Transcript

Alicia Garza:
Welcome to Sunstorm where we get real about what’s happening in the world and what we’re doing about it, because we are the light in the storm. Hi, I’m Alicia Garza.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
And I’m Ai-jen Poo. And today we have a woman joining our show whose work is, how do I say? Saving the world we live in.

 

Alicia Garza:
Yes. We are not even exaggerating. Tara Houska is an attorney, an environmental organizer and the founder of the Giniw Collective, which is resisting the 7.5 billion. Yes, I said billion, with a B, line three pipeline project, which is set to be built in Northern Minnesota. She is calling us today from the front lines at Giniw’s resistance camp, where she has been living with other water protectors for the past three years, my goodness, three years.

 

Tara Houska:
It’s so good to connect with you over Zoom.

 

Alicia Garza:
Awesome to have you join us. Thank you so much. We know you’re in motion and you are literally taking a small break to holler at us as you’re fighting a huge project that has huge consequences. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re up to right now? I mean, we’re telling our listeners that you’re Zooming in with us from the front lines. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

Tara Houska:
Sure. So when I first logged on, we were facing a lodge that’s in our encampment. I walked you guys over to some of the gardens that we’ve put in place. Sovereign feuds is a huge piece of understanding what we’re actually fighting for. To me, it’s one of the pieces of environmental resistance that’s oftentimes overlooked. Right now at this exact moment, I’m actually heading over to Duluth for one of the court cases that water protectors are currently facing.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Talk to us a little bit about that. You did begin your career as a lawyer representing tribal interests, and now you’re fighting for the earth herself and you’re fighting in court. You’re also organizing, you’re doing all the things, building a movement, and talk to us a little bit about your journey from being a lawyer to living on this encampment for three years.

 

Tara Houska:
So I started out in DC representing tribal nations all over the country and saw firsthand what the treatment of native people was on Capitol Hill. What happens when there’s a total lack of education and understanding at those levels, and seeing that in real time and how it impacts folks and everyday lives. I had actually got involved in what I didn’t really know was outside of the box, more like movement organizing stuff through a case that went through the courts during my bar studies and I was getting to prepare. It was a case called Baby Veronica, a young Cherokee child who had been adopted out through a for-profit adoption and her Cherokee father had fought for her since she was born. And she has rights to her tribe through the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is intended to address the separation of children from native families and native tribes.

 

And they used every last aspect, the adoptive couple, used every last aspect of public pressure. So like Dr. Phil and CBS, and all these different platforms like NPR to paint this native father as this terrible deadbeat person who was in active combat, a military member and a member of his community alongside his tribe fighting for this young girl. And they won, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court and they won. That was I think my activation into realizing just how critical those pieces really can be. And then I went out to Standing Rock and that was a understanding and recognition of a different type of work, which is land defense work. I’d been doing urban organizing and demonstrations during my lunch breaks at that point. And then just went all the way in and packed up everything I had into a rental car and drove out to North Dakota because those young kids came out and they ran all the way from Cannonball to DC and LaDonna Allard went on Facebook live, which was brand new. And so they were going to stand and fight.

 

Yeah. I never really went back, I think to that world, after that.

 

Alicia Garza:
I love that story so much, especially because I know so many people who have been politicized in this last moment. And literally it was just like you hearing a call out for not just for people to show up, but people actually saying, I’m going to do something about the things that I can no longer stand. And that sounds like it is exactly what happened with you so much so that you packed up a rental car and didn’t look back. I’ve read that you have talked about how the politicization of nature is criminal, and I’m hearing you talk about your shift from primarily focusing on urban organizing to really focusing on protecting the earth. I’d love to just sit with this for a little bit. Talk with us a little bit more about what you mean when you say the politicization of nature is criminal and talk with us too, about some of the work that you all are doing right now to fight back against that.

