Theia Chatelle:  Indigenous-Led Collectives Are Keeping Minnesotan Communities Safe From ICE

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Members of the American Indian Movement and the Many Shields Warrior Society are patrolling the streets of Minneapolis.

A cozy cafe in the heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota, has become a staging ground for Indigenous-led patrols working to keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) off their streets. Pow Wow Grounds, opened in 2011 by Bob Rice, has been both a gathering place for community members attempting to make sense of the scale of violence they have witnessed over the past few weeks and a place to strategize an autonomous response.

During Truthout’s visit to the cafe at the end of January, wagons full of supplies — from food and gas masks to Narcan — passed in and out of Pow Wow Grounds’ front door, which for the first time was kept locked to keep ICE agents out. The door was unlocked again and again to allow the wagons into the newly repurposed All My Relations gallery space, which is housed with Pow Wow Grounds in the Native American Community Development Institute.

“Look outside,” Rice said during an interview with Truthout in the cafe. “This is the American Indian Cultural Corridor, the heart of Native life here in Minneapolis. They come here to try to intimidate us, but we will not bow down.”

Rice’s efforts to supply the Native community and its allies with “soup and supplies,” as he told Truthout, have been successful. Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and of the Many Shields Warrior Society (an Indigenous community security group) have been patrolling the streets of Minneapolis’s Phillips neighborhood since the start of the occupation, and they do not plan to stop.

“We all have a place. My place is to make sure people are fed and get a cup of coffee,” Rice said.

As is the case with many Minneapolis residents who do not imagine themselves as demonstrators — much less radicals — getting involved in anti-ICE activities, Rice said this felt like the logical thing to do. “We get a call that someone needs something, but they don’t want to leave the house. We have a volunteer list of people who will drive stuff out. This is about keeping the community safe,” Rice stressed.

Masked federal agents have been ubiquitous in the city since the start of “Operation Metro Surge” in December, and for the Native community, the idea of police brutalizing members of their community is hardly new.

“The day after Renee Good was murdered, I remember waking up and thinking I need to get to work and open up the gallery for the people, and it was just immediately, this is what we need to do,” Angela Two Stars, vice president of arts and culture at the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis, told Truthout.

This is not the first time All My Relations has served as a community hub amid turmoil in the Twin Cities. In 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Two Stars and her team opened the space for community members just as they did in early January, she recalled.

“The thinking is the same. We’re not going to bow down to the fear tactics. Hand in hand, everyone is doing the work together.”

Minneapolis is the historic heart of the American Indian Movement. It was founded in the Twin Cities in 1968 amid extraordinary levels of violence against the Native community committed by the Minneapolis Police Department. “You’re going to see second- and third-generation AIM here. You’re going to see activism out of here, to push back. That’s the history here,” Rice added.

AIM was instrumental in bringing the number of arrests of Native people down from five to six each day to close to zero. Through the 1960s and 1970s, AIM patrollers scanned police radios and intervened during arrests in progress in an attempt to de-escalate a pattern of violence fomented by underinvestment, redlining, and intense policing.

Rice, who was born and raised in Minneapolis, remembers this time well. When his family moved to the city from the White Earth Reservation, he told Truthout that a petition circulated in his North Minneapolis neighborhood to keep his family out. This anti-Indigenous animus has appeared at other points in Rice’s life in the Twin Cities. He told Truthout it often takes the form of anti-Indigenous comments made in his presence because of his light skin tone.

In early January, reports circulated that federal immigration authorities had detained four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. The site was a concentration camp for Lakota people in the late 1860s, from which they were deported west. The historical memory of such a place is not lost on the Native community in Minneapolis.

“There is a blood trauma here, seeing masked federal agents walking down our streets waiting to pick people up,” Mary LaGarde, executive director of the American Indian Center in Minneapolis, told Truthout. LaGarde said her own family has been impacted by Operation Metro Surge. At least two of her relatives have been stopped and questioned by immigration agents since December.

“I never thought that I would have to wear my tribal identification, but that’s what I’m wearing around my neck. We don’t know if we’re stopped by ICE. Are they going to give us time to provide proper identification?” she asked emphatically.

Jacqueline De León, a senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, confirmed reports that Native Americans have been stopped in Minneapolis and provided their tribal identification cards to federal immigration agents, but that officers have refused to accept them as valid forms of identification. She said this has also occurred in other cities that have experienced federal immigration surges.

“A lot of our elders are afraid to leave their homes. They’re stuck inside because they’re afraid they will get detained by an ICE officer, even though they have citizenship,” LaGarde added.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe recently banned ICE agents from entering its reservation, a step that other tribes have taken in response to increasingly brutal tactics deployed by immigration agents, such as the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

“A lot of our elders are afraid to leave their homes. They’re stuck inside because they’re afraid they will get detained by an ICE officer, even though they have citizenship.”

Chase Iron Eyes said in a statement outside the Whipple Building published by online news outlet Status Coup, “There is nobody more American than American Indians.” Per the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Native people in the U.S. who are members of a federally recognized tribe are also U.S. citizens.

When ICE came to town, it was only a matter of activating what had already been done before. The historical memory was there, and so was the framework for action. “They should have expected this,” said Miles Koenig, who has been working with AIM to help patrol neighborhood streets.

AIM patrols have continued in an on-and-off fashion over the decades — restarting when the community faces a wave of shootings and winding down when a degree of calm returns. But this time is different, according to those who spoke with Truthout.

Crow Bellecourt, the son of Clyde Bellecourt, one of AIM’s four co-founders, now leads the Indigenous Protector Movement, another organization patrolling the streets of the Phillips neighborhood since the start of the occupation. “We just want them out of here,” Bellecourt said of ICE agents. “They can’t keep taking us away.”

The Many Shields Warrior Society, like the Indigenous Protector Movement, is something of a splinter group of AIM. Members of Many Shields allowed Truthout to join them for a training session in the neighborhood of Kingfield on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution from the federal government — a well-founded fear. The FBI has historically attempted to infiltrate left-wing autonomous collectives, including through COINTELPRO in the 1960s.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe recently banned ICE agents from entering its reservation.

For Many Shields, the community’s elders have become something of an institution over time, while the group has taken a hardline abolitionist approach. The group’s work is an attempt to counter the logic of prisons and policing inherent in a system that has historically criminalized Native people. “We know our community best, and we are best equipped to make them feel safe,” one member said.

The City of Minneapolis approached Many Shields in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprising to ask whether the group would be interested in joining the city’s violence interrupter program, which was expanded in response to calls to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department. Many Shields declined the funding, saying it did not want to “self-police,” as one member put it, or tie the group to an institution it had worked to undercut.

Many Shields members are prepared for the worst-case scenario, each carrying combat medical kits. With each passing civilian death at the hands of federal immigration agents, one member said, their use is becoming less of a “just in case” and more of a certainty. Many Shields has been patrolling the community’s streets for weeks, communicating potential ICE sightings via handheld radios.

Putting ideological differences aside, the autonomous groups operating in Phillips have banded together in solidarity by coordinating patrols and sharing tips on potential ICE sightings. “There’s been an incredible network of dedicated Indigenous people, neighbors, friends, and advocates who have come together to support the Native community,” De León said.

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First published by Truthout. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

THEIA CHATELLE is a conflict correspondent based between Ramallah and New Haven. She has written for The Intercept, The Nation and The New Arab. She is an alumnus of the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Rory Peck Trust.