Dozens of Native American elders from South Dakota tribal nations gathered in the Prairie Knights Casino on the Standing Rock Reservation earlier this month. Sitting at tables armed with pens and composition notebooks, they wrote about memories from their childhoods and shared their stories orally with each other in Lakota and English. Those conversations will be recorded, transcribed and translated by Thunder Valley Community Development, a nonprofit on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Thunder Valley will use the material to preserve elders’ memories and stories for their families, and to preserve the Lakota language and build a foundation for new Lakota learning standards.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Moore v. Harper that state courts are an essential part of our system of checks and balances to protect voters from legislative overreach. This is especially important to Native voters who rely on state courts to counteract state legislation that disenfranchises Native communities. In this case, a small group of state legislators made a blatant power grab, arguing that there should be no restrictions or oversight of how they administer and apply laws around federal elections.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