 

Tara Houska:
So I grew up in a town of 200 people outside of a larger town of about 4,000. It’s up in the north woods of Northern Minnesota. It’s on the Canadian US border. I’m a Northerner in a reserve that’s directly across the lake on one shore, but I’m a US citizen because I was born on the other side, so a border town in the truest sense of the word. But it also meant growing up with a really deep connection and understanding of living with the cycles of the forest and with the ecosystems around me, and we ate a lot of food off the land, and that was what kept our family going. Moving to the cities for the first time I mean, when it was like so overwhelming, there was more people in a classroom and it wasn’t my entire school. I had never seen that or understood that scale of extraction and how little connection people had.

 

So not knowing where the water [inaudible 00:06:28] were that were feeding the city or not knowing where the food came from or any of those pieces. I think going back to the land and being in Standing Rock and seeing people that were literally giving voice to the voiceless, they were standing with the earth directly, physically was so truthful and honest to me, and it was walking the talk. Everyone’s talking about the urgency of climate crisis and the world’s on fire, politicization that happens of “natural resources” and all these things and statistical analysis and whatever of global warming and the global south, it all feels really removed.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
I think that different people in different ways can relate to or connect with the idea that we can and should be more connected to the earth. And I think there’s probably a disconnect between how people understand these fights around pipeline projects and that very fundamental, essential connection that you just so beautifully talked about. What do you think people really need to understand that may not come across in the mainstream media about these campaigns around pipelines, billions of dollars of our public resources being invested in a project like a pipeline project. Bring our listeners up to speed about what’s at stake with these projects.

 

Tara Houska:
As folks who are essentially treated as consumers from the moment we’re born into the society, there’s been I think a campaign of propaganda and understandings and ways of knowing that leave people believing we need this thing. Like we have to have this thing to live. So the pipeline company that’s behind line 3 Embridge their motto is life takes energy, as if to say life doesn’t exist without per sense, it just can’t exist as we know it. And people have become used to that through the many comforts that the mainstream westernized society provides. So all the things that we’re told we have to have, and that’s where we begin equate happiness and success. And we start to really ingest all those hierarchical ways of thinking. So then it’s how much stuff do you have? What’s your title? What’s your value. And the hands that made this thing have less value, their way of life is not one that I would accept for myself, but they can do it because I need this thing or I was told, I need this thing.

 

The pipelines are, obviously being resisted by many indigenous folks, all over Turtle Island and also around the globe. They’re one piece of that, a fight that’s going on for mother earth, but it’s more than just the protection of those places, it’s about looking at that way of extraction and that economy of extraction, which is not just an economy of “natural resources” but people ourselves. And pushing back against that, as hard as we possibly can. And then native people are 5% of the population, we’re holding 80% of its biodiversity. So we have some understandings and ways of knowing that are more balanced and more in tune with our place in the world, in the web of life.

 

When you start looking at things, it’s like a web and it’s instead of this like pyramid structure or whatever, whatever the heck dominion always tries to put us into, we start to see the humanity of everything around us and the personhood or the life of everything around us. This isn’t just a fight for human beings and our right to survive, it’s our hope to survive. It’s also for all the beings that are around us, it’s everything. And so, yeah, we’re pushing back against consumption, we’re pushing to save the sacred that remains, the last beautiful places that these industries are coming for because their entire model of economy is based on infinite growth instead of a more sustainable way of being.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
That really resonates with me, especially when you talk about exploitation and extraction, being at the center of our entire culture and economic model. I think about the fact that at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we always talk about how it’s the invisible labor of women of color that have been at the heart of this country’s evolution and completely exploited and invisible. And there’s this way in which I think about the planet’s resources and the work that women have historically done in our communities that has made everything else possible. And yet our whole economic model and culture is designed to devalue it and make it invisible and make it so that we take it for granted and allow for this kind of extraction and abuse to happen. And so thinking about it from the lens of care, definitely everything you just said about the matrix that we’re in makes so much sense to me.

