NATIVE PEOPEL ARE STILL HERE: Indigenous communities in the Midwest are not only surviving--they're often thriving.

• Author: Lahm, Sarah

Beside a snowy, ribbon-like highway in Western Minnesota, a small pack of horseback riders moves together through the biting cold of late December, bracing against a blast of arctic air.

They are headed to Mankato, a small city in Southeastern Minnesota, where the largest mass execution in U.S. history occurred in 1862. That year, President Abraham Lincoln signed off on the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Two more Dakota chiefs were kidnapped and tried in 1864, and hanged the following year.

Every year since 2008, descendants of the forty executed Dakota men have made the trek on horseback from South Dakota, where their surviving ancestors were exiled by the U.S. government. Many of their ancestors died in Minnesota, at a concentration camp at Fort Snelling, before they could be forced to march, in the middle of winter, to a reservation in South Dakota.

Minneapolis-based photographer Ben Hovland and Minnesota Public Radio reporter Hannah Yang accompanied the group on its latest 330-mile journey across the frozen fields of South Dakota and Minnesota, capturing the spirit of survival and healing that seems as present as the snow and ice.

Hovland's pictures are striking, painting the colorful riders against a bright blue December sky and capturing pre-ride scenes of a community joining together.

In one photo, the low winter sun hangs just above the curve of the neck of a horse in mid-gallop. In another, members of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe join in a circle around a large drum to send the riders on their journey with a ceremony that includes an offering of tobacco.

The future of this memorial ride is uncertain, Yang notes, as the elders who have been leading it have indicated that 2022 was their last year at the helm, although many expressed hope that younger people would keep it going.

For those who have participated, the experience has been transformative. Yang interviewed LeAnne RedOwl, forty-one, whose ancestor was among those hanged in Mankato. "We're here to show them that we're still here," she told Yang. "We're still making noise. We're not going anywhere, and we're proud of who we are."

It would be wrong to extrapolate too much here, although it is tempting to apply RedOwl's words of determination and perseverance to other--or perhaps all--Native people living in the Midwest. The rates of suicide, addiction, and homelessness continue to disproportionately affect Native...