Community
Strength in Numbers The Great Plains Action Society works to preserve Native stories, lands and lives while seeking justice.
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ikowis Nobiss has two kids at home, both in elementary school. She has a full-time job and volunteers on Iowa City’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Ugh, trying to deal with COVID and just keep the house clean? That’s my day today,” she said. Nobiss is the founder of Great Plains Action Society (GPAS), a nonprofit that helps organize and rebuild Indigenous communities throughout the Midwest. She came to Iowa to attend the University of Iowa around 2006, and she soon saw that there wasn’t much support for the nearly 15,000 Native people that currently live in the state. “There’s nothing for Natives here in Iowa City, you know. It’s just very bereft of culture for Natives. There’s very few of us,” she said. Tama County, home to the Meskwaki Settlement, has the highest percentage of Native Americans relative to the total population at 8.3 percent, or around 1,400 people, according to the recent census numbers. There are also high numbers of Native people in Sioux City and Des Moines. While there are a few Native organizations in the state, including the Native American Coalition of the Quad Cities, Nobiss felt that there were still unmet needs throughout the Great Plains region, which spans from the Canadian border in Montana and North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. “We do stuff here in Iowa that nobody else does, and I’m not saying that because I want to come off as, you know, necessarily unique,” she said. “Literally like nobody does this stuff here, and it blows my mind. I would love to see more people doing it, and we hope that through the work that we do, we can inspire more Natives.” Nobiss began planning the first stages of the Great Plains Action Society around 2015, but it wasn’t until the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that the idea began to resonate. “There was something very sacred about that event. I felt very called to it,” she said. “It elevated the words and actions of Indigenous people so that our ideologies and our ways of doing things were really amplified.” In Iowa, the Dakota Access Pipeline runs through 18 counties, a distance of about 347 miles. That’s about 30 percent of the pipeline’s
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total length of 1,172 miles. The pipeline is still active today. Thousands of people protested the project, and millions of others showed their support. It created a “mini Renaissance” for Native people, Nobiss said, by focusing the world’s eye on their causes, culture and beliefs. “It allowed me to finally get the attention that I was trying to get towards this organization, so
Texas. President Biden canceled the pipeline’s border crossing permit in January. The project’s sponsor, TC Energy, eventually abandoned the project in June. But the Biden administration has taken no action against the Line Three pipeline that runs from Alberta to Minnesota. “Right now the big fight is Line Three in Minnesota, and these are interconnected because
I could get more Natives involved. And here we are.” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and President Joe Biden have halted development of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would stretch from Alberta, Canada, to Illinois, Oklahoma and
the police play a big role in brutalizing the activists,” said writer and comedian Adrianne Chalepah, a member of the Kiowa Tribe and Apache Tribe of Oklahoma. GPAS has a number of campaigns for Native rights, all of which are interconnected, from food
