In April of 1921 Vaudevillian entertainer Al Jolson stood on the stage in Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre in New York City in blackface in the production of the Broadway musical Bombo, and he sang, “Though April showers may come your way, they bring the flowers that bloom in May.”
At that time April became the month of hope and dreams. But before Jolson’s song of April, the month took some ominous turns.
On April 20, 1889, Adolph Hitler was born and between his life and death, millions would die in World War 2. More than 6 million Jews would die in the concentration camps in what Hitler proclaimed as the Final Solution.
On April 15, 1912 the luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and sank taking 1,517 passengers to the bottom with it.
It was in April 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy made his historic visit to Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just a few months before he was assassinated in California.
On April 19, 1995 an Army veteran named Timothy McVeigh calmly walked away from the Ryder Truck he had parked in front of the Alfred Murrah federal building and the truck exploded nearly destroying the building and taking the lives of 168 people.
And on April 20, 1999, Hitler’s birthday, two high school boys, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, walked into the classrooms at Columbine High School and took the lives of 12 students, one teacher and then turned the guns on themselves. In all 15 people died that day.
Something else happened on April 4, 1981 that helps me to round out things that happened in that month that held different meanings. On April 4 a group of Native Americans from the American Indian Movement occupied a small plot of land called Victoria Creek Canyon and changed the name to Yellow Thunder Camp in honor of Raymond Yellow Thunder, the Lakota man killed in Gordon, Nebraska by locals.
On the evening that AIM took over the grounds at Yellow Thunder Camp the skies above Rapid City took on colors of red, pink and purple that I have never seen before or since. The entire sky above this city lit up for nearly 30 minutes. Members of AIM looked upon this as a sign that Wakan Tanka (Great Spirit) was with them.
That same evening in a hospital bed at the Rapid City Regional Hospital, a tiny Lakota woman named Lupe Giago breathed her last breath. When I looked out of the windows at the hospital and saw the brilliant hues of colors in the skies I thought, “There goes the spirit of my mother.”
In April of 1991, I got a phone call from my cousin “Buzzy” telling me to hurry home because my brother Tony, the man we called “Tuna the Bass” was in the same Regional Hospital and in dire straits. I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard at the time and I rushed out to Logan International Airport in Boston and caught the first available flight home. I was too late. My brother passed away before my plane could reach Rapid City. Ironically Logan International Airport is the same airport where the 911 hijackers took the plane that flew into one of the Twin Towers in Rapid City 10 years later.
April has been a month of many sad memories to me. My angst about the month “that brings May flowers” was pushed to the brink when on April 6, 2006, my lovely daughter Roberta died in a terrible pickup crash in Belen, N.M. She was only 34 and was living in the happiest time of her life. Roberta worked for me at Indian Country Today when we had a branch office in Albuquerque. She also worked in our Rapid City office. We buried her ashes in the wooded hills near the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. There was a special tree where she used to take my granddaughters on picnics and her ashes are now forever covered in the red earth beneath that tree.
As April blends into May we move into the month of Memorial Day and like I and my family have done for many years, we will go to the cemetery at Red Cloud Indian School and place those flowers of May on the graves of my grandmother, grandfather and my Aunt Annie who all lie buried there. This year we also hope to place a stone monument at their graves to replace the wooden crosses now marking their burial place.
I suppose any of us can find a month of the year that has had its saddest moments just as we can all find one where we have had our happiest moments. And so like life itself, April brings May flowers and turns a little bit of darkness into light.
– Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, was born, raised and educated on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in the Class of 1991. His career in journalism spans more than 35 years. He can be reached at