Indigenous woman leads Great Plains Action Society from Iowa City

As a child, Sikowis Nobiss’ great uncle took her on a few horseback rides through prairie on the George Gordon First Nation reservation in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Compared with the built environment in Winnipeg, Canada — where she was born and raised — the natural landscape abundant with life felt foreign to her. Flowers and grass sprouted plentifully from the earth; bugs buzzed from plant to plant.

“At first, it was something that bothered me,” Nobiss said. “But as I got older, I started to appreciate how diverse and beautiful a prairie can be that isn't being sprayed with pesticide.”

“After moving to Iowa,” she continued, “that memory’s always in my head because I think about what we don't have here and what the prairie can be.”

Nobiss, who also goes by her government name, Christine, is a citizen of George Gordon First Nation. She is Nêhiyaw — commonly known as Plains Cree people — and also Saulteaux. The tribes historically occupied the prairies and woodlands of the Touchwood Hills before being forced onto smaller reservations.

Now located in Iowa City, Nobiss calls Iowa the most biologically colonized state in the country: “Iowa is Big-Ag’s sacrifice zone,” she wrote in a 2018 article, attributing the state’s disproportionate contribution to the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone to its oppression of Indigenous land management.

The environmental degradation in Iowa spurred her to found Great Plains Action Society — an Indigenous-led nonprofit uplifting Native American practices and communities.

“I feel like I was just born to do this work,” she said.

From Canada to Iowa

Nobiss was born in Winnipeg’s North End — about a six-hour drive from the reservation — in what her father called “the war zone.”

The area is known as one of the most socially deprived parts of the city and has a high Indigenous population, Nobiss said. Winnipeg in general has one of the highest homicide rates of Indigenous people in Canada as of 2021 data.

Her parents moved her just outside of the North End. But she still spent time in the area where other family members still lived, where drug dealers, gang members and prostitutes walked the streets.

“There have been people that had been murdered in the back alley of my grandparents’ house,” Nobiss said. “I feel really lucky to not have experienced the violence that was happening around me, and even what was being inflicted upon my family members.”

Her first full-time job was with the New Brunswick Aboriginal Peoples Council, where she eventually became the assistant fisheries coordinator. She traveled around the state to support Indigenous nations during Canada’s Burnt Church Crisis, when Indigenous people clashed with non-Natives about fishing rights from 1999 to 2002.

It was her first exposure to organizing around Indigenous social and environmental justice issues.

Both her grandparents had attended residential schools — a system between the Canadian government and Christian churches that forced Indigenous youth to assimilate to mainstream society. They emerged “brainwashed,” Nobiss said, their Indigenous roots squeezed out of them.

They still told her stories and taught her how to be culturally appropriate, Nobiss said. But she grew up not knowing much about specific cultural traditions like beading or dancing.

“On my own, I started finding my culture,” Nobiss said about her work during the Burnt Church Crisis. “I guess you could say I got kind of radicalized.”

She went on to receive a master’s degree in religious studies at the University of Iowa. She specialized in Native American religions and culture, with a graduate minor in Native studies.

“My true calling was to learn more about my own people and just work in that realm,” she said. “I had been already been involved with organizing and standing up for us. Why wouldn't I continue on that route?”

Great Plains Action Society begins

Nobiss stayed in Iowa City after graduation — and she grew lonely as one of the few Natives there.

Even more so, she had trouble finding Indigenous people speaking up about the environment and climate in Iowa as a whole. She tried creating a group as early as 2010, but she couldn’t get enough traction. It wasn’t until the Dakota Access Pipeline protests that her efforts started to gain momentum.

The Dakota Access Pipeline was approved in 2016 to pass through the Dakotas, Iowa and Illinois. Opponents said the project would violate a treaty with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and threatened its culture. The tribe organized protests, some of which Nobiss attended — and that’s when everything changed for her efforts in Iowa.

“All of a sudden, more Native people wanted to get involved,” she said. “From what I found is it takes some type of event in order for things to happen … And so, people were rising up, and it felt really good to be a part of that.”

After that, Nobiss helped support the Mississippi Stand Solidarity Network and co-founded Little Creek Camp — two groups that continued the mission of fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

From those efforts, Great Plains Action Society emerged. Fellow Indigenous people like Trisha Cax-Sep-Gu-Wiga Etringer, the project director for the Sioux City tri-state area, and more joined over the years. Eventually, the team reached today’s more than 14 collaborators — supporting a network that spreads across the state and the nation.

Supporting Indigenous communities

Great Plains Action Society stretches its work across Iowa and Eastern Nebraska and covers three initiatives: defending colonized land, protecting sacred Native culture and promoting proper representation of Native communities.

Much of its work centered in Sioux City, where the largest Indigenous population in Iowa is concentrated. That population makes up around 63 percent of the homeless people in the area, Nobiss said, plagued with poverty and substance abuse.

Great Plains Action Society is also the only group led by people of color that is doing on-the-ground work against pipeline proposals in Iowa, she said. The projects would span large swaths of land that historically belonged to Indigenous people.

“Black and brown communities that are going to be affected really aren't getting a voice in this fight because 98 percent of agricultural land in this country is owned by white people,” she said. “It almost feels like if you don't own land, then you don't have a voice, which is really, really racist.”

Additionally, the organization helps improve Indigenous representation by targeting stereotypes, tokenization and whitewashing. For example, Great Plains Action Society has worked to abolish racist school mascots in Iowa — as much as 27 of which still remain, Nobiss said.

The nonprofit also works to correct the narratives surrounding American holidays. It is hosting its seventh annual Truthsgiving this November at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City, a long-term project working to correct the common narrative behind Thanksgiving and recognize the associated history of genocide and colonization.

Last month, Great Plains Action Society received a $6,000 racial equity and social justice grant from the Iowa City Council for this year’s Truthsgiving.

In her nonprofit work and beyond, Nobiss stresses that the public needs to understand that Indigenous people exist in Iowa and deserve recognition.

“If people really want to do more for Indigenous peoples, I think they should care for the land. I think they should start understanding that this is stolen land, no matter how you look at it,” she said. “If you are gaining generational wealth from land that was stolen centuries ago … well, you need to understand where that came from, and the price that Indigenous people paid for that.”

Support for Great Plains Action Society

If you’d like to donate to Great Plains Action Society, you can do so at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/gpas.

Brittney J. Miller is the Energy & Environment Reporter for The Gazette and a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: (319) 398-8370; brittney.miller@thegazette.com