Letters from the American Empire: August 11, 2026

Dear friends,

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This summer has been a moment of reflection and of remembering—what we call Wokiksuye. Mourning is the demonstration of love when we know it can no longer be reciprocated. It comes when we lose a loved one or when we experience a traumatic event. Oftentimes it’s both things at once.

I’ve been reflecting on the mass alienation of U.S. society, especially when it comes to grieving and mourning, which are frequently practiced as private matters. The same can be said of addiction, trauma, and emotions in general. The privatization of our afflictions has become a hallmark of capitalist societies, standing in stark contrast to Lakota practices of grieving. Below, I offer two examples of Lakota responses to the violence and traumas of Standing Rock and Operation Metro:

The mud sucked up our boots as we walked toward the gathering at the river’s edge. Women in ribbon skirts moved with quiet authority through the crowd, calling people into a circle and asking women and men to stand on opposite sides. Leading them was Ihanktonwan elder Faith Spotted Eagle. “What if you don’t identify as a man or a woman?” a voice asked. A pause—then the reply came, steady and without hesitation: “stand in between or on the outside, wherever you feel comfortable.” No one was refused; the circle widened to contain us all.

At the center stood Arvol Looking Horse, the nineteenth-generation keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, surrounded by his helpers. He held the stillness of the gathering, serving as the movement’s spiritual guide, his presence anchoring a resistance shaped by Lakota virtues, ceremonies, and principles of non-violent resistance. Behind me, the crowd opened like parting water. An elderly man in a motorized wheelchair lurched forward jolting over clods of mud and flattened grass, steadied by the hand of his helper as he made his way toward the center, toward Looking Horse. It was Leonard Crow Dog. He stuck out his hand to one of the bystanders and cracked a joke: “Shake the hand that shook the world,” he grinned with a toothless smile.

A once larger-than-life figure—immortalized in films and books for his role as the spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement—Crow Dog’s voice that day was weathered, thinned by time, yet no less powerful. A captivated audience strained to hear his words over the incessant mechanical buzzing of overhead drones. He spoke about the strength of Lakota spirituality in the face of all the violence Indigenous peoples had endured and then turned deliberately to the non-Native allies in the crowd.

“You are traitors to the United States government for standing with us,” Crow Dog said.

The words fell with the weight of a verdict, silencing the remaining whispering banter. He told them that like Lakotas they, too, had to be patriotic—not to a flag or a country, but to the land, water, and the humble people of the earth, first and foremost—and that such an allegiance had made them guilty of “treason” in the eyes of their own government and perhaps their own families and communities. He gestured behind him to the dark figures arrayed atop a hill, looking down on us; their hands rested on riot control munitions launchers, their helmet visors flipped upwards as they stood in irregular lines, a silent phalanx presiding over what had become a ritual violent confrontations clashes over the last weeks and months, paused only briefly by the day’s event.

It was early November 2016, days before the fateful U.S. presidential elections for which Donald Trump claimed victory. The elections seemed distant, almost unreal, a spectacle unfolding somewhere else for many of us. Lakota and Dakota elders gathered Water Protectors for a healing ceremony and a horse dance just east of the Oceti Sakowin camp at the confluence of the Cannon Ball and Missouri rivers, pulling people into a prayer circle. Days earlier, an army of police from multiple law enforcement jurisdictions had descended upon the 1851 Treaty Camp erected on Highway 1806 directly in the pathway of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which trespassed through unceded Oceti Sakowin treaty lands.

That day—October 27—seared itself into the memories of those who survived and witnessed it, creating some of the most tragic and iconic images of the Indigenous-led #NoDAPL movement. The police crackdown was brutal. Armored police ripped through tipis with tactical knives and tore down sweat lodges, pulling half-naked elders from the middle of ceremony. More than 140 Water Protectors were arrested, their arrest numbers scrawled on their forearms in black Sharpie marker, and, lacking adequate space at local jails, some were caged in dog kennels. Leaked cellphone footage from inside these makeshift cells showed women singing the “Warrior Women Song,” composed by Lil’wat elder Martina Pierre to honor Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women. The song has traveled across numerous frontlines, carried by breath and memory, with various stories of when and why it was sung, oftentimes in the face of terrible danger but always in the spirit of resistance and courage led by Indigenous women.

