When Manilan Houle, who is undergoing an Orthodox Jewish conversion, thinks about the rabbinic commandment to separate and burn challah, a small portion of the dough that one is making into bread, he thinks of a traditional Native American story of his ancestors falling ill from eating raw ingredients, like flour and lard, before learning how to cook them into frybread.

“Our obligation is to restore the challah,” he said. “You put a little aside and say, ‘Thank You for this knowledge that will sustain my people.’ That which once was making us sick is changed to strengthen us.”

Houle, 31, an enrolled member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, had a difficult upbringing. “When I was 11 or 12, I was in foster care,” he told JNS. “My family was struggling with drugs and alcohol, and we were broken.”

He graduated from high school in 2012 and studied theater at the University of Minnesota, Morris. “I was a very active thespian at the time, and had even toured with a regional opera tour my senior year of high school,” he said.

He left classes after “mere weeks” and volunteered for a grassroots campaign that fought a proposed amendment banning same-sex marriage in the state. Standing in a “sea of thousands” as the governor signed a bill recognizing such unions “made me realize that through deep relational organizing, we can change the world and make it a little more just,” he said.

Houle moved to New York City three years ago and found himself surrounded by a vibrant Jewish community that changed his life. “It was a journey of exploring, of learning, of community,” he told JNS.

Working with AIPAC, Israel Policy Forum and Anti-Defamation League, he connected Jewish and Indigenous experiences.

“I saw people attacking something that I was striving for as a Native person who didn’t quite know the strength and power of our people yet,” he said. “I saw people who for thousands of years have had to stand up to attacks and pogroms and vilification and be able to stand strong.”

That sense of shared endurance led Houle to connect Indigenous sovereignty with Jewish self-determination. “We’re at the precipice,” he said. “We’re at the seventh generation, where we’re turning the leaf, building resiliency, building that pride.”

Houle felt the pull to return to Minnesota to help his mother raise his 12-year-old nephew, after his sister—the boy’s mother—died. He took his growing Jewish identity with him.

“You have to go where your people are, to take with you the laws and to continue to hold halachah,” he told JNS in a video conversation on Tuesday. Bearded and donning a sweater over a button-down shirt, he looked like a yeshiva student.

“To take the written Torah and the oral Torah that you’ve been taught,” he said. “To go out, to build, to stand and to uplift.”

When Houle returned to Minnesota, he applied to join the Indigenous Commission of the City of Duluth, whose members the mayor appoints and the city council confirms.

“I certainly was surprised it happened so fast,” he said of being accepted to the commission. “And humbled.” It is a “gift,” he told JNS, of bringing his Jewish advocacy to his hometown. “It’s also an obligation.”

He was sworn in on Wednesday in a government building decorated for Halloween, he said.

Houle links his civic work and his role as spiritual guide to his nephew, who asks “big questions like, ‘Who am I?’ ‘Who are my people?’ How do I learn my traditions and my ways?’ How do I connect to God?’” he told JNS.

Last week was his first Shabbat back in Minnesota. He told his mother and nephew that they would enjoy his Shabbat food and posted photos on social media.

“Homemade challah (using maple sugar), squash, salmon cakes, wild rice, apple oatmeal-nut cookies,” he wrote on Friday. “Cholent for lunch tomorrow.”

In Duluth, Houle stays in touch with Jewish friends in New York and studies Torah with Chabad rabbis and with the Orthodox rabbi who is sponsoring his conversion.

“Judaism is about these challenges,” he told JNS. “Baruch Hashem, right? Thank God for this moment.”

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