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A January 2019 article in Indian Country Today described Phillips as a "keeper of a sacred pipe".

On January 18, 2019, snippets of videos recorded at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., appeared to show Phillips being harassed by a group of fifty to sixty high school boys who had attended the coinciding annual March for Life; they were widely shared through social media. Print media described Philips as surrounded and faced with "relentless smirk". Philips had walked towards and into a group of adolescent boys from Covington Catholic High School (CovCath), who had traveled from Kentucky on a school trip to attend the anti-abortion March for Life. He began to chant the AIM Song, a traditional Native American inter-tribal powwow song. Videos showed a student, later identified as a junior at CovCath, and Phillips facing each other inches apart while Phillips chanted and beat his drum and some of the students in the background allegedly did "Tomahawk chops" and danced. Several students wore red "Make America Great Again" caps.

Shortly after the video went viral, CovCath's communications director released a statement regretting that the incident took place. On January 19, 2019, multiple students who were present at the incident stated that coverage of the incident had been skewed. The involved student released a statement saying that the students were confronted by four members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, that Philips tried to provoke the students, and denying that they had chanted "build the wall" or used any racist language or gestures. Interviewed after the event, Phillips said, "While I was there singing, I heard them saying 'Build that wall! Build that wall!', you know... this is indigenous land! ...We're not supposed to have walls here, we never did—for millennium. Before anybody else came here we never had walls. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, we took care of our children," and "There was that moment when I realized I've put myself between beast and prey, [t]hese young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey." In the days after the confrontation, Journalists reviewed hours of tapes from multiple points of view and, in their opinion, showed that videos of the event either "[contradicted] or [failed] to confirm accounts provided in that story—including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, [that] the students were trying to instigate a conflict," and the video evidence was consistent with the students' version of events. Video footage also showed members of the Black Hebrew Israelites shouting targeted racial insults and slurs at a group of Native Americans and later at the Covington High School students. Asked why he had approached the group of students, Phillips said that he was trying to defuse a confrontation between the group of students and a small group of Black Hebrew Israelites who were shouting insults and profanities at the students. Subsequent interviews with Phillips and his associates stated they interpreted the students' school cheers as racist toward their nearby Indigenous Peoples March.

In 2012, Phillips and his son appeared in the music video for "Make It Bun Dem", a song by Skrillex and Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley. In a February 20, 2017, interview that took place during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests (DAPL), Phillips explained he had answered the casting call because he wanted to help his children cope with his wife's cancer.

The Guardian called him "a well-known Native American activist who was among those leading the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017 against the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota". Phillips was among the last of the protesters when law enforcement evicted the camps and effectively ended the protests, which for his part were "a prayer (...) a commitment to stand for our youth, for our children, for nature and for myself, standing for my nation."

In 2015 Phillips alleged a group of students from Eastern Michigan University harassed him. A January 2019 article in The Washington Post described Phillips as a "a veteran in the indigenous rights movement".

Phillips is the subject of the award-winning 2013 documentary film Between Earth and Sky in which he and his wife, Shoshana, travel back to his Omaha reservation after his wife was diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. She died of the disease in 2014.

Phillips entered the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves on May 20, 1972. During his time in the military, he was trained as an anti-tank missileman and then served as a refrigerator technician in Nebraska and California. He was not deployed to Vietnam. On May 5, 1976, Phillips was discharged as a private following disciplinary issues. In accordance with the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, Phillips is classified as a Vietnam-era veteran.

Nathan Phillips (born February 22, 1954), also known as Sky Man, is an Omaha Native American political activist known for his role in the January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation in Washington, D.C.