Tara Houska: The Standing Rock resistance and our fight for indigenous rights
Tara Houska is an attorney who fights for indigenous rights and justice. Full bio
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my Native name is Zhaabowekwe.
my clan is bear.
Couchiching First Nation,
in International Falls, Minnesota,
has trickled through the generations.
of isolation, of invisibility,
of who we are today.
of Indians in headdresses
somewhere you never heard of,
and casino money.
to be in these shoes,
of genocide survival, of genocide.
of unteaching the accepted narrative.
children's textbooks, to Native Americans
mention more than a single tribe,
mention the boarding-school era,
for my grandmother
and culture beaten out of them.
and I was there to be a tribal attorney
representing on the Hill,
why racist imagery matters.
football season, of all times.
of Indian heads
for funding for schools,
of managing our own affairs.
to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
2,000 miles from Cannonball, North Dakota
with a message for President Obama:
of people around the world.
first and worst by climate change.
by the fossil-fuel industry.
climate change refugees exist.
from rising sea levels.
comes a slew of human costs
to build these pipelines,
and violence with them.
indigenous women in Canada
it's spawned a movement
who have disappeared,
we don't even track that.
the United States Supreme Court,
to prosecute at the same rate
onto a reservation and rape someone
as everywhere else,
these cases 40 percent of the time.
are raped in her lifetime.
you could feel the energy in the air.
in front of the machines
to stand with us from around the world.
to stand together, united as one.
by police officers shooting at them,
when I was arrested.
of being put into a dog kennel.
with all these people,
are there and we're there,
We're going to act like dogs.
playing out in front of us,
pushed off of Native lands again in 2017.
a line of hundreds of police officers
off indigenous lands,
out on horseback across the plains.
of buffalo towards us,
"Please turn, please turn."
come towards us,
amazing moment of remembrance.
We were so empowered.
who had, on one day --
had told the courts --
the direct path of the pipeline."
in its construction,
the people in camp rushed up to stop this,
wielding attack dogs in [2016].
by one of these dogs,
in another resistance camp,
in my people's homelands,
of tar sands per day
to the shore of Lake Superior
territories along the way.
and we're all out there standing together,
how to reconnect to the earth,
comes from somewhere.
in our medicines, in our lives,
in the United States.
hidden in plain sight.
when they came in.
when you stand together.
that we have when we stand together,
people having this power,
you can possibly imagine
hundreds of millions of dollars,
on the banks behind these projects,
we've cost them so far,
and forgotten people?
It shapes the way we teach.
and modern Native people
are appropriating their budgets,
treaty obligations?
since the day they were signed.
if treaties were actually upheld.
where, in 2017,
as the supreme law of the land, right?
treaty rights, I'm crazy.
your representative officials
are under the age of 24.
in the United States.
we are medicine women,
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Tara Houska - Tribal attorney and advocateTara Houska is an attorney who fights for indigenous rights and justice.
Why you should listen
Tara Houska (Couchiching First Nation) is a tribal attorney based in Washington, D.C., the National Campaigns Director of Honor the Earth and a former advisor on Native American affairs to Bernie Sanders. She advocates on behalf of tribal nations at the local and federal levels on a range of issues impacting indigenous peoples. She recently spent six months living and working in North Dakota fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. She is a co-founder of Not Your Mascots, a nonprofit committed to educating the public about the harms of stereotyping and promoting positive representation of Native Americans in the public sphere.
Tara Houska | Speaker | TED.com