Indigenous activists in Cleveland, Ohio, have advocated Indigenous issues and rights since the early 1900s. After the removal of the last American Indians from their traditional territory in Ohio in 1842, Cleveland, and the greater Cuyahoga County, had an almost nonexistent Indigenous population. However, in the early 1900s, an Osaukee man named Chief Thunderwater engaged in activism, protesting the displacement of the Erie Street Cemetery and creating the Supreme Council of Indian Nations, which advocated for Indigenous peoples' right to cross the United States–Canada border in the Supreme Court case of McCandless v. United States. Later in the century, the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 moved a variety of Native Americans from their different reservations in the West into Ohio, specifical