[1] Chosa had been a student of twentieth-century Chicago-based community activist and theorist Saul Alinsky, author of the 1971 book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer.
[7] In early 1970, Menominee woman Carol Warrington, a mother of six, began a rent strike to pressure her landlord to improve the dilapidated conditions of her apartment.
Chosa borrowed the teepee, pitched it on an empty lot across the street from Warrington's apartment, and encouraged other Native Americans to join him.
[6] In June 1971, Chosa led his followers to occupy some vacant acreage on Lake Michigan at Chicago's Belmont Harbor, previously the site of a battery of Nike anti-aircraft missiles.
[12] In the year that followed as negotiations continued, the group camped at various locations including Big Bend Lake in Des Plaines, Illinois, and a second decommissioned Nike missile site near the Argonne National Laboratory.
[9] Eventually, an assistant to John N. Erlenborn, a member of the US House of Representatives for Illinois's 14th congressional district, named Joanne Maxwell, found the group lodging at Camp Seager, a summer camp facility of the United Methodist Church near Naperville, Illinois, until a final settlement was reached, problematic because the cabins there had not been constructed for use in winter.