 

Tara Houska:
My mom’s a housekeeper. She’s one of those people that, caregiver who oftentimes in her career has been treated as less than a person. She has no agency. She has no value, she’s not even worth a hello. She comes home with her hands that are so beautiful and broken from that labor that’s so undervalued because she’s caring for someone else’s family and she’s making their lives better. Seeing that extraction happens to each other as, I guess, maybe that was part of maybe what made me the way I am, it was like, you see that firsthand and it’s a way of thinking that is very entrenched in this way of life.

 

Alicia Garza:
So what can it look like to actually shift that? We’ve talked about economies of extraction, it’s like parasitic, the ways in which we have learned to survive is not, it’s a different way of interdependence that is driven by greed and extraction. But I think for all of us who are fighting for a different world, we’ve talked about shifting those values, shifting from extraction to investment, but also care and shifting the values around how we’re organized and how we do things together, how we be together, from being parasitic to being cooperative. And I’m interested just in hearing a little bit more Tara about how do you see the work that you all are doing right now, not just fighting back against the pipelines, but also building the alternatives and building the world that we want to be living in. Talk to us a little bit about that and how that is getting us closer to a better future.

 

Tara Houska:
One of the pieces that I see when it comes to folks thinking about a resistance camp or a community that’s off grid or whatever it happens to be, especially if it’s involving indigenous folks is this romanticizing that happens. Like that’s so romantic and amazing and incredible. And it’s like, no, it’s actually an incredible amount of work, yeah, it is beautiful and it is powerful, but giving up comfort, unnecessary comfort is really difficult when that has been our reality for so long, that’s been our reality up to the moment that we choose to start letting those things go. There are so many lessons within that. And I think those are lessons that I see reflected into the value system of the lodges that I’m part of. And this lifelong work to grow spiritually and grow as a person and to find that healing within, and then the next step is what are you going to do about it?

 

And oftentimes it actually takes a lot of action to get to that point. So when we’re out fascinating or something like that, we’re physically depriving ourselves in order to elevate our minds and our spiritual side of ourselves. But we’re also learning so much along that journey, which is water, that second day without water is pretty tough, it’s a lesson that you carry with you everywhere you go, because you understand what it’s like to be without water. When you’re on the fourth day you’re really, you’ve reached a new level of understanding. For the world that we could be, I think it’s going to require that giving up those pieces of comfort, like, what are we willing to give up? What are we willing to do to try to reestablish a mutuality component, to our relationship with the earth and with each other?

 

And then we talk about mutual aid all the time, that’s been thrown around a lot, especially in the last year of the pandemic, but where’s the mutuality of our relationship with our mother. And it’s a pretty toxic relationship as it stands right now, we’re just taking and taking and taking and taking. And that toxicity is being realized through rising season, extreme weather and all these different pieces of our mother telling us, this is not going to work out in your favor. This is not a way to be. So I think it’s on the individual. I think that these pieces of fighting these larger corporate campaigns are trying to force that envelope faster. I think there’s the capitalist approach of, we’re green washing now, and we’re moving into electric vehicles and stuff like that, which to me is still fine, it’s still progress, it shows just like the power of the people.

 

But there is a lot to be said for education and our own growth and trying to make it through that grind because that grind is really damaging to us as people, we’re doing something really unnatural to our spirits when we do that. And we’re just trying to make that next paycheck or that next day to keep ourselves alive. I’m living a very different reality, when we’re out in the woods where I’m going to sit in this tree and I’m going to hunt and I’m going to hope that something comes along so I can eat [inaudible 00:17:03] for the next few months.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
I’m wondering what you have learned over the last three years through what you’ve given up.

