Tara Houska

https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/Houska%20Testimony.pdf

Testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on the Environment The Role of Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Preventing Action on the Climate Crisis

Tara Houska, Founder, Giniw Collective

April 18, 2021 Introduction Boozhoo, My name is Tara Houska and I am an attorney and organizer from Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe on the border of Ontario and Minnesota. I am the co-founder of Not Your Mascots and the founder of the Giniw Collective.I spent six months on the frontlines fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and am currently engaged in the movement to defund fossil fuels and a yearslong struggle against Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota. Indigenous Rights and Leadership The most common perception of Native people is that we are ‘people of the past’ — that we are a static footnote in history. We were here before the arrival of the United States, before America, before Canada, and we live on still. There is a long history of dispossession, genocide, and removal; then almost nothing. Too often, people think we didn’t keep progressing after the late 1800s. Indigenous peoples are just five percent of the global population, yet eighty percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is in Indigenous lands. We are the last holders of the sacred places left on Earth.

Despite this, our voices are often absent from the table of solving climate crisis. Our sovereignty is not absolute and instead is subject to the whims of the judiciary and a confusing web of governmental authority often heavily influenced by special interests. One solution beyond teaching the basic truths of life — that we all need healthy water, air, and soil to live — is the imperative that we stand together centering justice, equity, and reconnect to the living world as beings in community with our Mother. We know what a just transition should look like. We must find what that looks like for everyone, as water shortages are already ongoing. We must protect communities that are already at risk, those who are impacted first and worst. Indigenous peoples never lost our connection to the land and to the water. Many of us live in community with our Mother as a practice, not in theory. I always ask people to find out where their food comes from, where their water comes from, and to truly internalize what that means. So many people buy things and don’t have a second thought about the hands and places their purchases came from. They turn on their tap and or buy a bottle of water and don’t think about the journey from the Earth to their lips. Everything comes from somewhere. Every bit of life comes from the Earth and everything is returned to the Earth, including human beings.