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Ojibwa 1
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Ojibwa 2
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Ojibwa 3
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Ojibwa 4
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Ojibwa 6
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Ojibwa 7
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My name is Tara Houska,
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I'm Bear Clan from
Couchiching First Nation,
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I was born under the Maple Sapping Moon
in International Falls, Minnesota,
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and I'm happy to be here with all of you.
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(Applause)
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Trauma of indigenous peoples
has trickled through the generations.
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Centuries of oppression,
of isolation, of invisibility,
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have led to a muddled understanding
of who we are today.
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In 2017, we face this mixture
of Indians in headdresses
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going across the plains
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but also the drunk sitting on a porch
somewhere you never heard of,
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living off government handouts
and casino money.
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(Sighs)
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It's really, really hard.
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It's very, very difficult
to be in these shoes,
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to stand here as a product
of genocide survival, of genocide.
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We face this constant barrage
of unteaching the accepted narrative.
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87 percent of references in textbooks,
children's textbooks, to Native Americans
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are pre-1900s.
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Only half of the US states
mention more than a single tribe,
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and just four states
mention the boarding-school era,
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the era that was responsible
for my grandparents,
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my grandmother
and her brothers and sisters
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having their language
and culture beaten out of them.
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When you aren't viewed as real people,
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it's a lot easier to run over your rights.
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Four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC.
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I had finished school
and I was there to be a tribal attorney
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and represent tribes across the nation,
representing on the Hill,
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and I saw immediately
why racist imagery matters.
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I moved there during
football season, of all times,
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and so it was the daily slew
of Indian heads
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and this "redskin" slur everywhere,
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while my job was going up on the Hill
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and trying to lobby for hospitals,
for funding for schools,
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for basic government services,
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and being told again and again
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that Indian people were incapable
of managing our own affairs.
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When you aren't viewed as real people,
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it's a lot easier to run over your rights.
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And last August, I went out
to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
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I saw resistance happening.
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We were standing up.
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There were youth that had run
2,000 miles from Cannonball, North Dakota
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all the way out to Washington, DC,
with a message for President Obama:
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"Please intervene.
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Please do something.
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Help us."
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And I went out, and I heard the call,
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and so did thousands
of people around the world.
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Why did this resonate with so many people?
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Indigenous peoples are impacted
first and worst by climate change.
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We are impacted first and worst
by the fossil-fuel industry.
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Here in Louisiana, the first US
climate change refugees exist.
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They are Native people
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being pushed off their homelands
from rising sea levels.
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That's our reality, that's what we live,
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and with these projects
comes a slew of human costs
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that people don't think about:
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thousands of workers influxing
to build these pipelines,
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to build and extract from the earth,
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bringing crime and sex trafficking
and violence with them.
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Missing and murdered
indigenous women in Canada
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has become so significant,
it's spawned a movement
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and a national inquiry,
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thousands of Native women
who have disappeared,
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who have been murdered.
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And here in the US,
we don't even track that.
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We are instead left with an understanding
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that our Supreme Court,
the United States Supreme Court,
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stripped us, in 1978, of the right
to prosecute at the same rate
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as anywhere else in the United States.
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So as a non-Native person you can walk
onto a reservation and rape someone
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and that tribe is without the same level
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of prosecutorial ability
as everywhere else,
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and the Federal Government declines
these cases 40 percent of the time.
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It used to be 76 percent of the time.
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One in three Native women
are raped in her lifetime.
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One in three.
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But in Standing Rock,
you could feel the energy in the air.
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You could feel the resistance happening.
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People were standing and saying, "No more.
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Enough is enough.
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We will put our bodies
in front of the machines
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to stop this project from happening.
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Our lives matter.
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Our children's lives matter."
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And thousands of allies came
to stand with us from around the world.
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It was incredible, it was incredible
to stand together, united as one.
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(Applause)
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In my time there,
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I saw Natives being chased on horseback
by police officers shooting at them,
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history playing out in front of my eyes.
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I myself was put into a dog kennel
when I was arrested.
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But funny story, actually,
of being put into a dog kennel.
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So we're in this big wire kennel
with all these people,
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and the police officers
are there and we're there,
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and we start howling like dogs.
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You're going to treat us like dogs?
