up while learning the techniques — find it both physically grueling and emotionally taxing.

"Almost as if my ancestors, my aunties, my grandmother — everybody was with me that knows what our women face," she says. "And just to see the power of that, in that scenario, was real."

The class is designed to be taught to Native women, by Native women. And Rachael Devaney told the group that aspect is important to her.

"It is so empowering learning from other Native people. That space is not available to us all the time," she told the group at the end of class. "To feel that kind of empowerment, connecting with you guys in that way is really amazing for me, just as a Native woman."

Native men participate in the class aswell. Two of them wear football padding and very reinforced helmets.

Michael Davis of the Turtle Mountain Tribe, whose traditional name is Fire Spirit, said he volunteered because too many Native women have had their "fire" taken away through violence. He has seen it firsthand.

"I have an auntie who could've definitely benefited [from this class]," Davis says. "She might still be alive today if she would've known these tactics, or that she could empower herself to say no, to step away or maybe fought back one time and deterred him and maybe made him think twice."

At the end of class, a song is sung that memorializes the lives of all missing, murdered Indigenous women:

We will always remember you warrior women and leader women. You are in our hearts and