it really is an honor to be able to celebrate with you on this first anniversary of seattle's indigenous peoples day and it was an on our last year to be able to sponsor this resolution and we have to be clear this resolution just as we made clear last year this indigenous peoples day is a recognition of indigenous people but it is also a correction of revisionist history it is a rejection of columbus day columbus and ignores the genocide of an entire continent and teaches implicitly teaches racism where some people's humanity is deemed less meaningful than others year i think we are defining the tradition of what this holiday can mean to us i don't indigenous peoples day can become a day when politicians can pretend that they care one day of the your but empty rhetoric it can be a day of struggle every year we continue to score new victories for seattle's indigenous communities but that's our choice we have the power to decide environmental justice let this day be a reminder for us that we still have that systemic struggle ahead of us and what are we doing today in that to build a t we have to fight to bring forward the boarding school resolution as part of this program in this room through the boarding school resolution we are saying that genocide not only includes brothers every year on indigenous peoples day let us use the celebrations to continue our struggle and let us start discussing today what do we want to fight for from now until indigenous peoples day twenty sixteen i thank you for all your carnage i owe you all to join me in the fight for affordable housing and to address the racial inequities in seattle public schools the indigenous peoples down resolution and today's boarding schools resolution to success and i thank him with you a story behind this necklace and i'm wearing last year matt gave this to me on my birthday because it has a symbol of war years from his community and i took it to mean that it was a in light moment by the seattle city council and the city of seattle to do this to recognize indigenous peoples as a part of this world thank you to people the people the muckleshoot people for their territory that i have come to very great thank you for the place that the sailors see that's pretty cool we all did that i'm really big on this naming and you know in this naming of things could you ever notice like this whole continent is like named after a bunch of like basically named after a bunch of white as like you know how what kind of brain like makes it so that you could name something as large as a mountain as after something as small as a human you know as like perplex me my whole life and you know it changes how people view things if it's named after all these guys and so we're just beginning you guys are doing some leadership here and you know i really appreciate that as we look out across a lot of work ahead in the renaming and the recovery and the restoration of places and i'm grateful that i come on here so in doing this and remembering our ancestors and those who sang here and prayed here in this place those who knew the secrets of creation the stories of relatives who have wings and we reaffirm our place here as a people who remember as a people who do not suffer from historic amnesia do not step aside from ecological amnesia but our people we are people who live today in a civil society which knows where it is exactly and is willing to be healthy healthy and beautiful song i'm really grateful to be here with you on this day so you know i'm i'm fifty six and in my fifty four years of those was i had to have that columbus thing shoved down my throat just like the rest you write and somehow it was palatable you know i mean they they they made it like it was the way that it was and i'm never going to understand that how they and you know that that all worked out for all those years and so when i think of b c i think of before columbus i also think of before cook if you are from the pacific islands ok and i think of it as before colonization place for ten thousand years with such grace and elegance without being great peoples and now is this opportunity when we begin perhaps to be able to tell those stories with light and beauty with light and beauty instead of kind of marginalized to some party or anthropology class you know i'm really tired of being over there in the anthropology class i have to say some maybe you know in in our his in longer having historic amnesia we remember that for ten thousand years we lived in fish here we made love to our husbands and our wives that we created the finest basket weaves in our hands elegant elegant peoples and we are those peoples today so as i reflect on things i think of the things that were learned and the things that were not learned you know we contributed eight thousand varieties of court a pretty good gig right i mean you get real like corn does not exist in nature it's to use in today and the reason that corn exists is because of our ancestors and ancestors to the south of us varieties of potatoes we were not just like you know chillin over here we're busy we're busy making some great food and then i think about these words someone who is i know wattle speaker can probably help me out with this but from what i know the word to model right meaning that they're western hemisphere in origin now that's some pretty good stuff to do spit world i don't know a world without chocolate would be kind of rough you know what i'm saying and you know i love the italians but they would have no merit or a sauce it's like this like the omission about where they came from was this like from like outer space that the spanish came to do you know what i'm saying the spanish brought the tomato to europe in fifteen forty like well where did they get that tomato you know the medicine of a same we call it a same it is tobacco it is a medicine it is a curse if you misuse it like most of our medicines it is a great gift and how you talk directly to the creator in our territory it is also something you should not misuse we have pharmacology to heal the magic of our medicines which is how we have survived for all these years whether it was or whether it is aspirin