Prophetstown and The Long American Tradition of Sanctuary Cities and Community Defense Networks

Rachel Ida Buff

Posted January 30, 2026

In the spirit of Tecumseh — continuing the fight against oppression.

IN THE WAKE of the murders of community defenders Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, commentators have scrambled to understand these acts of violence. Predictably, administration officials work to equate community defense with domestic terrorism,” alleging against documented video evidence that Pretti and Good menaced the agents who murdered them.

Many others have defended participation in efforts to safeguard neighborhoods in face of the organized federal onslaught against Minneapolis’ immigrant communities. Both sides often neglect the history of community defense and sanctuary formations as long term resistance to colonization and repression in the United States.

During the current onslaught against urban immigrant communities in sanctuary cities like Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis, rapid response and migra watch networks have helped reduce the number of people taken through neighborhood watches and widespread “know your rights” education. These networks also train volunteers to observe the activities of federal agents on the ground and to warn and support impacted communities.

These entirely legal activities, necessary in context of the current administration’s numerous violations of the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike, stand on the backs of organizing that has been taking place on this continent since at least the 17th century.

Originating in the grassroots practices of the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement (AIM), legal observing musters residents to monitor law enforcement.

After too many Indigenous residents of Minneapolis found themselves freezing in the trunks of police cars, AIM began following police there in 1968. Similarly, the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966, responded to police brutality by patrolling African American communities and founding legal clinics as a part of their broad community defense efforts.

In context of the current assault by ICE, legal observing has become a key aspect of community defense and sanctuary organizing. In recent weeks, the AIM Patrol has again begun walking Twin Cities neighborhoods.

Oneida organizer and historian Heather Bruegl explained: “we see that now happening again [because] people’s rights are being violated. We see Indigenous folks, tribal members being detained. It’s important that groups like AIM and other groups are coming out again, working in community and making sure that we’re protecting each other.”

As forms of resistance to militarized repression, these efforts have deep historical precedents. Although the very ideas of sanctuary and community defense have become controversial in an era of political rhetoric marked by extreme xenophobia and the demonization of collective action, these practices predate the founding of the United States as a nation and have been foundational to collective survival throughout the history of colonization and migration in the Americas. Sanctuary practices have been a central, if often obscured, part of the history of the Americas.

Soon after European ships brought enslaved Africans to labor in the Americas, maroon communities sprang up in remote and hard-to-access places like Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp and the Florida Everglades. These communities harbored Africans, Europeans and Indigenous people fleeing the harsh regimes of slavery and settler colonialism imposed upon them.

In Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons, historian Sylviane Diof describes maroon communities as spaces of “movement, independence, and reinvention where new types of lives were created and evolved; where networks were built and solidified, and where solidarity expressed itself in concrete ways that rendered the maroons’ alternative way of life possible.”

Multiracial maroon communities and the multi-tribal Indigenous encampments that arose along the frontiers of colonization share many aspects of contemporary community defense practices. Recognizing these historical parallels recasts our collective understanding of the longevity and elasticity of sanctuary practices and sheds light on why the current regime seeks to demonize them.

In Prophetstown, Indiana, for example a state park founded in 2004 commemorates the multi-national Indigenous encampment created by Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa in the early 1800s. Although Indiana Territories governor and later president William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison defeated the intertribal gathering and burnt Prophetstown to the ground, the place stands as a tribute to the power of collective organizing against deportation.

The Treaty of Paris concluded the American Revolution, drawing the boundaries of the new nation east of the Appalachian Mountains. But in the decades after the revolution, pioneers poured over the mountains into Indigenous homelands, making the Ohio River Valley a new frontier of settlement. The farms these settlers claimed and fenced interrupted longstanding indigenous practices of sharing the land.

To the newly minted United States, the Ohio Valley was necessary for national security against Indigenous, English, French, and Spanish incursions. For Indigenous people, EuroAmerican settlement spelled disaster.

Hoping to hold the line against U.S. expansion, Indigenous people from around the country joined the Prophetstown encampment. The spaces of refuge they created incorporated daily life, spiritual practice, and political education. From helping one and other gather food and care for children to constructing dwellings and setting watches, these sanctuary spaces were sites of collective, mutual aid.

Known in his later years as The Great Shawnee Prophet or “the Open Door,” Tenskwatawa came into his spiritual leadership after a dramatic recovery from years of alcoholism. After surviving a drunken fall into a fire, he began preaching that rejecting non-native imports like guns and alcohol would allow Indigenous people to return to their traditional ways, protect them from further displacement, and restore their lands.

His prophecies corresponded with those of other Indigenous holy figures at the frontiers of settlement, from the pre-Revolutionary War teachings of Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, to the late 19th century revelations of Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka.

Each of these prophecies contained spiritual and political aspects, each occasioned the construction of a temporary sanctuary city built by a multinational array of Indigenous followers, many of them displaced from their homes and bent on fighting further deportation.

A Sanctuary City

People from a dozen tribes in the Midwest travelled to Tenskwatawa’s encampment at Greenville, Ohio, in 1805. Like the contemporary migrant caravans made up of diverse groups of people walking together through Central America in search of safe harbor further north, many of these travelers had already seen war and environmental destruction in their homelands.

