In 1981, he founded the Lakota Times with Doris Giago at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he was born and grew up.
When hired in 1979 to write a column for the Rapid City Journal, Giago was the first Native American writer for a South Dakota newspaper.
[1] Giago served with the U.S. Navy at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard, where he started writing because his commander noticed "he typed well" and assigned him to produce the base newspaper.
Giago also wrote personal articles and poems about his mission school experience, first published in the monthly journal Wassaja, run by Jeannette and Rupert Costo of San Francisco during the 1970s.
[3] Giago's hiring had followed Wounded Knee incident in 1973 at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which received international attention, and near civil war on the reservation during the next few years, but, as Carrier wrote later, "none of the state's 11 daily newspapers or 145 weeklies covered the mayhem in any depth, relying instead on the Associated Press or printing nothing at all.
[4] As a young reporter, he was sometimes told that he could not cover events at the Pine Ridge Reservation because he could not be "objective", an opinion which he questioned.
In the beginning, he earned revenue by publishing the most complete list of pow-wows nationally and selling related advertising.
[4] Despite his criticism of programs, he gradually earned the respect of tribal governments, and gained their support for his independence during difficult years.
[3] Through the years, Giago hired and trained numerous Native Americans, some of whom later moved on to other papers and media to become successful in journalism.
[3] In 2000, Giago founded The Lakota Times and sold it in 2004 to the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe, thinking he would retire.