At least four people had died within two months. Diseases spread, with upward of 200 people cramming into dozens of tents. Fears rose among activists and the mostly Native American population living there that the city would crack down, which for them would have echoed the country’s dark history of treating indigenous people with force and contempt.
But then, an unlikely solution surfaced.
Red Lake Nation, a tribe about 4 1/2 hours’ drive north, offered to help build temporary shelters on land it had bought two years ago for a permanent housing development in the city.
Other tribes in Minnesota supported Red Lake’s shelter proposal, forming a partnership to help win concessions from local officials and secure emergency relief.
It was a rare show of unity by tribal nations to resolve an urban crisis, Native advocates said. And it represented a potential turning point in the sometimes distant relationship between Native Americans who live in urban areas and those who choose to remain on reservations.
“I think what the tribes in Minnesota are doing is fairly remarkable,” said Janeen Comenote, executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition. “I haven’t seen necessarily that level of intervention from a tribe for an urban crisis.”
The majority of American Indians live in cities, although very little federal funding is directed specifically toward them. Tribal governments do receive federal dollars, but they usually go toward life on the reservation. There is rarely enough to expand resources and services needed in urban areas, where Native Americans often lack basic housing.
Clarista Johnson, 20, lived on the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe reservation. When her grandfather died, she said, she left drug treatment to mourn with her family, but then fell out with her aunt and boyfriend. Both of her parents were incarcerated. She considered her prospects on the reservation to be bleak, so she left for Minneapolis, about two hours south.
“I thought maybe the cities would have more resources, more options,” she said. Instead, she continued her struggles with meth and heroin addiction, and had no place to live.
For the past five months, she had been staying here at the encampment, in the city’s Native American corridor. Orange buckets for disposing used needles were scattered about and mangled tents were pitched beneath a noisy thoroughfare, the scent of burning wood choking the air. An elderly man limped around barefoot, his feet stiff.
As she scooped handfuls of cold chicken fettuccine into her mouth one recent morning, Johnson said she was annoyed because someone had stolen $35 out of her wallet while she was sleeping.
Roughly eight out of 10 American Indians do not live on reservations. The mass migration to cities, experts say, was prompted by the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, when the federal government, attempting to assimilate Native people, offered them incentives to leave their reservations. But assurances of opportunity gave way to discrimination, isolation, dead-end jobs and poor living conditions that continue today.
In 2015, Native people accounted for 8 percent of Minnesota’s homeless adult population even though they were just 1 percent of the overall population, the largest disparity of any group in the state, according to a survey by Wilder Research, a nonprofit that carries out human services research.
In September, after negotiations between Native-led nonprofits and the city failed to yield an agreement on a site for temporary shelters to address the homeless encampment, Sam Strong, the Red Lake Nation secretary, offered the tribe’s property, a solution that was quickly accepted.
Red Lake purchased the land where the temporary shelters are two years ago after it surveyed its members in the city about their needs and found that housing was at the top of the list, Strong said.
The parcel of land is just south of downtown. The tribe plans to build a complex with 110 units of affordable housing, and is expected to break ground next summer. It will also offer social services and cultural events, such as drum circles, Strong said.
Red Lake Nation leaders said they believed that building property on the land not only would provide much-needed housing, but also generate new revenue streams that the tribe can then reinvest.
“It’s creating sustainable revenue and assets for the tribe to serve our own people,” said Strong, 35, who is a Cornell-educated urban planner. “It’s really the best of both worlds.”
Jacob Frey, a Democrat in his first year as Minneapolis’ mayor, said that traditionally, “many have seen homeless communities around the country as invisible.”
They want to take a different approach, he said.
But the overtures from Red Lake and other tribes were not greeted with open arms right away by the local nonprofit groups that have been focused on providing services for urban Native Americans.
Although tribes provide some services in urban communities, these Native-led nonprofits that are unaffiliated with particular nations had forged deep connections with the encampment dwellers. They used those relationships to make sure the homeless got the services they needed and to help maintain order in the camp.
These groups sometimes felt sidelined during negotiations in Minneapolis. On several occasions, they urged city officials to make sure they, and not just the tribal leaders or representatives from various far-flung reservations, were involved in important discussions.
“They thought if they had a braid in the room, they were covered,” said Robert Lilligren, a Native American leader and former city councilman.
The controversy evoked a long-standing emotional divide in which American Indians in cities sometimes feel abandoned by those on reservations, and vice versa.
Enrolled tribal members, regardless of where they live, generally get access to per capita payments that their tribes pay out, and can vote in tribal elections. But Margarita Ortega, who is Red Lake Chippewa and volunteers with Natives Against Heroin, a grass-roots group, said it seemed like the only time tribes contacted members living in urban areas was to give them their per capita payments and collect votes.
“Other than that, as an urban Native you don’t have any relationship with your tribe,” she said. “We’ve been asking for their involvement for decades.”
Johnson moved into the new temporary shelter late last week, and she now sleeps in one of its heated dome-like tents. She can shower in trailers and hang out in a community room. She can come and go as she pleases 24 hours a day and not be turned away, even if she is high — a policy that Native leaders pushed for to ensure a welcoming environment.
But Maggie Thunder Hawk, 56, worried that officials would eventually introduce onerous restrictions. She said that the facility “looks and feels like jail.” She would give it a try, she said, but if she did not like it, “I’m going right back outside.”
While the encampment spurred people to address the long-standing crisis of Native urban homelessness, local activists said it was important to keep the support coming.
When Red Lake breaks ground on its housing complex next summer, the temporary shelters will have to come down, and many former encampment dwellers, including Johnson, might find themselves back on the streets.
“Our relatives are out in these streets, dying and struggling,” and they are not getting the help and funding that others are, said Lance La Mont, 33, Ortega’s companion. “We know as a movement, as soon as you shut up, and the moment you be quiet about an issue, is the moment that they’ll keep mistreating you.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.