Nearly a decade has passed since that moment. Recently, those images and experiences came rushing back to me when the Trump administration deployed thousands of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) and Border Patrol officers to the Twin Cities for Operation Metro Surge. This time the frontline had widened, its geography expanding from prairie camps to urban neighborhoods, where the federal troops far outnumbered local police. Local electeds and activists were quick to call it an “invasion,” a federal takeover of a “Blue State” that had largely voted against Trump and his Make America Great Again (or MAGA) coalition. Liberal pundits framed the federal attack as revenge for Minnesota governor Tim Waltz’s unsuccessful Vice-Presidential bid on Kamala Harris’s Presidential ticket against Trump’s re-election campaign. Officially, the occupation operated under the auspices of immigration enforcement. But in the months leading up to the influx of federal agents, other possible motives became clearer.

It was open-ended campaign of terror and political theater, carried out on the occupied streets of Minneapolis and across other parts of Minnesota. A permanent state of emergency had settled in. The presence of federal officers, who outnumbered local police, was no longer exceptional but routine. Murder and abduction were treated as collateral. Terror itself appeared to be the policy, not the byproduct.

On February 7 of this year, Lakota and Dakota spiritual leaders gathered for a Wokiksuye—a memorial—not only to remember, but to carry forward the weight of what had been taken. The ceremony honored Renee Macklin Good, shot and killed by federal agents a month earlier. There, before thousands, grief moved like a current through the people, held together by prayer, by song, by the quiet insistence that memory itself is a form of resistance.

Gaby Strong, vice president of the NDN Collective, spoke of her Dakota grandmothers—the first witnesses to invasion, the first to survive its violence—imprisoned at Fort Snelling, near the current headquarters of the regional ICE headquarters. “This is a generational burden that we carry,” she said, her words binding past to present, “and we’re seeing that burden again today.” She named Renee Good’s final act—standing to protect her neighbors—as something more than courage. It was, she said, an expression of what it means to be a good relative, to uphold one’s obligations to those beside you, even at the cost of one’s life.

Five thousand people gathered under the guidance of Arvol Looking Horse, the nineteenth-generation keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe. There was something unsettling in the continuity of it all—that a decade earlier he had presided over ceremony at Standing Rock, and now again he stood at the center of a people mourning another life taken in the long arc of state violence. Among those present were Renee Good’s immediate family, their grief both intimate and public, fractured by forces far beyond the circle.

In the days following her killing, Kristi Noem described Good as a participant in “domestic terrorism,” defending the agent who shot her as acting in self-defense. The language was familiar—a vocabulary of justification that transforms the dead into threats and the living into suspects. Yet what followed revealed something even more disquieting. Good’s own father-in-law, speaking to Fox News, refused to place blame on the agents. Instead, he turned inward, invoking scripture to suggest that had she been “walking in the spirit of God,” she would not have been there. Responsibility was not assigned to power, but displaced onto the victim herself.

Even as her siblings condemned the administration’s role in her death, Donald Trump dismissed Good as a “professional agitator,” “very, very disrespectful of law enforcement,” and—with a characteristic cruelty—publicly wondered whether her father remained a loyal supporter despite her killing. For his part, her father, Tim Ganger, declined to condemn the administration or Trump himself. Grief, here, was not only personal; it was political, stretched across the fault lines of allegiance to the settler project and the belief and power imbued within it. There were deep psychological and spiritual investments in a settler colonial order that not only killed Indigenous, Black, Brown, and racialized people but also those who stood in solidarity with them.

Those named in the Wokiksuye, who died in ICE detention:

• Geraldo Lunas Campos (January 3, 2026) – Camp East Montana, TX (ruled a homicide due to neck and torso compression).

• Luis Beltrán Yañez-Cruz (January 6, 2026) – Imperial Regional Detention Facility, CA.

• Parady La (Jan 9, 2026) – Federal Detention Center, Philadelphia, PA.

• Heber Sánchez Domínguez (January 14, 2026) – Robert A. Deyton Facility, GA.

• Victor Manuel Díaz (January 14, 2026) – Camp East Montana, TX.

And so I end with this witnessing of the Wokiksuye. It was not only for and about Renee Good but also the people killed that same year by ICE and Border Patrol, and Alex Pretti, who was likewise shot and killed by federal agents while attempting to stop an abduction.

The circle held them all—the named and the unnamed, the mourned and the disappeared, the children taken from their families and the mothers and fathers calling out for them—drawing them into a shared ledger of loss. And even with the diminished sovereignty of Indigenous political worlds and governance in the place called Minnesota, the Wokiksuye was an exercise of spiritual sovereignty and authority to remember, name, and refuse the normalization of such deaths and violence. It also redefined the enduring power of traditions of Indigenous resistance to only endure the physical and psychic intrusions of a settler colonial order but to redefine the meaning of that struggle toward radical and liberatory ends.

Love and solidarity,

Nick