 

Tara Houska:
Oh, I’ve learned so much, I grew up in one of the coldest places in the continental US, it’s the home of Rocky and Bullwinkle, International Falls, the big town next to it, yeah, it’s that place. Where it’s always winter because it is effing cold. But I thought I understood the winter really well and living outside is a far different relationship. I’ve been humbled in my time living out off-grid and still recognizing that I have access to grocery stores and all those things. My ancestors did not. It’s given me new respect for what they went through and why we count our age in winters. I understand that a lot more fully at this point. It’s also been really inspiring to see the number of young people that have come into this space and have been drawn to this space, to see that a large piece of those folks tend to be that they are femme women, two-spirit, queer, non-gendered, those are the folks that are out there. And it’s interesting to see that too.

 

And Minnesota is the home of where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd and that’s the same people you see in those streets. It was a lot of young, Black, Brown, queer folks that were out standing together. It’s enabled me to have a lot more interaction with hope and to see that healing happening in real time.

 

Alicia Garza:
I love it. I’m still stuck on the piece that you reminded us of that change is hard. It sounds so simple, but just changing our way of life, changing the way that we relate to each other, changing the way that we relate to the planet, to our communities, to our food system, to our water, really means that there will be some discomfort in the shift from what we know, which is convenient, but toxic, to the shift towards what we want and what we need, which is much more imbalanced, certainly, but that may not be as fast or quick or easy. So I’m sitting with that. And when it comes to climate, when it comes to issues of the environment, as I understand it, we have already gone over the tipping point. And so the choices that we make in this moment are incredibly important.

 

Tara Houska:
Yeah. We’re essentially just playing with, how bad is it going to be? There usually comes a point in almost every interaction I have with folks that are asking questions about, what do you think is going to happen? What if we really are screwed essentially? The climate science is quite clear on that and that’s really hard. There’s climate anxiety that exists now and there’s climate depression and different things that are making their way through the population because we know. We know what’s happening. The way I’ve been taught and the way I understand things we have been wiped out before, when we were out of balance with the earth, we’re out of balance with nature, with animals. So to me that concept really isn’t like one that’s like the doom and gloom kind of thing. But why don’t we still want to fight with every last bit of our agency and energy and beauty to make the best world we possibly could, in that time?

 

Why don’t we want to build a world that has racial justice, social justice, gender justice, that is more reflective of the wealth that we’re part of and not to be the most beautiful human beings we possibly can be? The status quo, I think, is so much more than just the status quo of extracts of economy, it’s also, what are we going to do? Why fight? You hear that question, why fight if everything’s lost? Well, because we’re still in this pattern of growth. And so in this cycle of being that we get a little bit further along wouldn’t we want to give that and be part of that?

 

Ai-jen Poo:
I hear in that actually a tremendous amount of hope and Gloria Steinem once said that hope is a form of planning. And I also hear in your words a different sense of time, which also for some weird reason, relaxes me. Having a different sense of time, thinking about the life cycle of winters and of the planet as a whole just feels like it’s more spacious. What is your sense of time? And do you feel like what you’ve learned being off the grid for the last three years, gives you a different sense of it?

 

Tara Houska:
Time to me is one of those structural pieces that separates us, it’s just another aspect to me, of us trying to have dominion over something that we never can, just like we can never have dominion over the earth, we can never have dominion over time itself. Trying to solve the world’s problems, it gets a little bit further, but then I feel like the language that’s been given is one that’s very cold and disconnected because of the language that we all know and share together at this point. But there are other languages and other ways of thinking. My concept of time, living in a resistance camp for this long is very different for sure. It’s more like time that I have to remember to interact in the world and to try to do my best to change what’s happening outside time when it starts to break down, I feel like people become so much freer.

 

That was one of the most beautiful pieces of Standing Rock that people didn’t really talk about quite so much. Just a sense of being together, living like that, and sharing time and space and sitting by a fire and not thinking about, oh, I got to do this thing and I got to do this thing and I got to do this thing, it’s a different type of thing. Or like people sitting in a indigenous led meeting, which you don’t know how long that meetings is going to go, you don’t know exactly when it’s going to start. But I think, yeah, those pieces really help. I mean, that’s how the lodge teaches us to. And I was out here in this struggle, I’ve been arrested. There was a lodge in the middle of a active construction site. And then we had allies around us who were people of faith and they surrounded us with straight boxes, literally creating a line to protect us as we prayed and sang.

