While every community is different, the similarities are vast, especially as it pertains to having people of different backgrounds living in the same place.

"How can we expand our world view to honor and acknowledge other people's values," said Maureen Hansen, the district director for the 3rd Judicial District in Iowa.

In Sioux City, Iowa, of those in the criminal justice system, many are indigenous.

"In the entire eight judicial districts in Iowa, 66% of Native Americans that are on correctional supervision reside in our district," Hansen explained.

Maureen Hansen leads the department that works with people on probation and parole in this part of Iowa. She also helps them adjust to life after prison. With Native Americans being incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the U.S. average for all other groups, Hansen and her team have acknowledged the changes needed to better serve this community.

"I think our jobs have taken a more social work approach than the criminal justice approach or kind of having a balance between the two," said Sara Anderson, a community treatment coordinator for the district.

Anderson organizes workshops, training, and books speakers, who educate their staff on native customs and history.

"If we just would immerse ourselves in different cultures and go outside of our comfort zone, then any of those biases that we may or may not be aware of get challenged," said Kashe Utesch, another community treatment coordinator.

People like Anderson and Utesch work directly with people whose current outcomes rely heavily on corrections understanding and respecting Native history.

"Still in 2022, we have clients that because of generational trauma, because of the boarding schools we had here, don't want to go places and struggle with that," said Utesch.

Will Myer, a juvenile probation officer, points out this is far from how the Indigenous community was always treated.

"Traditional probation was always pounding a square peg into a round hole. If you look at any government policy with Native people, it's always been this is what works for me it better work for you," Myer said.

He points to some prison systems using traditional medicine as the only option for treating sickness, when Indigenous people may use other treatments and have for hundreds of years.

"Sometimes they aren't treated with respect. Sometimes social workers, probation officers, judges, they make a choice to have a disrespectful attitude," said Terry Medina, a former probation officer.

As a Native man and a former probation officer, Medina says understanding cultural differences is crucial.

"As non-Native, we need to respect that, and how can we let them have some of their Native possessions in their properties and respecting those boundaries with them," Hansen said.

Now, on the other side of the criminal justice system, Trisha Etringer wants more incarcerated Natives to have this experience as opposed to the one she had.

"This is really personal when it comes to working with the probation and parole officers here in Sioux City, Iowa, because I was part of that system," said Etringer. "To go back to your office now and say, 'Wow, I didn't even realize. Maybe I had a client that was a part of the Indian boarding school era. This makes a lot of sense.'"

This community is just one example of the positive effects respecting and understanding culture can bring.

"Community corrections is about having a healthy community; it's about having a safe community," Hansen said.

"We see people getting better. We see people getting stronger and people feeling better about themselves," Myer said.

"It can adapt how we work with our clients, but it can also adapt to how we raise our next generation to have a better cultural understanding," Anderson said.

SHONTO, Arizona — Living conditions on the Navajo reservation resemble a third-world country. Households lack necessities taken for granted in much of America, including running water, electricity and internet access.

"I did not grow up with running water. It's normal. You just work 10 times harder than anybody else to obtain water," Shanna Yazzie, who grew up on the Navajo Nation and is raising her children there today.

Yazzie is a project manager with the Navajo Water Project, an indigenous-led nonprofit working to bring running water and solar power to homes on the Navajo Nation.

Dirt roads and worn gasoline pumps are a constant reminder of generations left behind. Through numerous treaties, the U.S. government made promises to maintain and support the needs of Native communities in exchange for land. But calls to address these failings have often been ignored.

"What's really struck me has been their resilience. It really is a strong sense of community," said George McGraw, founder of DigDepp. "And that's what's really allowed them to survive — despite a world around them that in many ways is organized to erase and destroy their culture."

Left vulnerable to the deadly pandemic, challenges on the reservation were put in the national spotlight. At one point, the reservation had the highest rate of COVID-19 infections per capita in the country.

Now, these basic needs are within reach for tribal communities and reservations across the U.S., with the newly-signed infrastructure bill promising to address decades of unfunded projects and broken promises.

"This infrastructure bill is really like a once-in-a-generation opportunity to work on this problem," said McGraw. "It's hundreds and thousands of projects, all shovel-ready."

The bill allocates $3.5 billion for the Indian Health Service (IHS). The agency says the funding will be enough to address more than 1,500 projects nationwide on its list of water and sanitation issues, including water lines, bathrooms, sanitation facilities, and water treatment plants.

"It's really difficult to understate what impact that will have on native communities. To take, you know, decades of projects that have sat there unfunded and really languished and push them all forward," said McGraw.

He says 30% of Navajo homes don't have running water. Families must travel for miles to haul back every drop they need to survive.

