Indian Country Today, March 3, 2020: Native journalist who made a lasting impact dies at 84
Charles “Chuck” Trimble, Oglala Lakota, a man who made a lasting impact on Indian Country has died at the age of 84.
Trimble served as the executive director for the National Congress of American Indians from 1972-78 and was a principal founder of the American Indian Press Association. He was also inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 2013.
“There are so many ways that Chuck Trimble contributed to Native journalism, and Indian Country, that it’s hard to narrow it down,” said Mark Trahant, editor of Indian Country Today. “Chuck was a brilliant cartoonist. He could have made a career out of doing just that.”
He also was a warrior in the battle against termination, Trahant said. Lucy Covington asked Trimble to help start a newspaper at Colville so that people would understand the implication of termination.
“She made no offers of compensation for travel and expenses. The Press Association was not yet established and there were no funds for travel or anything else; so I went at my own expense,” Trimble wrote years later. Covington “wanted a newspaper that would tell what a tribe means to its people, and its true worth to them in terms of land, natural resources, and most of all their cultural heritage. She wanted the newspaper to be called Our Heritage, and she even described the logo she wanted for the masthead. It would be a pair of hands holding together the shape of the Colville Reservation. The logo would signify that the future of their reservation, indeed their nation, was in the hands of the people, not in the U.S. Government or the State of Washington, or anyone else.”
Our Heritage chronicled the tribe’s eventual rejection of termination.