or quinine the multitude of medicines that come from indigenous people that we never got any credit for and today as bio piracy continues in the amazon well you see i major multinational drug companies down there prospect ing and trying to take traditional knowledge and traditional medicines that are for people and turn it for private profits but we have that knowledge of those medicines and then we have knowledge of climate as look at these pictures of something called the winter count which you know a lot of people know about a long time ago we used to in the northern plains people used to write their history by drawing on the side of buffalo robes so we kept a lot of our history and they had marked significant historic events and so there was a winter in man down territory where that where the snow was higher than the  that is some climate knowledge that our peoples have historically that is something that needs to be referred to a little bit more in this area we are the people who have course contributed representational democracy to the united states now you all know that a lot of people do not know that in public office right you know the fact is that the people who came to this country they had no experience whatsoever with democracy they came from monarchy and feudalism they came from being imprisoned in treated like third class citizens and so they came here and where do they go to learn about democracy they had sources from different places but they went to see the iroquois confederacy who had developed a representation on democracy and a confederacy right after many years of battling each other we are quite fit confederacy knew enough to put their weapons down at the foot of a tree and make peace that is a lesson that has never been learned by the united states has they took notes and representatives and such but they had a pretty significant mission which i think most of us in the room know which is that the klan mothers are who appointed and removed the chiefs and this country of course when they created th representation of democracy the only people could vote were white man who owned property and some of that property was also people so we have some work to do on this democracy thing because i haven't seen it fully evolve yet  in congress and who is in the senate but in seattle i see a lot of people of color and i see more and more people that look like all of us in office i'm not a there are lessons that still need to be secured and so when i see something like indigenous people's day i see kind of like the opportunity you know as bob marley would say bob to liberate your mind to let stuff go and to recognize that some people had a much better idea than you did in your entrenched power system and now would be some time to take some good notes because things are not working out perfectly for us so it's an opportunity i think about what some of those opportunities are for instance if you look on a worldwide scale there's about nine million prisoners in the world and we got two point two million or two point three million of them here in the united states right highest rates of incarceration and all of us have relatives in prison right now as me i have family who has been in prison and i have family that is now in prison because i come from people that look like this and that is how i usually end up in prison in this country is if you are poor or brown  in america a little bit better from indigenous people we would know something about restored of justice and the idea that for instance in the case of crow dog versus spotted tail were  dog assassinated spotted tail in eight hundred eighty three or eight hundred eighty two in south dakota the luck code of justice system said that the descendants of quote dog had to now care for the family of spotted tail because they had denied him the man on the head of their family who would care for their food and so that family was now responsible the other family the crow dog family the united states did not like how that worked out and instead created the major crimes act and said that indian people should be in a punitive justice system because that has worked out so well for the united states  in that they did sentence him to death because that is how punitive justice system works but with the passage of the end the major crimes that came upon our territory but i do not believe he was actually killed because the court ruled that he had already in a double justice system but i'm still saying that in our next evolution if we continue the process of understanding what indigenous people bring maybe we can create a multicultural civil society where some of these teachings exist as a part of public policy could learn a lot from indigenous peoples economics because from what i see the economics of conquest colonization and capitalism is not working out well either for the majority of us or for the earth you cannot keep exploiting taking more than you need and not leaving the rest nor we can we continue to live in a society which which decides that it could extra lives all its problems dumping them in third world countries tempting them in our territories what we know is that indigenous economics your wealth was attributed to how much you gave away not how much you society is not based on your hoarding like the koch brothers your status is what you do for your family what you do for your community and how much you give away of yourself and of your wealth and i think that there is a great great amount to be learned from that kind of a knowledge of that kind of economic system that's also how you can hang out for a lot longer if you're careful and respectful in our public policy wisdom we could learn a lot from indigenous peoples teachings of considering in each deliberation the impact upon the seventh generation from now right now public policy is written by politicians for election years and the hand on the pan is usually an oil company or a pharmaceutical company or a coal company or a utility those who have money influence our public policy because what is happening in our society as you all know is that the energy industry and monsanto control a lot of the