 

A little bit different structure of it is it’s also can be like for living, it can be for prayer and ceremony, it can be for so many different pieces. And it’s something that’s been with us for so long, since our people have come into existence, we’ve had that structure, that simple structure that has so many pieces to it. The way that it’s made and all that has a meaning.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Well, just a quick follow up on moments of joy that you’ve felt. What gives you hope?

 

Tara Houska:
When I see a young person harvest wild rice for the first time or drink from a tree for the first time, that gives me enormous joy.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Wow.

 

Tara Houska:
Watching their eyes open a little wider and see the world, maybe a little differently. It’s really powerful. It gives me hope to see people from all walks of life, coming out and standing in solidarity together for a place that’s not necessarily their own, but they understand it is everyone’s at the same time. None of that sense of belonging and ownership in the sense that we have a duty to protect it for those to come, that is enormously powerful. And it’s something that I hold very dear to my heart. It’s really hopeful to see I think some of the connective tissue also forming and reforming and perhaps healing in some ways between Black and indigenous folks in particular, because those libratory movements to me are so intertwined and critical. It’s a different type of connectivity and it’s really beautiful to be part of that and to see that.

 

Yeah, plus it’s badass when I see anybody coming out to camp and giving up, they’re just like, “Wait, where, wait, what?” But then people watch people get the rhythm too and start to really figure it out. And they start to look at their phones less and they start to be in the space more. And that’s really cool.

 

Alicia Garza:
I love that so much. And I love how, in this moment in particular, I think one of the things that is bringing me so much joy is seeing the ways in which our movements are inspiring each other to be one movement and creating space for each other, to be one movement. And I’m seeing so much space that is opening that is so different than it was literally a decade ago. I just was in conversation with an OG the other day. And she was saying, and reminded me that in this last decade, we have accomplished things that folk never thought was possible. And we’re alive to see that, we’re alive to be a part of it. And we’re going to keep pushing, let’s go.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Let’s do it.

 

Tara Houska:
I remember a little while back, one of the folks who ended up actually coming out to camp from DC, never been in a place like this. She’s a young Black person and the NGO space tried to pit us against each other, like we were taking from each other’s movements or something. And it was so, like there was a moment where we were both on the same space and we were like, no, this is awesome. I want their movement to succeed because it’s our movement, there’s is ours and ours is theirs, it was really beautiful. And then watching all the folks that are rallying around, like anti-Asian violence and just all these different pieces, that it’s like, no, you’re not taking anything. We’re trying to all give to each other and to stand together to be one, because we’re all fighting the same problems of colonialism and White supremacy and oligarchy, all of us are in this fight together.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
That’s right. From the zero sum to the abundant power of the people.

 

Alicia Garza:
Come on.

 

Tara Houska:
Oh, I like that.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Thank you. We are truly grateful for your time with us this morning. And I know I’m feeling inspired and my heart is full. For those of you who are listening, go follow Tara right now at Z-H-A-A-B-O-W-E-K-W-E on Twitter. And just learn from the best, do it. And while you’re there follow @sunstormpod too, we have more amazing conversations coming this season. So you don’t want to miss a thing. Until next time loves, ciao.

 

Alicia Garza:
Ciao.

 

Ai-jen Poo:
Sunstorm is a project of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in collaboration with Participant. Sunstorm is executive produced by Alicia Garza, Ai-jen Poo and Kristina Mevs-Apgar. Sunstorm is produced by Amy S. Choi and Rebecca Lehrer of The Mash-Up Americans. Producers are Shelby Sandlin, Mary Phillips Sandy and Mia Warren. Original music composed by Jen Kwok and Jody Shelton.

 

Alicia Garza:
There’s just a thing that breaks in people, where like, I’m not going to fucking do this with you. You know what I mean?