By Maya Rao

Minneapolis Star Tribune

As fire and riots raged around Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue last week, several employees of an American Indian nonprofit called Migizi stayed behind to guard their building.

They wrote “native youth center” on the window to discourage attacks. Members of the American Indian Movement came to help. But rioters set fire to the block anyway. The inferno forced out the building’s protectors around 3:30 Friday morning.

When the nonprofit’s executive director, Kelly Drummer, returned to the scene a few hours later and saw the destruction, she said, “I knelt down and I just cried.”

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