Denver's first Native American affordable housing project aims to make amends for U.S. policy

This article was originally published in The Colorado Sun. The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported news outlet dedicated to covering the people, places and policies in Colorado.Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon.

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.”

https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/denver-s-first-native-american-affordable-housing-project-aims-to-make-amends-for-u-s-policy