When these projects happen in America they happen out of sight and out of mind, and that usually falls to indigenous people.” Photograph by Erika Larsen, National Geographic “We know how it feels to have extractive industry projects threatening our communities and our drinking water and our children’s future. “This is a moment in which indigenous people are saying ‘No more, enough is enough,’” she says. Tara Houska, an Anishinabe from Couchiching First Nation, is a tribal attorney in Washington, D.C., and the national campaigns director for the group Honor the Earth. We've learned a new way, and it's teaching us to be human beings again.” “We're sharing work, and we're sharing stories. Their ancestors are indigenous from somewhere, which means they were once caretakers of the Earth.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his Carhartts. We saw a lot of lost people, people who don't realize they're more than Americans.

“Most people who come here never had a role to play in their own lives. We were sitting in a hotel room at the Prairie Knights Casino: the unofficial movement headquarters as temperatures dropped below 0☏. I decided to come here instead, and the spirit took care of the rest,” Abe said. “Back in Denver, I heard singing in the alleyways, whooping in downtown. But around the campfires he found the “real warrior society” he craved. “I was all, ‘I'm gonna go hole up with my dog and not talk to anyone for the rest of my life,’ ” he said. On a long road trip in mid-2016 with his dog, Scout, a shepherd mix, he dropped in on his closest army friend, a Lower Brule Sioux, at Kul Wicasa.

After his service, he said, he moved home to Denver and, missing the close bonds of the military, fell into years of depression. “We're a good collection of misfits here,” said Ken “Abe” Abrahamson, a Coloradan with a ruddy beard and piercing eyes who had ridden into Baghdad in 2003 as a gunner with the 3 rd Infantry Division. They were Ojibwes and Yanktons and Standing Rock Sioux-all in search of a sense of purpose. The youth at Kul Wicasa had come from reservations across the country.

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