In the sanctuary city they created together, people stood watch against hostile forces, shared supplies and swapped stories, creating bonds that sustained them in their temporary encampment and beyond.

Though people travel to sanctuary spaces motivated by their fervent hopes for collective survival, their efforts at securing safe harbor have been widely demonized. Fear of the power of the Ghost Dance propelled the U.S. Army’s 1890 massacre of close to 300 Lakota encamped at Wounded Knee. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently defended the medals of honor awarded to soldiers who murdered elders, women and children at Wounded Knee.)

Just as fear of Indigenous insurrection precipitated a massacre of Ghost Dance adherents, notions of contemporary migrant caravans as hordes of rogues bent on the destruction of the United States animate the contemporary war on migrants and asylum seekers as well as the vilification of sanctuary practices.

“Border czar” Tom Homan consistently refers to sanctuary cities as “sanctuaries for criminals,” demeaning the august history of these spaces.

While his brother gathered people to build their sanctuary city, Tecumseh traveled the Midwest and south, speaking to far-flung indigenous nations about the necessity of Indian people standing together in defense of their lands. He explained: “These lands are ours, and no one has the right to remove us. The Great Spirit above has appointed this place for us to light our fires.”

His fiery speeches brought many more Indian people to commit to collaborating with the Indigenous alliance he envisioned, with many moving to join the new sanctuary community in Ohio.

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa drew on Indigenous prophetic traditions to mobilize broad resistance to dispossession. Similarly, abolitionist communities organized in Black churches in cities like Philadelphia and Milwaukee drew on Christian scripture to infuse their defense of African Americans against the depredations of slave catchers enabled by fugitive slave laws during the long, violent prelude to the Civil War.

Together, they harbored those targeted by police and slave catchers, collectively resisting attempts to enslave free Black people.

Liberation Theology Inspiration

In the 1980s, many religious institutions were inspired by the Latin American liberation theology to open their doors to asylum seekers from Central America, many of them Indigenous.

These leaders recognized the spiritual imperative to shelter and organize the dispossessed, taking slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero’s injunction about accompaniment seriously: “What the National Guard is likely to do is unjust. If they attack, you should be there next to the campesinos. Accompany them. Take the same risks they do.”

Immigrants fleeing the ravages of U.S.-backed wars in Central America educated organizers in the United States about the liberation theology. As a result, accompaniment became one of the key practices of the 1980s and the New Sanctuary Movement as it resurged in the early 2000s, along with heightened campaigns against undocumented immigrants by democratic and republican politicians alike.

As food ran out in Ohio and some local Indigenous leaders signed treaties ceding their lands to the U.S. government, Potawatomi shaman Main Poc encouraged Tenskwatawa to move the encampment west, into Potawatomi country. In 1808 Prophetstown, near contemporary Lafayette, Indiana, became the center for Indigenous spiritual revival and political resistance in the Ohio River Valley.

Indigenous people from around the Midwest and farther caravanned to the encampment, eventually numbering over three thousand there. In his article, “Prophetstown on the Wabash: The Native Spiritual Defense of the Old Northwest,” historian Timothy Willig explains that local Indigenous people had long viewed the area, at the confluence of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers near Prophetstown as a powerful spiritual site.

Strategically, these rivers provided access to the Illinois and the Great Lakes regions. And they provided drinking water, along with, perhaps, a sense of shelter and comfort for the thousands drawn to the encampment.

In words that echo many reports about maroon communities in the U.S. south, William Henry Harrison observed: “It is immediately at the center of that fine country which he [Tecumseh] wishes to prevent us from settling — and above all, he has immediately in his rear a country that has been but little explored…into which our cavalry could not penetrate, and our infantry, only by slow, laborious effort.”

Sanctuary spaces like Prophetstown come into being at moments of grave peril, offering refuge and community care against militarized state actions that displace people, threaten their homes, and force difficult decisions about flight and relocation.

Prophetstown was one of many sanctuary cities built throughout American history to shelter people gathered in the hopes of defending their homelands and ways of life. There are many others, from early maroon communities, through the many Indigenous spaces created out of solidarity and resistance, to the northern cities that flouted runaway slave laws and sheltered African Americans in the long prelude to the Civil War.

In the present period, migra watches and deportation defense networks bolster sanctuary policies and create them where they are not in force. The pro-Palestine encampments on universities around the world were temporary sanctuary cities, built out of multiracial and interfaith solidarity, hosting conversations forbidden elsewhere.

Today’s war against sanctuary cities takes place at a time of radical historical revisionism when state forces attempt to consign much of our collective history to oblivion. As it attempts to lay waste to sanctuary spaces, the current regime works to eradicate even their memory.

Crusading for the wellbeing of a tiny percentage of wealthy people over the common good, this regime dreads the power and inevitability of collective resistance.

But the spiritual and political power of sanctuary spaces endures. The message of Prophetstown survived the burning of the encampment by Harrison as well as subsequent forced relocations of many Indigenous people from the Ohio Valley to “Indian Country” in Oklahoma.

Despite ongoing efforts to discredit community defense networks and sanctuary cities, they continue to represent powerful, democratic forces that resist and survive authoritarian brutality.

Defending their communities, the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul model a time-honored American tradition. History will remember their courage.

Go to article on the ATC website.