We're going to act like dogs.
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But that's the resilience we have.
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All these horrific images
playing out in front of us,
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being an Indigenous person
pushed off of Native lands again in 2017.
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But there was such beauty.
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On one of the days that we faced
a line of hundreds of police officers
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pushing us back, pushing us
off Indigenous lands,
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there were those teenagers
out on horseback across the plains.
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They were herding hundreds
of buffalo towards us,
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and we were crying out, calling,
"Please turn, please turn."
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And we watched the buffalo
come towards us,
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and for a moment, everything stopped.
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The police stopped, we stopped,
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and we just saw this beautiful,
amazing moment of remembrance.
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And we were empowered.
We were so empowered.
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I interviewed a woman
who had, on one day --
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September 2nd,
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the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation
had told the courts --
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there's an ongoing lawsuit right now --
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they told the courts,
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"Here is a sacred site that's in
the direct path of the pipeline."
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On September 3rd, the following day,
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Dakota Access, LLC skipped 25 miles ahead
in its construction,
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to destroy that site.
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And when that happened,
the people in camp rushed up to stop this,
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and they were met with attack dogs,
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people, private security officers,
wielding attack dogs in 2017.
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But I interviewed one of the women,
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who had been bitten on the breast
by one of these dogs,
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and the ferocity and strength of her
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was incredible,
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and she's out right now
in another resistance camp,
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the same resistance camp I'm part of,
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fighting Line 3, another pipeline project
in my people's homelands,
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wanting 900,000 barrels
of tar sands per day
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through the headwaters of the Mississippi
to the shore of Lake Superior
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and through all the Treaty
territories along the way.
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But this woman's out there
and we're all out there standing together,
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because we are resilient, we are fierce,
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and we are teaching people
how to reconnect to the earth,
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remembering where we come from.
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So much of society has forgotten this.
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(Applause)
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That food you eat comes from somewhere.
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The tap water you drink
comes from somewhere.
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We're trying to remember, teach,
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because we know, we still remember.
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It's in our plants,
in our medicines, in our lives,
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every single day.
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I brought this out to show.
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(Rattling)
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This is cultural survival.
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This is from a time that it was illegal
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to practice indigenous cultures
in the United States.
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This was cultural survival
hidden in plain sight.
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This was a baby's rattle.
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That's what they told the Indian agents
when they came in.
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It was a baby's rattle.
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But it's incredible what you can do
when you stand together.
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It's incredible, the power
that we have when we stand together,
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human resistance,
people having this power,
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some of the most oppressed people
you can possibly imagine
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costing this company
hundreds of millions of dollars,
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and now our divestment efforts, focusing
on the banks behind these projects,
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costing them billions of dollars.
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Five billion dollars
we've cost them so far,
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hanging out with banks.
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(Applause)
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So what can you do?
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How can you help?
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How can you change the conversation
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for extremely oppressed
and forgotten people?
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Education is foundational.
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Education shapes our children.
It shapes the way we teach.
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It shapes the way we learn.
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In Washington State,
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they've made the teaching of treaties
and modern Native people
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mandatory in school curriculum.
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That is systems change.
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(Applause)
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When your elected officials
are appropriating their budgets,
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ask them, are you fulfilling
treaty obligations?
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Treaties have been broken
since the day they were signed.
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Are you meeting those requirements?
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That would change our lives,
if treaties were actually upheld.
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Those documents were signed.
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Somehow, we live in this world
where, in 2017,
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the US Constitution is held up
as the supreme law of the land, right?
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But when I talk about
treaty rights, I'm crazy.
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That's crazy.
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Treaties are the supreme law of the land,
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and that would change so much,
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if you actually asked
your representative officials
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to appropriate those budgets.
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And take your money out of the banks.
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That's huge. It makes a huge difference.
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Stand with us, empathize,
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learn, grow, change the conversation.
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Forty percent of Native people
are under the age of 24.
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We are the fastest-growing demographic
in the United States.
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We are doctors, we are lawyers,
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we are teachers, we are scientists,
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we are engineers,
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we are medicine men,
we are medicine women,
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we are sun dancers, we are pipe carriers,
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we are traditional language speakers,
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and we are still here.
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Miigwech.
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(Applause)