked or despised a Native columnist or letter writer; if their writing was pertinent to the issues of today, I published it. If I got a letter calling me an S.O.B. and my newspaper a good bottom liner for the birdcage, I published it. And that is what is important in a newspaper and if ICT is now to become a magazine, Halbritter should initiate a policy of freedom of the press and freedom of expression as a basic part of its new role in the media. Native American readers are not stupid and they recognize censorship when they don’t see it. According to a former ICT employee, Halbritter and staff trashed 18 years of the Lakota Times and the early Indian Country Today rather than keep them as archival referrals. The first 18 years of a truly great Indian newspaper went to the dumpster. As we move further into the 21st century, perhaps newspapers and even magazines will become irrelevant, but the basic traditions of freedom of the press and freedom of expression should remain as the guidelines of any form of media that may emerge. I look forward to reading the first edition of This Week from Indian Country, but in the back of my mind I will always wonder how many Native writers were censored before the magazine went to press. (Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the editor and publisher of Native Sun News. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1990. His weekly column won the H. L. Mencken Award in 1985. He was the first Native American ever inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com)
"Disaster Uranium: Democratic Presidential Candidates Backed by Nuclear Powerhouses" Article by Jessica Lee from the Indypendent, New York City Independent Media Center While Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to spar for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, a hidden conflict over uranium mining and radioactive waste dumping is simmering, pitting the two candidates, other prominent politicians and Wall Street financiers against many indigenous and non-native American communities. >>Read More or view the article online. "Tiokasin Ghosthorse Reaches New Yorkers With Indigenous World Views" Article by Natasha Terry on iaiachronicle.org New York—“Humankind will cease to exist if Native Americans become extinct,” says Tiokasin Ghosthorse. “If you kill off a species, you remove a balance from that chain and things start to collapse. The earth cannot live without animals; [but] the earth can live without humans. >>Read More or view the article online. "Where's the Respect?" Article by Michael Kane on gnn.tv But the spectacle deeply offended a number of the original peoples of this land according to Tiokasin Ghosthorse, the host of “First Voices” on New York City’s Pacifica Radio outlet WBAI 99.5 FM, Thursday at 10 AM. Reached for comment, Tiokasin told GNN, “I suppose it would take a national apology as big as the exposure they (Outkast) were privileged to, and to come and actually stay with Native people for quite a while.” >>Read More or view the entire article online. "Indigenous People are not of the Past" Article by MariJo Moore on Amerinda.org In a recent conversation I asked Tiokasin why he had chosen radio as a means of communication. He answered that radio is a medium in which the sounds and the intonations of our voices are presented the same as oral culture. Growing up on the reservation, he was \ constantly watching and listening to the elders who were “eloquent speakers and whose abstract concepts compelled deepened thinking.” >>Read More or View the article online. Participatory video workshop gives voice to Indigenous People's Concerns at the United Nations on UNDP.org June 1, 2006 “We need to get away from the type of linear, hierarchical, rational thinking processes and get back to our own Indigenous thinking processes which are primarily very holistic, very egalitarian, very inclusive.” Tiokasin Ghosthorse >>Read more or View the article online.