Denver’s first Native American affordable housing project aims to make amends for U.S. policy – By Jennifer Brown (Colorado Sun) / April 23, 2023
The 187-unit apartment building with a symbolic circular design will include an Indian Health Services clinic and cultural programming in Denver
Carla Respects Nothing left the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota right after high school, wondering what other life was beyond the rolling prairie.
She had relatives in Denver, so she came to Colorado’s largest city in 1989 and enrolled in community college. She didn’t realize then how much it would matter, but this is what Respects Nothing left behind: her ancestors’ Lakota language, the traditions of the Oglala Sioux, her sense of belonging.
She has tried for 30 years to get it back, to somehow gather up a Native American community that’s been scattered into pieces across the city. In her hardest times, when alcohol addiction led to losing her job and her housing and she ended up in a homeless shelter, Respects Nothing “just gave up.”
But she has been sober nine years now, with help from White Bison, a sort of Native American version of Alcoholics Anonymous where she learned to get back on the “Red Road,” the spiritual path to a “good life, with a clear heart and mind,” she said. Respects Nothing looked for connection in “talking circles” organized by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. And while working as a peer navigator for the Denver Public Library, she invited Native Americans who were homeless to gather for “wiping of the tears” ceremonies for loved ones who had died. She shopped for groceries and let them cook the traditional foods of their tribes — buffalo and beef kidney, soup and wasna, a crumble made with cornmeal and animal fat or beef and chokecherries.
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