politics and that is not going to work out well for us over the long haul and if we were reflective society we would learn from the teachings of that your choir that say in each deliberation we consider the impact upon the seven generation from now because what i know is that which you know which is that everything we have today we inherit we are very very fortunate that our ancestors were strong people were very very fortunate that our ancestors took care of this land so well we are very very fortunate that our ancestors stood up and fought for every right that we have every recognition that we have and we also know that those who are not yet here are counting on us to not mess on us to make sure that there will be water for them to drink that there will still be fish that the air will not be so poisoned or so hot that they cannot live and so it is important that we consider how we make public policy that is not based on today's election years but is instead based on a long term view of how you protect the commons  you do that is you do something it lightened like bolivia does a country headed by an indigenous leader able morales and the whole chunk nation of wisconsin recently just passed the rights of mother earth like many of you likely do as well that rivers also have a right to live and the peseta might have a right to continue to exist and not be over allocated to fishing trawlers and have their rivers  all of life all of our relatives have have these rights so those are some of the things that i hope to see as we continue to evolve as civic society the civil society together because we are only in this together but let us just say a few things about where we are now i want to say that the duwamish are full people what you will find is that that is how it is worked out you take the wampanoag people who live on cape cod and it took them a very long time to get federal recognition and that is because of the price of real estate and a lot of you have hawaiian brothers and sisters and you know that hawaiian peoples rights a very small in comparison to even our minimal rights we have held onto as indigenous people and my theory on that is price of real estate the price of real estate does not determine whether or not you are a person and we all know that these people have been here for a very long time greed in real estate should not determine the identity of people in reviewing the city of seattle's recent history well i was actually just super proud of all the people who cocked up there when shallow came to town and i want to say you know indigenous people as we're talking about that columbus guy who came towards our shores do not let it it's not a good idea to let the ships come in move into your harbor do not let them move into your harbor because oil companies are not entitled to the world is joined to you in many ways you know i live in northern minnesota and my own territory i live on the same lake that my great great great great great slave dog you know that's a great privilege to be one of those people you know that is in the same place as a privilege of being an indigenous person and in this moment in time we're facing the largest oil pipeline company in the world the ambridge company but they are just like tkinter morgan trying to come in here they're just like those guys trying to go to cherry point right and they're trying to come in with their fossil fuels and at this moment in time it's really really important that we say no and we stop because if we you know unless we're all missed something this is the hottest year on record and it was one hundred sixty five degrees in iran this summer just see that all the heat hottest record in history and they just got what twenty seven inches of rainfall in two days in south carolina that is the climate change catastrophe that is the cat caster free that would we have brought upon us from the missions fifty to seventy years ago what we are doing now and what they are attempting to do what shell is attempting to do in the arctic what the koch brothers are attempting to do in the tar sands and what they are trying to do to bring those bomb cranes out here from the bokken is to combust the planet to oblivion it is our spiritual moment to stop them it is our moment as the people who are here we can stop them from doing that we could stop them from come busting the planet to oblivion from poisoning the waters and from genetically engineering the world's food supply and we get to be the people who do that so that's how i see this and we are certainly all in this together so there are a few lessons in closing i think  was like oh what am i doing here i was doing something because my father passed away anyway like this german this german journalist came to talk to me and i kind of you know i'm trying to be cool like super tired and super not patient but i tried to call him the guy says he starts talking to me about imago cells have any of you ever heard of imago cells the reason to tell you this is because you can learn something from everybody that's part of the point of this is like be a little more humble right and like sometimes the person that you were just about to go oh i don't want to talk about first so they give you this great gift to this thing so imago cells what is a caterpillar when they go into their chrysalis to metamorphosis you all know what i'm talking about into a butterfly there's these cells that are appear they're called imago cells and first they are killed off by the organism by the caterpillar and then they emerge and there are more and more of them and they are what enables a caterpillar to turn into something as beautiful as a monarch butterflies the imago cells it is the same word as the say it's it has the same root as the word imagination and i think about that because sometimes it takes those cells or those people to come out and you know maybe we're getting pounded down you know i have been with a lot of you in the streets and i've been on a lot of streets demonstrating i've been arrested you know i've been hit on the head any time recently and i'm trying to avoid that one because i'm a little too old but you know i'm stan is that