MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) – The president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe is calling for the immediate release of tribal members who were detained by ICE and remain in custody at the Whipple Federal Building.

 I’m on the plane to Minneapolis, returning Sunday night. The plan is to get there by evening and tomorrow join the big protest led by Native Americans outside the Whipple prison that’s part of the Fort Snelling compound, now used as a holding cell for immigrants as well as three Native American members.

Back in New England, the calls seem endless; Do a bystander training; do an ICE-tracking training; help plan the No Kings rallies in March. Come to this committee meeting next week, that task force convocation. The people of Minneapolis have inspired so many of us across the country not to take the current government insanity lying down.

No thanks to the fancy universities, rich law firms and the uber-rich corporations, bowing down to the despot and his minions so low their collective butts brush the sky—instead, let’s thank the people of the Twin Cities, the neighbors who rush out to alert their fellows about ICE agents, filming and videoing everything, putting themselves on the line. Let’s thank Renee Goode and Alex Pretty. They show us a way to be proud of this country, right?

Nevertheless, when the call came, I thought of limited energy and resources. I remembered my age. It’s just one weekend, a voice said. But it’ll also mean the day before and the day after, at the very least, another voice said. You don’t bounce back as quickly as you used to.

That night I studied up on Fort Snelling, the large compound in St. Paul. At the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, it has been the site of numerous treaties with the Dakota Nation, signed and then broken. The ownership of the land itself has been contested for over 200 years.

Enslaved black men and women appeared at Fort Snelling from the 1820s on. In fact, the Fort surgeon brought Dred Scott, an enslaved black man, into the Fort—yes, the same Dred Scott who sued for freedom. In one of this country’s most ignoble decision, our Supreme Court ruled that not only must Scott continue to be enslaved, but that our highly trumpeted constitutional rights did not apply to any black person, slave or free. That fueled the anger of the abolitionists, a big ingredient in our Civil War three years later.

Warning to Justice John Roberts: Do you really want the Court over which you preside, known as the Roberts Court, to be mentioned in the same breath as Roger Taney’s Court of 1857?

In the middle of the Civil War, the Dakota nation, reeling from starvation, freezing winter, and treaty violations, fought the regiments at Fort Snelling. After the Battle of Wood Lake, the army wished to execute some 310 Dakota members for their participation. Abraham Lincoln approved the hanging of 38, the biggest mass execution of American Indians in our history.

Fort Snelling then became the holding area for thousands of Native Americans, mostly women and children, who were thrown off their land and sent down to reservations west and south. Thousands died from exposure, disease, and starvation.

I read all this Monday night. The next morning, before going into the local hospital for some routine procedures, I booked a flight for Minneapolis.

Bernie often talked of the concept of Makom, the Hebrew word for Place. In fact, in Judaism, Makom is one of the names of God. When we first went to Auschwitz-Birkenau in late 1994, he recognized that the immense death camp was a Makom with tremendous energy. Yes, the very site visited by millions who go in, shake their heads, leave as soon as possible and head towards the nearest bar, that place is Makom, the name of God. He wanted us to gather there and stay, not leave, for 5 days.

We’ve had over 30 retreats in those death camps, and many many have experienced what he recognized that first time, that the most horrific places in human history are also places of recognition and responsibility, that when you stay and look at the abyss you may see your own face there. You experience yourself as everything: perpetrator, victim, bystander. The place becomes very, very close, not far away or historic. You might learn to embrace your own humanity.

These are places of transformation.

Monday night I thought to myself that Fort Snelling may be such a place, too, a confluence not just of two rivers but also of karmic streams that continue to inundate this land. Now, the Whipple Federal Building, part of the Fort, is being used to detain immigrants in terrible conditions as well as tribal members who don’t fall under federal US jurisdiction.

Who else will be held there after this? Who’s next to be persecuted? And who else will marshal the courage to look face to face at what is happening to our country?