(Arapahoe, WY) – Sunday morning was clear and still on the Wind River Reservation, and by mid-morning a crowd had gathered outside the St. Stephens Post Office, near St. Stephens Mission, to walk roughly a mile to the Foundations For Nations Ministry. Some rode, some carried flags, while others drove. Waiting for them at the end of the road, on private property next to the church, were another 20 to 30 people who had already staked out near the ditch off the road.
It was the seventh consecutive Sunday of protest since Pastor Sarah Lucas, from the pulpit at Foundations For Nations on July 5, told her congregation that the Native Americans’ sacred grandfather pipe could not hear their prayers and urged Native people to turn away from their traditional ways. This Sunday’s march was different in two respects. Organizers had brought in leadership from the American Indian Movement’s Montana chapter. And, according to organizer Nicole Wagon, the church had moved its service to Saturday.
“They knew we were coming,” Wagon said. “We’re taking a stand and fighting back.”
Before the walk began, Big Wind Carpenter stood in the post office lot and explained why people keep showing up to Sunday protests.
“It is imperative that, as tribal people, we stand up for our rights,” Carpenter said. “We have religious freedom, and the words that were said over a month ago, personally, to me, feels like a continuation of assimilation and colonization.”
Carpenter, a Northern Arapaho activist raised on the Wind River Reservation, pointed to a date that comes up constantly in conversations about this controversy – 1978, the year the American Indian Religious Freedom Act made it lawful again for Native people to practice their ceremonies openly.
“It was illegal for us to practice our ways until 78, and now we’re here in 2026, and we still hear the same rhetoric, that it’s demonic, that those values are not aligned with Christianity,” Carpenter said. “And there are a large majority of tribal people who would consider themselves both traditional and Christian.”
That distinction matters to Carpenter, who said the protests have been widely misread as an attack on Christianity itself.
“This isn’t against any particular religion,” they said. “And I think that that’s where a lot of the framing has gone.”
What changed, Carpenter said, was not the sermon, but what came after it. At the first large protest in July, more than 100 people gathered outside the church with a single request.
“All we wanted was a public apology,” Carpenter said. “And instead, she doubled down.”
Carpenter also pushed back on the constitutional framing the church has used since protests started. Lucas has said her statements are protected speech.
“One thing that people misconstrue is that they have constitutional rights within the boundaries of the reservation, and they don’t actually,” Carpenter said, describing those protections as flowing from the Indian Civil Rights Act rather than the Constitution itself, and noting that the Northern Arapaho are not an Indian Reorganization Act tribe and have no tribal constitution of that kind.
“We’re not saying that nobody can own land out here. We’re not saying that Christians can’t be out here,” Carpenter said. “But there has to be mutual respect. When you’re on somebody’s territory, you have to come and understand that some things are untouchable.”
The harm Carpenter described wasn’t only in what Lucas said about the pipe, but in the fact that she talked, in front of a camera, about things the tribe tends not to discuss outside of ceremony.
“Arapaho people were actually very private about our ceremonies and our sacred items, and we don’t talk about them,” they said. “That’s how we protected them for so long. For her to get up there and then to showcase that for her followers and her funders was very disrespectful.”
The result, Carpenter said, has been a month of reporters and strangers asking questions about things the tribe usually doesn’t discuss with outsiders.
“We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg here,” they said.
Lance Fourstar has been showing up to things like this since he was a kid. His first protest was over Arizona’s refusal to recognize the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Now he is co-director of AIM’s Montana chapter, and he made the drive down from Wolf Point, in the far northeast corner of that state, to be at St. Stephens on Sunday.
Asked for his reaction to the July 5 sermon, Fourstar did not describe surprise. “It’s nothing new,” he said. “I mean, we’ve been dealing with it for quite a while.”
He traced the through line the same way Carpenter did, back through the boarding school era and the federal prohibitions on ceremony, and forward to the wave of federal Indian law that followed AIM’s actions at Alcatraz, at Wounded Knee, and in the Northwest fishing rights fights.
“When I was born in 1976, we could not,” Fourstar said. By 1978, he said, tribes could hold medicine lodge and pipe ceremonies without fear of the government.
“So this is a step backwards,” he said, “by having Sarah Lucas on the Wind River Reservation standing up there with the condemnation of our ceremonies.”
Fourstar’s other objection is procedural, and it comes back to the policy the Northern Arapaho Business Council adopted July 20, requiring outside organizations to consult with the tribe before conducting organized activities on the reservation.
“When they ask for people to come before the Northern Arapaho Business Council for permission to be on the reservation, that’s something they scoured the records for,” Fourstar said. “I never did see Sarah coming to the council asking for permission. So it’s just a continuation of disrespect of our sovereign rights.”
He called it a slap in the face to the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone business councils and their joint tribal council, and described the underlying dispute as proselytization by another name.
Fourstar was also the reason for some wearing red armbands at St. Stephens. Before the march, organizers ran a marshal training for volunteers, who then coordinated with tribal game wardens accompanying the march. Fourstar said the armbands identified people trained to link arms and form a peaceful barrier if an outsider tried to disrupt the rally, a tactic he said AIM Montana has refined over recent protests in that state.
“We’ve looked for any rocks or anything that could be depicted by anti-protest voices,” he said, describing an approach built to keep the protest inside its free speech protections. He said he expects to return to Wind River to run a know-your-rights training for the community and a second marshal training.
Wagon, an advocate long known in Fremont County for her work on missing and murdered Indigenous relatives, organized the rally with local residents and invited AIM Montana down. She said she put out a flyer inviting anyone who wanted to come and turned no one away.
She said her position has not changed since early July. “The focus is we want them to leave,” Wagon said.
Wagon was raised by a father strong in the Native American Church, and a mother who was a devout Catholic.
“So we were raised in both,” she said. “And brought up to never forget who we are and where we come from.”
Her upbringing is part of why the sermon landed the way it did with her. “The Catholic Church hasn’t spoke that way,” Wagon said. “The Episcopalian Church. And the Native American Church. No way.”
She rejected the church’s account of itself as a persecuted congregation, noting that Lucas has described death threats since the sermon went viral.
“If she was threatened, like she states and trying to play a victim now, wouldn’t people be arrested by now?” Wagon said. “She victimized our people. We are the victims.”
Wagon said the fallout has drawn letters of support from the Eastern Shoshone, from AIM, from the Northern Cheyenne and from tribes well beyond Wyoming, which she attributes to how familiar the pattern felt. “This right here affected many other tribes,” she said.
She was emphatic on the point that Sunday’s march, like the ones before it, was peaceful.
“Sometimes people who are upset think that protests have to be violent. No, they don’t,” Wagon said. “They just have to be educated on how to do it peacefully, effectively, and professionally.”
She said the Sunday gatherings will continue. “We’re not gonna stop,” Wagon said. “Our ask is for them to leave.”
Foundations For Nations has given no indication it intends to. The church, founded by Jason and Sarah Lucas in 2017 on private land inside the reservation boundaries, has said it owns its property and cannot be removed, and has retained the Florida-based Christian legal nonprofit Liberty Counsel, which on August 7 filed a discrimination complaint with the USDA over the Food Bank of Wyoming’s decision to suspend its partnership with the church’s Riverton food pantry.