CENTERVILLE, S.D. (AP) — Three people were shot to death in a small South Dakota town, and a former law officer who once served as the town’s mayor is charged in the killings.

Jay Ostrem, 64, was jailed on $1 million cash-only bond on three counts of first-degree murder, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley said Tuesday in a news release. It wasn’t immediately clear if Ostrem had an attorney. Calls to a phone listing for Ostrem went unanswered.

A probable cause affidavit identified the victims as two brothers, ages 26 and 21, and a 35-year-old man.

Ostrem worked in law enforcement for more than two decades in Wyoming and South Dakota, media reports said. He served as mayor of Centerville about a decade-and-a-half ago, but the exact dates weren’t immediately available.

The probable cause document said a man in Centerville called police at 9:44 p.m. Monday to report that his brother had been shot by “a guy from across the street” and that the shooter had gone back home. The caller was still on the phone with a dispatcher when he said that he had been shot, too. He then stopped talking, the document said.

The document didn’t specify any connection between the third victim and the brothers.

Ostrem was arrested a short time later. An AR-style rifle was on the ground near him, and he had a handgun in his pocket, the document stated.

Officers then went to the home where the call originated and found all three victims.

Ostrem’s wife told police that a neighbor named Paul had sexually assaulted her on Thursday, and she told Ostrem about the assault Monday night, the document stated. She said Ostrem “got up and went raging out of the house,” according to the document.

 

UNDATED (AP) – A new South Dakota policy to stop the use of gender pronouns by public university faculty and staff in official correspondence is also keeping Native American employees from listing their tribal affiliations in a state with a long and violent history of conflict with tribes.

Two University of South Dakota faculty members, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw and her husband, John Little, have long included their gender pronouns and tribal affiliations in their work email signature blocks. But both received written warnings from the university in March that doing so violated a policy adopted in December by the South Dakota Board of Regents.

“I was told that I had 5 days to remove my tribal affiliation and pronouns,” Little said in an email to The Associated Press. “I believe the exact wording was that I had ‘5 days to correct the behavior.’ If my tribal affiliation and pronouns were not removed after the 5 days, then administrators would meet and make a decision whether I would be suspended (with or without pay) and/or immediately terminated.”

The policy is billed by the board as a simple branding and communications policy. It came only months after Republican Gov. Kristi Noem sent a letter to the regents that railed against “liberal ideologies” on college campuses and called for the board to ban drag shows on campus and “remove all references to preferred pronouns in school materials,” among other things.

All nine voting members of the board were appointed by Noem, whose remarks in March accusing tribal leaders of benefitting from illegal drug cartels and not properly caring for children has prompted most South Dakota tribes to ban her from their land.

South Dakota’s change comes in the midst of a conservative quest to limit diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives gaining momentum in state capitals and college governing boards around the country, with about one-third of the states taking some sort of action against it.

Policies targeting gender pronoun use have focused mainly on K-12 students, although some small religious colleges have also restricted pronoun use. Houghton University in western New York fired two dorm directors last year after they refused to remove gender pronouns from their work email signatures.

But some fear the South Dakota policy could signify a creep of such efforts into public colleges and universities.

“Quite frankly, this is the first I’ve heard of a state university choosing to use branding standards to eliminate what obviously had become a practice of including pronouns and tribal affiliations to emails,” said Paulette Grandberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “But I’m not surprised, given the current climate we’re in.”

Grandberry Russell referred to the conservative push limiting transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as a “testing ground” to see if discriminatory laws will be tolerated.

“It is a steady progression,” she said. “This comes in the form of communications and branding standards. Is that going to be the next frontier in sanitizing the realities of our differences? ”

The college faculty advocacy group American Association of University Professors is not aware of any other faculty at a public university in the U.S. being required to drop their preferred pronouns in official correspondence, spokesman Kelly Benjamin said.

“Anecdotally I’ll say, because I live in Florida and have seen what’s happened with all the anti-wokeness and targeting of education here, I know this is part and parcel to a longer-term agenda,” Benjamin said.

A spokeswoman for the University of South Dakota declined to answer questions about whether its administrators or the University Faculty Senate had been consulted before regents adopted the policy, referring questions to the Board of Regents.

Shuree Mortenson, a spokeswoman for the regents, said all six universities under the regents board umbrella were given the opportunity to review the policy, “but ultimately, the Board of Regents made this decision.” She declined to say whether other faculty at any of the five other schools had received warnings about not using gender pronouns, tribal affiliation or other identifiers, but defended the new policy as providing “consistency to safeguard the brand.”

Mortenson did not answer questions about whether the inclusion of tribal affiliation in official public university signature blocks had been considered by the regents before adopting it or whether tribal leaders in the state had been consulted.

When the policy was announced to faculty in January, Little said he and Red Shirt-Shaw asked schools administrators how the new policy would impact the inclusion of tribal affiliations.

“It was clear that they had not considered that this would impact Native employees,” Little said.

The U.S. had long tried to eradicate Native American communities and cultures through warfare, assimilation and other means before recognizing tribes’ inherent right to govern themselves. Indigenous children, for example, were taken from their communities and forced into Native American boarding schools, which systematically abused students.

Red Shirt-Shaw said in social media posts that being told she could not list her tribal affiliation as part of her signature felt like further erasure of Native people in South Dakota.

“The ability to share my tribal affiliation as well as gender pronouns signals that I am a person who values the lived experiences of others,” she said.

Both she and Little have begun listing their tribal affiliation and pronouns in the body of their emails, which the university currently is allowing.

The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota said it has heard from faculty and students at the University of South Dakota who are concerned about the new policy. The ACLU is considering next steps to address it.

