Nathan Phillips

Activism

By 1999, Phillips was working to create a foster care system run by American Indians for Native children to help them gain an appreciation for their heritage: "I don't want our children to think that prison is the only place for them to go." and reported that he leads an annual ceremony honoring Native American war veterans in Arlington National Cemetery. Phillips was among the last of the protesters when law enforcement evicted the camps and effectively ended the protests, which he characterized as "a prayer ..., a commitment to stand for our youth, for our children, for nature and for myself, standing for my nation."

In 2015, Phillips alleged a group of students from Eastern Michigan University harassed him. A January 2019 article in The Washington Post described Phillips as "a veteran in the indigenous rights movement".

A January 2019 article in Indian Country Today described Phillips as a "keeper of a sacred pipe".

"Make It Bun Dem" video In 2012, Phillips and his son appeared in the music video for "Make It Bun Dem", a song by Skrillex and Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley. In a February 20, 2017, interview that took place during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests (DAPL), Phillips explained he had answered the casting call because he wanted to help his children cope with his wife's cancer.

Lincoln Memorial confrontation

On January 18, 2019, snippets of videos recorded at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., appeared to show Phillips being harassed by a group of 50 to 60 high school boys who had attended the coinciding annual March for Life; they were widely shared through social media. Print media described Phillips as surrounded by the students, one of whom, Nicholas Sandmann, exhibited a "relentless smirk". Phillips had walked towards and into a group of adolescent boys from Covington Catholic High School (CovCath), who had traveled from Kentucky on a school trip to attend the anti-abortion March for Life. He began to sing the AIM Song, a Native American intertribal song from the Red Power movement. and Phillips facing each other inches apart while Phillips chanted and beat his drum and some of the students in the background allegedly did "tomahawk chops" and danced. On January 19, 2019, multiple students who were present stated that coverage of the incident had been skewed. Sandmann released a statement saying that the students had been confronted by four members of the Black Hebrew Israelites and that Phillips had tried to provoke the students; he denied that they had chanted "build the wall" or used any racist language or gestures. Interviewed after the event, Phillips claimed he heard students chanting, "Build that wall! Build that wall!" and making racist comments. He stated, "This is indigenous land..., we're not supposed to have walls here. We never did for millenniums before anybody else came here". He also described the event as "that moment I ... put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey."

Robby Soave, writing for Reason magazine, and Caitlin Flanagan, writing in The Atlantic, said that in their opinion, videos of the event either contradicted or failed to confirm parts of Phillips' version of events and the video evidence—while it did not completely exonerate the boys' behavior—was broadly consistent with their story. Asked why he had approached the group of students, Phillips alleged he was trying to defuse a confrontation between the group of students and a small group of Black Hebrew Israelites who were shouting insults and profanities at the students.