As the sun set over Coldwater Spring on Wednesday, a ceremonial fire burned as a Dakota elder shared a song of prayer and healing, surrounded by a small group of people. Around the fire, four tipis stood with the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building looming in the background.
The tipis on a sacred Dakota site near Fort Snelling are one of the most visible signs of a movement by members of the Native community to push back against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity that has swept the Twin Cities over the past two months.
Native activists have been on the front lines of ICE protests for months. And the community has been in “alert mode” since early December, when the current surge of several thousand ICE and Border Patrol agents began arriving in the Twin Cities, according to Robert Lilligren, chair of the Metro Urban Indian Directors.
In recent months, community members have organized patrols to monitor ICE presence, organized aid, and have led healing ceremonies — offering prayer, song, and dance at memorials and protests — to support the broader community. Native residents have also shared accounts of being racially profiled and targeted by ICE agents, actions they say are an infringement on Native sovereignty.
“What we are witnessing today is part of a long continuum of occupation, removal, and surveillance imposed on our communities,” said Rachel Dionne-Thunder, vice president of the Indigenous Protector Movement. “Indigenous resistance has always been about naming this continuity and refusing to accept occupation, whether it comes in the form of forts, federal buildings or armed agents enforcing fear on stolen land,” she said.
Coldwater Spring itself is known to be a traditional gathering place for Native American tribes of the upper Mississippi that used the spring water for specific ceremonies.
Wasu Datu, a Dakota headsman, was one of the first to spend a night in one of the tipis which were erected Monday.
“How I identify them [ICE agents] as basically being unconstitutional, unlawful, disrespectful, basically committing acts of war on my people as well, and also harming other people from multiple races,” Datu said.
Detaining immigrants on Fort Snelling land echoes a dark chapter of Minnesota’s past, when nearly 1,600 Dakota men, women and children were detained on Pike Island below the fort following the U.S.-Dakota War.
“The significance to the pattern it created in 1862 is happening right now,” he said.
Migizi Spears, a member of the Red Lake Band, said a multi-tribal group is negotiating for Fort Snelling State Park, and historic Fort Snelling itself, to be returned to the Dakota people. “We’re all the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, which is South, North, and Central America, and we’re stronger as we all work together that way,” Spears said.
Those living in the tipis, including Datu and Spears, said they intend to erect three more tipis and will be living there indefinitely, and “allowing people to come here, lay their prayers to what it is that they ask for, in solidarity as friends and allies to the original people,” Datu said.
Speaking at Whipple Building grounds on Feb. 7, where an Indigenous-led coalition of Native clergy members called for ICE to leave Minnesota, Jim Bear Jacobs, founder of Healing Minnesota Stories, shared the history of the site where the Whipple Building now stands.
“They [Dakota men] were being starved out after so many broken treaties and broken promises by the federal government. What does that sound like?” Jacobs said, pointing to the irony and “desecration” of holding immigrant detainees on land that has historically seen the mass imprisonment of Indigenous peoples.
He then welcomed a group of performers who performed Danza Mexica, a traditional spiritual and ceremonial dance originating from central Mexico, described as a prayer in movement. Since the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Native community members have been bringing healing ceremonies and prayers — whether it be by burning sage or performing the Jingle Dress Dance — to protests and memorial sites.
For 15 minutes, as they danced around a drum, shells rattling on their ankles, a large crowd stood around, rapt. Samuel Xochikoyotl Torres, who was one of the performers from Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli — a traditional Mexica-Nahua (Aztec) cultural group — said that that’s exactly what the ceremony invokes.
@sahanjournal Brian Labatte, who lives in south Minneapolis, was among the advocates of the tipi location. He cites Fort Snelling’s past — where Native men, women and children were held after the Dakota War of 1862 — and expresses disbelief that similar detentions are occurring in 2026. #tipi #WhippleFederalBuilding #fortsnelling ♬ original sound – Sahan Journal
“There’s a magnetism, an ancestral connection, that, whether these are in your traditions or not, everyone understands, to a degree, what that drumbeat feels and what that means to them,” he said. “These gifts that our ancestors passed down to us, generation by generation, are thousands of years old. These traditions, these prayers, the songs and the dances that we have, there is deep wisdom in that, and this moment requires a combination of resistance, fighting, of sustaining, protecting, but also grieving.”
Torres nodded to the history of Indigenous resistance, echoing and borrowing from Standing Rock in South Dakota as well as the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1960s and ’70s where Native American activists came together and took action against high unemployment, slum housing, and racist treatment, fought for treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians who were facing illness and poverty.
Dionne-Thunder said AIM’s legacy continues through the Indigenous Protector Movement, which has been on the front lines patrolling, observing ICE activity, and organizing aid.
“Indigenous people organize to protect one another when the state refuses to, and often, when the state is the source of harm,” Dionne-Thunder said.
On Jan. 9, ICE agents confronted and tried to detain Dionne-Thunder when she was in her car observing ICE activity across from All My Relations Gallery.
“They were ready to break the window, and that’s when the community arrived on the scene,” Dionne-Thunder said in a news conference that day.
ICE agents eventually left the scene. The day before, Jose Roberto Ramirez, a 20-year-old of Native American and Mexican descent, was violently taken from his car and temporarily detained at the Whipple Building.
Lilligren, the MUID chair, said that surprised a lot of people.
“There couldn’t be anyone who’s further from being an immigrant on this stolen land than Indigenous people,” he said. And yet, he said Native leaders like him felt that, “We would be needing to protect our browner, darker-skinned relatives who may look more like immigrants.”
The Native community organized and mobilized quickly. They had a template from the outpouring of protests and activism following George Floyd’s murder, Lilligren said.
Following the killing of Renee Good, activists quickly transformed the Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI) office building — which also houses Powwow Grounds Coffee and All My Relations Art Gallery — into the headquarters for Native community efforts, as it had in 2020 and during the Wall of Forgotten Natives encampment.
“There was this precedent for this building being the headquarters for protectors movements, and this time, I feel like we were much more organized,” Lilligren, who is also president and CEO of NACDI, said.
This precedent and history, as well as “prayerful protests” have helped shape Minneapolis’ continued resistance to ICE, Lilligren said. Nicole Matthews, CEO at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition, agreed.
“Resistance is not a new concept for us,” she said. “There’s a lot of connections to the historical trauma that many of us have in our DNA and I think that’s even more a reason why it’s so important to keep our ceremonies and to stay in prayer. It’s part of turning to that core piece of who we are.”
Last Saturday, hundreds of non-Native community members felt the power of that prayer and ceremony when they gathered at Powderhorn Park to mark one month since Renee Good was shot to death by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Several Native groups and tribal leaders came together to share words of support and healing, and to pray with and for the Good family who were present.
Torres was there with the other performers to perform Danza Mexica.
“When we go to make our offerings to the memorials of Renee Good or the memorial of Alex Pretti, we’re there to hold a ceremony to grieve, knowing that these were individuals that were standing for our relatives, that are being detained and abducted,” Torres said.
“We wanted to surround ourselves and surround the family of Renee Good with those values alongside of you,” Nick Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, said, addressing Good’s family. “So you don’t have to mourn by yourself, that you are held by the people, and that you’re held by people whose ceremonies survived violence and struggle.”
Lakota spiritual leader Chief Arvol Looking Horse, along with multiple elders, jingle dress dancers, drummers, and singers, led an hourlong prayer and ceremony as Good’s family wept and held each other.
