Inside an encampment near downtown Minneapolis is a hand-painted sign made from a simple square of cardboard: “Just tents to you. A community to us!”
Residents call the camp “The Wall of Forgotten Natives” — what started out last spring as a few campers with sleeping bags has gradually grown to a tent city, three rows deep, on a quarter-mile-long grassy knoll beneath a soundwall in the heart of the city’s Native American community.
Small dome-tents draped with bright-blue tarps, a pair of tipis and a white canopy over a makeshift kitchen — these, together, represent the collective survival of an estimated 200 mostly Indigenous children, pregnant mothers, elders and others — many the offspring of first-generation urban Indians lured here by government plans more than half a century ago.