2.1. Indian reservations


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Rellenar huecos

Watch and listen from the beginning to minute 6:23 and write from one to three words in each gap.

My name is Tara Houska, I'm clan from Couchiching First Nation, I was born under the Maple Sapping Moon in International Falls, Minnesota, and I'm happy to be here with all of you.

Trauma of indigenous peoples through the generations. Centuries of oppression, of isolation, of invisibility, have led to a understanding of who we are today. In 2017, we face this mixture of Indians in headdresses going across the plains but also the drunk sitting on a porch somewhere you never heard of, living off and casino money.

It's really, really hard. It's very, very difficult to be in these shoes, to stand here as a product of genocide survival, of genocide. We face this constant of unteaching the accepted narrative. 87 percent of references in textbooks, children's textbooks, to Native Americans are pre-1900s. Only half of the US states mention more than a single tribe, and just four states mention the era, the era that was responsible for my grandmother and her brothers and sisters having their language and culture beaten out of them. When you aren't viewed as real people, it's a lot easier to run over your rights.

Four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC. I had finished school and I was there to be a tribal and represent tribes across the nation, representing on the Hill, and I saw immediately why racist imagery matters. I moved there during football season, of all times. And so it was the daily of Indian heads and this "redskin" slur everywhere, while my job was going up on the Hill and trying to lobby for hospitals, for funding for schools, for basic government services, and being told again and again that Indian people were incapable of managing our own affairs. When you aren't viewed as real people, it's a lot easier to your rights.

And last August, I went out to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. I saw resistance happening. We were standing up. There were youth that had run 2,000 miles from Cannonball, North Dakota all the way out to Washington, DC, with a message for President Obama: "Please . Please do something. Help us." And I went out, and I heard the call, and so did thousands of people around the world.

Why did this resonate with so many people? Indigenous peoples are impacted first and worst by climate change. We are impacted first and worst by the fossil-fuel industry. Here in Louisiana, the first US exist. They are Native people being pushed off their homelands from rising sea levels. That's our reality, that's what we live. And with these projects comes a slew of human costs that people don't think about: thousands of workers to build these pipelines, to build and extract from the earth, bringing crime and sex trafficking and violence with them. Missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada has become so significant it's a movement and a national inquiry. Thousands of Native women who have disappeared, who have been murdered. And here in the US, we don't even that. We are instead left with an understanding that our Supreme Court, the United States Supreme Court, stripped us, in 1978, of the right to prosecute at the same rate as anywhere else in the United States. So as a non-Native person you can walk onto a reservation and rape someone and that tribe is without the same level of prosecutorial ability as everywhere else, and the Federal Government declines these cases 40 percent of the time. It used to be 76 percent of the time. One in three Native women are in her lifetime. One in three.

But in Standing Rock, you could feel the energy in the air. You could feel the resistance happening. People were standing and saying, "No more. Enough is enough. We will put our bodies in front of the machines to stop this project from happening. Our lives matter. Our children's lives matter." And thousands of came to stand with us from around the world. It was incredible, it was incredible to stand together, united as one.

In my time there, I saw Natives being by police officers shooting at them, history playing out in front of my eyes. I myself was put into a dog kennel when I was arrested. But funny story, actually, of being put into a dog kennel. So we're in this big wire kennel with all these people, and the police officers are there and we're there, and we start like dogs. You're going to treat us like dogs? We're going to act like dogs. But that's the resilience we have. All these horrific images playing out in front of us, being an indigenous person pushed off of Native lands again in 2017. But there was such beauty. On one of the days that we faced a line of hundreds of police officers , pushing us off indigenous lands, there were those teenagers out on horseback across the plains. They were herding hundreds of buffalo towards us, and we were crying out, calling, "Please turn, please turn." And we watched the buffalo come towards us, and for a moment, everything stopped. The police stopped, we stopped, and we just saw this beautiful, amazing moment of .

Adapted from: https://www.ted.com/talks/tara_houska_the_standing_rock_resistance_and_our_fight_for_indigenous_rights/transcript#t-503030

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Pregunta Verdadero-Falso

Watch from minute 6:23 to the end and decide if the following statements are True or False.

Pregunta 1

1. People from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation came over in a hurry with attack dogs to stop it.

Pregunta 2

2. The woman bitten by a dog is still taking part in another pipeline project.

Pregunta 3

3. The speaker stresses that most of us think no more of where we really come from.

Pregunta 4

4. As an example of cultural survival she shows a musical instrument used at rain rituals.

Pregunta 5

5. They have cost this company five billion dollars without taking into account banks behind these projects.

Pregunta 6

6. The speaker believes education is a paramount base to shape society.

Pregunta 7

7. The speaker affirms that treaties are obeyed since they are the supreme law of the land.

Pregunta 8

8. The speaker states that her community is a young one.

Curiosidad

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Image by Free-Photos in Pixabay under public domain

Here you have ten extraordinary Native American Sites protected on public lands that are worth a visit.