♪♪
[ drum beats and singing ]
-These lands are beautiful.
The sunsets and the sunrises,
the water. The orcas in the water.
The salmons flowing free
in the rivers and the people are generous and welcoming.
-I remember starting off at really small rallies.
Not many people in the beginning,
not many people knew.
And there is like groups of like 15 people maybe.
And now it's like
grown to thousands and thousands
and hundreds of thousands of people.
So I was around 11.
I think I'm 24 now, so it's half of my life and advocating
for the environment.
There's that fire inside.
You can't really like put it out.
-As a Lakota person, I feel a responsibility
kinship responsibilities
during training because there's a training
before you can actually be a part of student leadership.
I remember they're asking me my goals and I only had one.
And that one goal was to add Coast Salish culture
to the campus and build connections with the tribe.
Ever since then, I've been reaching out to Muckleshoot.
I've been
to their cultural department
to get multiple programs. For that specific program,
they're going to be indigenizing curriculum.
They're going to be building a cultural center
right around here actually.
Affordable housing for students, too. The Coast Salish People
here don't have homelessness.
They didn't have poverty.
They didn’t have extreme wealth gaps.
They didn’t have food insecurity.
The US has actively ruined their quality of life
and made it drastically worse.
Even back then, hundreds of years ago,
it's drastically worse in the modern day, and
so is the US's responsibility in stuff like this...
colleges responsibility to reverse as much damage
as they can from their genocide of the people here.
-Mostly, I feel like a lot of the actions
I do are revolve around ceremony and spirituality.
That sets the tone for a lot of actions I go to.
We have usually a smudge or cedar boughs
or medicines with us to show
our intention is to come with love.
We're fighting for love.
[ drum beats and singing ]
-I was around 11 years old
when I first to
hear talks about a pipeline
wanting to be built through our traditional territory.
My dad came to me and he said,
“There's going to be a pipeline coming through our territory,
an oil pipeline.
They say it promises a lot of economic opportunity
for our people and all peoples
and they say it's going to benefit people.
But I think we know better than that.”
Any time you get too close to the construction,
there's a chance of getting arrested.
My grandmother was actually arrested, too.
I personally don't have fear of standing up for my land
and standing up for my people and future generations.
And I know many others
fearlessly stand by my side.
-Lakota means to be a good neighbor
and sometimes a neighbor here,
a neighbor of all people from North America --
it's important to help them out.
I got involved through the Clear Sky Youth program.
Ever since I was a little kid,
my dad would bring me to Clear Sky
because they have a lot of great
youth programs for Native youth.
[ drum beats and singing ]
One of the ideas I was throwing around was protecting
Coast Salish sacred sites around Washington.
We partnered with the library to spread awareness for this.
We wrote a draft resolution which was then edited
because we're all 12.
(running water)
It is the last, or one of the last remaining
sacred springs
in the Seattle area. In the spring,
that Licton Springs is red because of the iron oxide.
But a lot of them were just cap
for like buildings, apartments...
not just important, sacred site for people from here,
but people from all First Nations of North America.
[ chanting with drum beats ]
-Water warriors is... were a group of people
with good hearts, that's for sure.
And we stand up for what's right.
It doesn't matter who you are.
We’re going to stand up for what's right.
We were there for BLM.
We wee there for Free Palestine.
We're there for the L&G at Standing Rock.
We're there to stand for what's right.
I feel honored, and I feel great
to be
a part of an organization
that helps out a lot in our community and helps out a lot.
It feels good that we can
get together
with other people
to see what's going on in the world,
and they don't feel right about it either and
they want to do something about it.
-We're already close friends, so it's like we just
we are.
This group just brought us closer once.
-We just really just got tighter over time.
Like, you know, there's like minded people looking for...
-The chemistry was there.
-The bond is definitely not tiresome.
-There was like
a shipment of weapons that's supposed to be sent off
from our port here through the tribal
ancestral waters that was bound for Israel to,
you know, weapons to be used against Palestinians.
So Dylan, Dakota and a few other of us
from Water Warriors paddled out in an attempt
to block the ship from heading out.
-And when the Coast Guard pulled up on us,
we were not intimidated whatsoever.
They had to keep calling more Coast Guard boats.
Because they were the ones intimidated by us...
-Yeah. Big ole 50 caliber machine guns on em,
They're just staring us down.
-Yeah, we're just sitting there singing.
We're paddling,
we're waving the Palestinian flag, and we're,
we're within our rights and our waters.
-Some people would be scared
or just don't be comfortable
or not, because they think it's like,
all that stuff is just for old people.
It's like young people will come out and do it, too.
It's not just,
you got to be a certain age to come out
and try to change the world.
You can you can be any age
and try to come out, just express your feelings.
-You don't really got to leave your house.
It all starts
as simple as just a simple social media post.
The repost.
Yeah, there's just plenty of ways
to get out of that and get your voice out there.
And a lot of these
movements, they support each other,
so you'll find a lot of these movements support one.
So if you find one, you're most likely find another one.
-I'd say just going to
whoever you got in your community
and just try to get involved.
Take whatever
you think you need and, you know, push the rest out.
Okay. I'll take what I learned today.
-You've got to really go out there like in other ways.
You gotta ask your elders, the people older than you like
a was something that, you know, think we would need
or something we could change or like
whatever problems for you going and see if
if it hasn't changed and if it hasn't how about
you know you that's where you push out my okay.
[ drum beats and chanting ]
-I talked to a lot of people
personally that are discouraged.
It's not impossible to change things.
And there's a ton of examples. Like the
people here, Billy Frank Jr and all the Coast Salish
people during the fish wars got their fishing rights back.
It's not impossible.
And then me along with a youth group
just wanting to protect sacred sites here -- did it.
-Take care of yourself,
especially if you're
a BIPOC person or come from like a marginalized community.
We're already facing a lot of oppression,
and that's something I have to realize,
like taking some of my trauma and issues
and turning them into art healed me so much on a
spiritual,
like emotional, mental, physical level.
Everybody from all walks of life
is welcome in the environmental movement.
Your future. It's everybody's future.
There's something
to contribute in so many different ways.
We need a diversity of tactics.
Even if it just changes just
one person's mind helps one person.
-You're not going to fix
someone's ignorance by surrounding them
with more people that are ignorant.
You need more diverse views and expose the people
to as much views as possible and have your representatives
have as much views as possible.
-The younger generation has the power
what it takes to change the world for the better.
-You're going to hear my voice that's in every fiber of my
being to stand up and fight and to speak.
-You got to listen to yourself to learn something new.
If you're constantly speaking
to yourself, saying things to yourself,
you're not going to be able to listen and
learn something new. Same with the Earth.
If you're constantly speaking to it, defining it,
you're not going to be able to learn something new.
[ drum beats and singing ]