The infrastructure bill also provides $4 billion in funding to fix roads and $2 billion to expand internet access.

"We're going to be watching that process really closely, assisting where we can, representing communities and making sure their voices are heard. But it will not solve the problem. It will not close the water gap fully in the United States. That's going to take significantly more investment," said McGraw.

Advocates are calling for better data collection on the problem.

"We're using old data to estimate access," said McGraw. "We're going to have this new influx of money. What collection mechanism do we have to prove that that money is getting where it's needed? That that number is shrinking? And it's something that we're talking to federal agencies and to lawmakers and to tribal officials now, but I don't have a good answer to that question now."

But he says the bill is historic and gets tribal communities on the path to finally accessing life-saving infrastructure needs.

"It gets us, you know, into that fight," said McGraw. I have a lot of hope."

On October 11, Americans celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. It’s a day to honor the cultures of Native American people.

Right now, there’s there is a push by Indigenous Americans to become self-sustaining. When you first enter the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, you see signs of poverty. But as you continue along Highway 18, you’ll come across something unexpected.

In the middle of the Badlands National Park lies Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation. Tatewin Means, who is with the Oglala Lakota tribe, says they decided to take on the project to create a self-sustaining community.

“Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation started from a prayer. It was from a group of young people that were restless for change, that were reconnecting to our Lakota lifeways, to our songs and ceremonies,” Means said.

Through crowdsourcing, they were able to build energy-efficient homes. This ultimately created homes for first-time homebuyers.

“We know that we can build the most beautiful community, the most beautiful homes that are energy-efficient, that are sustainable, that check all the boxes of what a community should have,” Means explained.

The reservation is also a food desert. According to Means, Thunder Valley has a plan in place.

“We have a two-and-a-half-acre demonstration farm with nearly 500 chickens at any given time to provide local fresh eggs, a community garden where we can provide farmer's markets to community members.”

At the end of the day, each piece of the Thunder Valley puzzle has a purpose. It’s a purpose of circling back to their roots.

“Each of the houses are in circles of seven. And as Otani Shockey, as the seven council fires, that's how we arranged ourselves when we would all come together. They open to the east to welcome the sun,” Means said.

She tells us it’s their way of healing from the past. She wants her people to move forward and break the cycle of poverty.

“It's our own living expression of liberation. It's not the only way. It's not the right way. But it's our way,” she said. “And we want as many people as possible to come along in this journey as we define what it means to be Lakota in this day and age, in the 21st Century.”

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. —

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The remains of nine Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania meant to assimilate them into white culture have been returned to their South Dakota tribe for burial on its reservation.

The Rosebud Sioux planned to rebury the remains during a ceremony on Saturday, the Argus Leader reported.

The effort to return the remains took nearly six years. A caravan of young adults tasked with bringing the remains home to the reservation set out Tuesday from the site of the former Carlisle Indian Reform School, which is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of the Pennsylvania capital Harrisburg.

It made several stops along the way, including in Yankton and Whetstone on Friday for emotional ceremonies with tribal members. Another ceremony was held earlier Friday at a Missouri River landing near Sioux City, Iowa, which was where the children, who died between 1880 and 1910, boarded a steamboat for their journey east.

"This is a common sorrow we share, but on this day we have a common celebration," Ben Rhodd, a member of the Rosebud Sioux, told the gathering in Yankton.

Rodney Bordeaux, the tribe's president, said Friday's events were historic and thanked the young people for bringing the remains back.

"This is going to make us that much stronger as a people as we reclaim who we are," he said. "Indian Country nationwide is rising up. We're going to be stronger as we go forward."

Christopher Eagle Bear, 23, who was part of the youth council responsible for bringing returning the remains, said, "On this day, it is an honor to be Lakota. Hopefully, what we do here can inspire another youth group to move the road further than what we have started."

Some of the children will be reburied in a veterans' cemetery on the reservation and others will be interred at family graveyards, tribal officials said.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland last month announced a nationwide investigation into the boarding schools that attempted to assimilate Indigenous children into white society.

Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said "forced assimilation practices" stripped away the children's clothing, their language and their culture. She said the government aims to locate the schools and burial sites and identify the names and tribal affiliations of children from the boarding schools around the country.

The Carlisle school, which was founded by an Army officer and opened in 1880, was the first of its kind off a reservation and set an example later used by other schools to assimilate Native American children into white culture. It took drastic steps to separate students from their Indigenous cultures, including cutting their braids, dressing them in military-style uniforms and punishing them for speaking their native languages. They were also forced to adopt European names.

More than 10,000 Native American children were taught at the Carlisle school and endured harsh conditions that sometimes led to death from such diseases as tuberculosis.