sometimes you do it and you do it and you do it and then finally they take over and that is part of what i see this opportunity as this opportunity of enlightment and so in this beautiful world that it is our opportunity to make i think of things like my relatives to the south or our relatives to the south at hoop and iraq who conduct world renewal ceremonies and i think about the beauty of somebody who read news the world through their ceremonial commitment every year and i'm grateful to them because i think that the world is renewed each year because of that was prayers and those ceremonies and it is to be those people and to make this world beautiful so as the forces of the unenlightened in the evil in the greedy oil companies and the chemical companies try to poison our water and poison our air remember that our resistance is what stops they get what they want unless you stand up unless you go to your city council unless you go to the hearings unless you fight them and i'll tell you something that you all probably now which is that the longer you fight them the more expensive their project is they might go bankrupt i think that's what happened to what isn't that what they're call the washington public power supply right with their nuclear power plants what about acronym who chose out for th because a lot of people stood on the line and said we don't want another nuclear power plant here they did they went bankrupt a lot of these guys should just be bankrupt you know they should not benefit anymore from stealing from the earth and stealing from people about ideas you've got to fight them and then you have to work to make the difference and how you rebuild and restore a beautiful world is through your actions is through your ceremonies our ceremonies through our prayers through our feastings and it is through our actions i think of that guy moto i know some of you know who i'm talking about the water crystal guy right d moto right and remember what he does if you take polluted water and you seeing you pray to and you celebrate it the water becomes beautiful again right and that is the teaching of the beauty of the human being spiritually and our place in the universe so do not forget that we have that great spiritual power because we have that as humans we just need to make sure that we actual and then we also have the ability to clean things up i was out out east hanging out with some of my cool people this last week this guy named john todd was talking about water purification systems and i was like he says i'm a water doctor i was thinking about that into the main thing is don't make a worse mess but then start getting busy cleaning it up what we've got right we have the ability to do that saying is like riding horses that are like this like sirens there's cop cars there's flashing lights there's banners and there's people who want to take a picture of the guy next to you on a horse walking in front of you you're going it's a really right so the point is you all know no combustion engine right so i walk out of my teepee into a no combustion engine the guy powered on solar panels at his house sounded pretty good you know but that's basically what i want i want to walk out of my t i don't think anybody this room could actually afford a tesla at this point but the point is is that i want to move it and i want to move it in an elegant way to oppose fossil fuels economy i want to live in an economy where the food is local i know where it came from when the farmer was respected what not put things that's a side on things they eat right that's just my thinking on this but you know because can correct me if i'm wrong but i think i'm wrong i want to i want to live in a place where the energy that i use that my society is efficiently consumed we waste fifty three seven percent of our power in this city between point of origin and point of consumption and that's not the way an enlightened society lives you don't have exploding gas means right and you know waste everything and you don't destroy vast river systems and destroy other people to keep the lights on you live in an efficient and enlightened society which which can exist but you need the political will to do the right thing i want to live in a society where the quality of life is not determined by the level of income missing and that we are not in direct us my community is under duress as are most of your families and are most of your communities i do not want to live in teressa if i can pay my heat bill i don't want to live and arrests on how much bail money i have to come up with and i do not want to live and arrests to worry about how things are going to work out three months from now because i am hand to mouth with you know that is what we are that is what we owe to those generations that are not yet here and that is something that is in the power once we liberate our minds for us to do in my language are the same from out here different people speaking in different language but the same story i thought you might like to hear my language but i also wonder if you'll notice that none of those moons is named after a roman emp because it's ok no counseling is needed but it is possible to live in a society with a worldview that does not include empire believe we have it as we open our minds here you know i'm really honored to be here with you really honored to be here with you in seattle really honored to be here in a place that is getting in the process of kind of deconstructing some of the bad naming that members oceans that's a good start though we're starting on it and just great admiration and respect to all out here and i want to make sure also to acknowledge that you know i'm i'm happy to share our tomatoes forever with you telling secrets thank you very much for your time  order to release him great for the inmates early and the state of california has argued in court that they cannot do that because it would jeopardize their firefighting program now  corporations are a major barrier to these types of climate policy where i live in ontario we have been successfully challenge after world trade organization for introducing a bold energy program that require