“It is a War Zone”

(Says Gwendolen Cates, Documentarian Filmmaker on Assignment in Minneapolis)

Photo by Gwendolen Cates, Minneapolis, January 2026

Gwendolen Cates is a brilliant independent documentary filmmaker. Her latest film, THE DOCTRINE, journeys with a group of Indigenous youth from Minneapolis to the Vatican to demand the repudiation of the 15^th century papal bulls that authorized conquest and settler colonialism, and codified racism and slavery, known as the Doctrine of Discovery.

Last week, Gwendolen shared her on-the-ground experiences in Minneapolis. After another killing over the weekend of an observer/protester, we were hungry to hear Cates’ carefully curated impressions.

She emphasized that there were community hubs that shelter people indoors in-between their forays into the sub-zero temperatures to protect and accompany neighbors. Progressive churches are also serving as hubs for organizing and mutual aid. Minneapolis residents and supporters were patrolling, protecting, supporting around the clock. They spent time outside Whipple, the federal building that is the epicenter of federal operations where ICE has hidden its black site, a term used to connote CIA clandestine torture chambers around the world. She noted how striking it is that this site is next to Fort Snelling. Just below the fort, a notorious concentration camp was filled with the Dakota survivors of a genocide against them during the winter of 1862-1863. Minnesota is Dakota territory. The Dakota were hunted down, rounded up, starved, murdered, and those who survived, forcibly removed from their ancestral land. “Just as the Palestinians are being starved, murdered, and removed in Gaza and the West Bank now,” Gwendolen noted.

Nearly five years after Minnesota became a state in 1858, Congress passed the Dakota Expulsion Act declaring that treaties formerly signed were no longer valid and that it was now illegal for Dakota to live in Minnesota. From 1850-1860, white settlers in Minnesota grew from 6,000 to 172,000. The law is still on the books.

The largest mass hanging in the u.s. December 26, 1862

On December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution by hanging of 38 captured Dakota resisters, who had been protecting their communities and families. This remains the largest single mass execution in u.s. history. Two more hangings occurred when those resisters, both Chiefs, were captured. Lincoln’s order came in response to a six-week war, called Little Crow’s War when, facing displacement, internment, and starvation, the Dakota rebelled.

Every year in late December, since 2005, the Dakota men are memorialized and honored with the Dakota 38+2 Wokiksuye (Memorial) Ride to heal these ancestral wounds and promote reconciliation. The two-week horseback ride concludes with a ceremony in Mankato on the anniversary of the mass hanging.

In the West Bank, since the Palestinian resistance in October 2023, illegal settlement outposts have grown 300% compared to the previous two years.

Gwendolen talked about how the people of Minneapolis teem with life, with mutual aid, with resistance. She described one snapshot from their visit that brought me to tears: she was in a group of about a dozen people who had finished patrolling on foot and went to a Somali restaurant one night. After they settled at a large table, the owner and staff brought out platters of food and talked about what was happening on and off the streets in his city and in his community. Her body shifted she leaned into the story, describing how incredible the food was, and how the Somali owner stood talking to them. When they went up to the register to pay the bill, the owner said, “The bill has been paid.” It was at that moment that I broke into tears. The attack on the Somalis, on the Dakotans, on the Palestinians, and those in solidarity all rhyme with the beat of the rage and grief of the world.

“This was Standing Rock on steroids,” Gwendolen said, referring to the resistance she had documented by the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline from 2016 to 2017; the Indigenous forces had called together to defend against the 1170-mile pipeline in North Dakota threatening access to water and ancestral holy burial grounds. The resistance was massive, called the biggest of Indigenous warriors in a century. And the State and Federal response was vicious. “We’re protecting water, they’re protecting oil… I was almost shot in the face by a bean bag round,” said Tara Houska on Democracy Now at the time. Houska described the all-out war against water protectors, “peaceful until the police began their violent attack. Police officers were smiling as they aimed their rifles on us.”

People in Minneapolis and nationwide are protesting Hilton Hotels who are housing ICE officers, making noise with pots and pans, whistles and “no sleep for ICE” chants outside ICE officers’ rooms in the middle of the night. Enterprise rental is renting them cars so people are blocking entrances to the car rentals by driving very slowly.

On July 6, 2016, Philandro Castile, a 32 year old Black man who worked in a school cafeteria was shot and killed by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota with his girlfriend and her daughter in the car. Just five miles away, on May 31, 2021, George Floyd was murdered. The world watched the replay millions of time as Floyd called out “I can’t breathe,” with Derek Chauvin kneeling into his chest. We were hunkered down in Covid shutdown but busted out yelling “Black Lives Matter!” Floyd’s four-year-old daughter said at the time, “My daddy changed the world.” Which he did.

Less than one mile away, on January 7, 2026, an ICE officer targeted 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good for assassination. A white queer mother, poet, she was acting as a legal observer when she was killed. And less than two miles away from there, on January 24, 2026, ICE targeted Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Veteran’s Administration as he aided a woman who had been pushed to the ground. All of these murders in a five-mile radius. All three locations within a two mile radius of South Minneapolis. Land is a vortex. It remembers. It demands reparations.

While Black people have never stopped knowing fascism in America, these two murders of white allies and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s immediate knowledge of their deaths implies something bigger. On March 25, 1965, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white civil rights activist from Detroit with five children was killed while shuttling a young Black activist, Leroy Moton back to Selma after the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Four Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up alongside her car and shot her in the head. She died instantly; Moton survived by playing dead.

White allies expose the lie that the occupied and pursued are people, not animals. Resisters who are white don’t buy into the terror of the Great Replacement Theory: the fear of the u.s. being majority-minority by 2044 totally challenges the white supremacy myth of evolution. Like today, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI immediately moved to smear Liuzzo as a bad mother, a communist.

A South Asian man from London in Minneapolis said on social media, “I never saw anything like it. Old white ladies putting themselves in the line of fire for people with dark skin. I never saw that where I’m from.”

We are in a vortex of struggle to answer to those ancestors’ calls from Fort Snelling, Minnesota; Selma, Alabama; Kuan Younis, Palestine. We’re coming, each in our own way and massively, collectively.

You need to see this movie!

Please seriously consider supporting distribution of THE DOCTRINE by Venmo @GwendolenCates (Gwendolen Cates)!