“Maybe their intent was to suppress pronoun usage in email signatures, but as is often the case with any limitation or suppression of free speech, there’s always unintended consequences,” said Samantha Chapman, an advocacy manager for the ACLU South Dakota. “There is also a component here of double erasure. There are plenty of queer Indigenous folks in South Dakota.”

 

JOHNSTON, Iowa (Gray Television Iowa Capitol Bureau) – Primary elections are on June 4. National data shows Americans’ trust in election integrity increased ahead of the 2022 midterms after a low point in 2020. But – will Iowans trust the results this time around?

Overall, most Americans, 63% of them to be exact, trust US elections are accurate according to a 2022 Gallup poll ahead of the midterms. That’s only a minor improvement from the low point of 59% in 2020.

Despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate says his office is taking steps to make sure the vote is secure. Pate said, “The public should be reassured, and when they cast their vote in the upcoming election it will be counted fairly and accurately.”

Some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election centered on electronic voting machines. Pate says that’s not a concern here. “Iowans vote on paper ballots. You can’t hack a paper ballot. Iowa has pre-election and post-election audits. Every ballot tabulator undergoes a logic and accuracy test to ensure it is functioning properly,” Pate said.

Pate says the vote tabulators aren’t connected to the internet and the physical protection of each machine is accounted for in all 99 counties.

The state will also conduct exercises with federal and state partners on what to do if something goes wrong. That could include an attempted hack of a government office or a polling site getting damaged in a natural disaster.

Pate’s office also has new tools to boost poll worker training. Pate says all 10,000 poll workers in the state now get the same training. “They are the face of the election. They are the people on the ground dealing with every technical component that’s really going on. So what this does is allows us to have that consistency and gives us a new level of consistency if you will professionalism going forward,” Pate said.

Pate says recruiting poll workers can be difficult since some counties may lean more republican or democrat and they want a balance. However – Pate says this time around, he thinks there’ll be enough poll workers for the primaries next Tuesday.

As for possible recounts, Pate says he’s hoping for landslides. If a recount is required, Pate says he’s confident they have the tools to handle it.

After the election next Tuesday, Pate’s office will run randomly selected audits in all 99 counties. Bipartisan teams hand count the ballots to ensure they match what the tabulators say. “Following the 2020 general election, the 2022 midterm election, and the 2023 city school election, the hand count audits match perfectly. 100% in every county,” Pate said.

Cait Conley with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says they’ve moved all of Iowa’s local election websites to end in a .gov domain, so people know they’re not using a spoofed site. Conley says the agency has also visited all 99 counties to give cyber and physical assessments of county voting offices.

Still – Conley says artificial intelligence and ransomware threats remain. “While our election infrastructure is more secure than ever, today’s threat environment is also more complex than ever. Our foreign adversaries remain a persistent threat to our elections intent on undermining Americans’ confidence in the foundation of our democracy and sowing partisan discord,” Conley said.

On election night, the Iowa National Guard and other state partners will monitor election returns and manage any threats. This is done regularly.

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Kathleen Shannon / Greater Dakota News Service) – After 13 hours of markups late last week, the House Committee on Agriculture passed its version of the massive piece of legislation known as the Farm Bill.

The bill is renewed every five years and determines spending on agriculture and nutrition programs, conservation efforts and rural development. Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., supports the bill. He emphasized his contributions during the markup, including higher rural broadband speeds, creating sovereignty in tribal SNAP programming and increasing investments in smaller meatpackers and processors rather than the four now dominating the industry.

He spoke to the committee chairman.

“Livestock. You and I, sir, heard that it was important that we built capacity outside of the ‘big four,'” Johnson emphasized. “With the ‘A Plus Act’ and the ‘Butcher Block Act’ inside this bill, we do that.”

Critics of the House proposal are concerned about major cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, and a reappropriation of dollars away from conservation funding.

Evert Van der Sluis, professor of economics at South Dakota State University, said the shift would be a big deal.

“People concerned about conservation have been opposed to this,” Van der Sluis explained. “Because funds now having to do with climate change would then be rechanneled to direct producer support.”

Democrats are also concerned. There is bipartisan support for an increased safety net for big producers through raising what are known as “reference prices.” But the biggest proposed increases predominantly benefit southern farmers who grow peanuts, rice, wheat and cotton, not Midwestern producers. The Senate has not yet indicated when it will release its own proposed Farm Bill.

 

PIERRE, S.D. – Governor Kristi Noem has announced that she will be hosting a Tribal Public Safety Crisis Summit in Pierre on Monday, June 24.

The Governor is inviting both elected leaders and law enforcement officials at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels.

According to a release the goal of the summit is to solve issues through cooperation and communication.  Topics to be covered will include drug addiction, violent crime, and the trafficking of women and children on tribal reservations throughout the country, including in South Dakota.

Quoting the Governor from the news release, “Drug cartels and their affiliates are causing many of these challenges. We all want what’s best for our tribal communities, and I hope this conversation can get the ball rolling towards real solutions.”

The following leaders will be invited to the summit:

Tribal leaders, including the presidents and chairmen of all nine of South Dakota’s Native American tribes;

The heads of the law enforcement agencies for each of the nine tribes;

Sheriffs from counties that include reservation land;

Senator John Thune, Senator Mike Rounds, and Representative Dusty Johnson;

Attorney General Marty Jackley; Division of Criminal Investigation Director Dan Satterlee; U.S. Attorney for the District of South Dakota Alison J. Ramsdell; Secretary of Tribal Relations David Flute; Secretary of Public Safety Bob Perry; Tribal Law Enforcement Liaison Algin Young; Representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice.