The Last Voice on Channel 59

By Habib

The morning sun rose pale over Pine Ridge Reservation, its rays catching on the frost still clinging to the tin roofs of the radio station’s low building. Inside, Angela Two Bears sat in the small broadcast booth, the red ‘ON AIR’ light glowing above her. Her voice warm, steady drifted through crackling radios across miles of Dakota prairie.

“Good morning, relatives. You’re listening to KOTA 59 your community, your stories, your songs.”

Angela had been here for fifteen years. She’d grown up listening to this same station, the only voice connecting her grandmother’s old trailer to the wider world when snowstorms sealed the roads. It was more than news. It was Lakota language lessons. Tribal council updates. The bingo numbers. Obituaries for those who walked on. Lullabies sung by grandmothers.

Now, all of it was on the edge of silence.

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A week ago, she’d read the news on the same mic she used for birthday shout-outs: Congress was pushing to slash a billion dollars from public broadcasting. Just numbers on paper unless you lived out here, where public airwaves were the lifeline.

Fifty-nine Native stations like hers from Alaska to Arizona would go dark. Nobody would drive out here with a new for-profit signal. There was no profit in telling an elder’s story about the buffalo hunt or airing a youth drum circle live from the school gym.

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Meanwhile, 800 miles away, Thomas Nguyen paced a hallway in the Department of Education in D.C. He’d packed his office into two cardboard boxes. Two days ago, the Supreme Court said the administration could lay off thousands and Thomas’s name was on the list. He’d started here fresh out of grad school, a young policy analyst trying to fix Title I funding for rural schools like the ones Angela’s listeners depended on.

The memo had come down cold: Position redundant under new state-led model. Thomas knew what that meant federal money and oversight gone, states left to fight over shrinking budgets, kids in the middle.

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Back on the reservation, Angela watched the tower light blink over the cottonwoods. She knew the station’s budget line by line the grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was half their lifeblood. Without it, there’d be no salaries for the two part-time DJs. No gas money for the ancient van that carried them to powwows to record songs. No engineer to fix the battered transmitter when the wind howled.

That night, the tribal council met in the old bingo hall. Parents and elders and kids packed the plastic chairs. Angela stood up and spoke softly into the mic they’d set up.

“If we lose this station,” she said, “we lose more than a signal. We lose our voice. Our stories go silent.”

An elder, John Lone Elk, raised his hand. “They took our language once. This station brought it back to my grandchildren. If it goes, who will remind them who they are?”

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In D.C., Thomas lingered by the Capitol steps before his train home. His badge was gone; his boxes already shipped back to his mother’s basement in Ohio. He thought about the memos he’d written, the policies that would now die in a drawer.

He thought about a story he’d once read: in Pine Ridge, a radio station was teaching kids their native tongue again, keeping it alive. He’d funded a tiny grant for that, a single line item in a thousand-page budget. He wondered if that tower’s light was still blinking tonight.

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Angela closed the station that night as she always did with her mother’s lullaby in Lakota. She leaned close to the mic, eyes closed, singing for whoever might still be awake in the farthest trailer, the loneliest ranch.

If the cut came, she’d find a way. Maybe they’d crowdfund. Maybe they’d string wire through the cottonwoods. Maybe they’d whisper the words mouth to mouth, house to house, if they had to.

They’d done it before. They could do it again.

She signed off softly: “Good night, relatives. We are still here.”

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End.