The South Dakota Department of Health has released the state’s first report from the South Dakota Violent Death Reporting System, an offshoot of a national program that collects data on violent deaths and why they occurred. The report showed 240 South Dakotans died as a result of violence in 2020, for a violent death rate of 26.9 per 100,000 residents. Of those deaths, 75% were suicides, 21% were homicides, 2% were of undetermined intent and 2% were unintentional firearm deaths. Demographically, males made up 80% of the state’s violent deaths in 2020 and had a violent death rate 3.9 times higher than women. State data showed 62% of violent deaths were from the state’s white population, while 30% were from the state’s American Indian population, though the violent death rate for the American Indian population was 4.6 times higher than the death rate for the white population.
When the debate over teaching race-related concepts in public schools reached Kimberly Tilsen-Brave Heart’s home state of South Dakota, she decided she couldn’t in good conscience send her youngest daughter to kindergarten at a local public school. “I knew that the public school system would not benefit my child without the important and critical history and culture of Indigenous people being taught,” said Tilsen-Brave Heart, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Tilsen-Brave Heart worried that her 5-year-old daughter, Pia, would be exposed to even fewer lessons taught through a cultural lens than her older siblings had been, robbing her of an educational experience that would foster a sense of belonging and self-identity. “I want my children to know who they are,” said Tilsen-Brave Heart. “I want them to know their language, their culture, where they come from—to be proud of their ethnicity and their history and their culture.”
Those are your Headlines at this hour, I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
