In late 2016, Tara Houska called Morton County North Dakota home for six months—she stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the frontlines at Oceti Sakowin, the gathering of Indigenous Nations at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in defense of clean water. Tara was born in International Falls, Minnesota, is a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, and a tribal attorney who lives and works on the frontlines in northern Minnesota to stop Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline. She’s a co-founder of Not Your Mascots and founder of Ginew. Tara joined us at the Skoll World Forum in 2018 and we sat down with her backstage to learn more about her work and what continues to rekindle her hope. With World Water Week coming up later this month, this seems like a good time to revisit our conversation.
Gabriel Diamond: What’s the biggest misconception that you encounter around indigenous rights and native people?
Tara Houska: I think that the worst and most common perception of native people is this ‘people of the past’ idea—a footnote in history. We were here before the arrival of the United States, before America, before Canada. It’s this sad chapter of dispossession and genocide and then it’s just blank. People think that we didn’t keep progressing after the early 1800s.
We have the internet, too, just like you. We live in this modern world just like you, but we’re still often in very desperate conditions because of being put into these forgotten places, or having unequal access to justice, to wealth, to economic growth.
There’s structural inequity written within the laws of the United States. It’s a society that’s founded on genocide and slavery, and that’s at the heart of it, right?
Gabriel: So how do we heal and begin to fix what’s badly broken to build a just and equitable society?
Tara: There’s all kinds of different measures of political engagement, working within these government systems, working outside them, challenging these narratives, whether that’s front lines and direct action. In the instance of protecting our homelands, we’re kind of under this assault now. You’ve been put in these places, but now we’re coming for those last resources. We want to put a pipeline through your drinking water. We want to put an oil rig next to your community. We want to use this river for running our mining operations.
Eighty percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is in indigenous lands, so we are the last holders of these sacred places. One answer of how do we solve this—beyond just teaching the truth—is standing together and really figuring out how do we have justice and equality in the era of climate change. What does a just transition look like? What does that really look like for everyone, as these water shortages begin, and as they’re already ongoing? It’s going to be the communities that are already at risk that are impacted first and worst.
We’ve never lost our connection to the land and to the water. So we have some pretty good, tried and true ways. I always tell people to look at where their food comes from, look at where their water comes from, and really understanding what that means. So many people buy things and don’t have a second thought. Or they turn on their tap and they don’t think about where it comes from. Everything comes from somewhere. It all comes from the earth and everything is returned to the earth. This society though that has been created, this extreme capitalism, in a lot of ways become an oligarchy of corporations’ interests being represented above the people’s.
Gabriel: Tell me about the world you’re working to create.
Tara: It’s a world of true equality, with acceptance and inclusivity of all walks of life. It’s a world where we empower those who work to achieve change in a good way, where we don’t suppress innovation, we don’t suppress our future, really. I want a just society that respects different perspectives and is truly equal for every group of people.
As this world continues with climate change, those conversations are going to need to happen soon. This is happening now. There are already people migrating from places that are out of water. We need to have to have some serious conversations as human beings living in this shared world about what kind of world we want it to be.
Gabriel: How do we get there? How do we make that happen?
Tara: We get there by all the different methods, whether it’s in the streets or in the courts. Maybe it’s running for office, or working within, tearing down, or calling out these areas of our government structures that are fundamentally flawed. We, as consumers, also have a lot of agency. We don’t have to buy into this, and we can actually control things. With divestment for instance, we’re seeing the banking institutions respond. Some are moving out of the fossil fuel industry and at the least they’re being forced to respond. This is by small groups of people, right? There’s many different approaches, and we all have to work together on legal fronts, on the front lines, with community organizing, and from within political systems all at once.
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