Forced out of Standing Rock, American Indians have dispersed around the country to continue the work — and get arrested for it if need be.

“We came to the conclusion that all water is sacred and that all land is sacred,” said Micah Lott, 24, who came to Massachusetts after a full-time entrenchment last year at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

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At least one scholar has likened modern American Indian disenfranchisement to “the ones confronted by blacks in the South and Latinos in the Southwest,” wrote Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford Law School who wrote “Lightning in the Hand: Indians and Voting Rights.”