Vessel

The link here will take you to an hour long video that is totally worth watching if you have an hour. But even if you don’t, you should watch her anyway. Great speaker.

She’s been the running mate on the green party presidential ticket long before Sarah Palin and Hiliary Clinton decided to run and you can see why. The main takeaways I got from her lecture:

-Naming immortal places after people screw up our relationship with the earth. Paraphrasing what she said - ‘I don’t understand why white people want to name big mountains after small men’. She asks what this does to our mentality.

- That anyone can fight corporations. She said that many think of American Indians as the lowest of the low, without many resources. She and her family on white earth have stopped over 500 coal and mining and other energy gathering/polluting plants across the nation. If she can do it, anybody can.

- Whites need to get into the process of decolonizing themselves. As another person put it at the assembly, we are blocked by our birthright. One example she mentioned was the immaculate lawns our suburbs covet being a hallmark of British Empire. She tells us to yank up those lawns and put what was there in the first place; food. Plant some corn.

- As an oppressed peoples, quit dwelling on it. As she said, quit talking about talking about it. She said “You can complain about your kids getting diabetes or get them some food.” I think this can apply to whites as well, who complain that the system is too messed up to change. Quit complaining about it, and do the simple common sense thing to fix it.

- She touched on religion, saying her religion is over 7,000 years old and is what the land has known since time immemorial. She talked about how the first time the Pope down to South America, the people had the land and he had the bibles. On his most recent visit back, the indigenous people had the bibles but he had the land. The came to him to give him his bible back.

There are more things she talked about well while being very engaging. I enjoy how she can tie everything together - food, energy, oppression of peoples - and trace it back to the root cause of colonialism without getting academic or snarky.

So, an hour well spent. Click on the link and listen to her.