 Aloha and welcome to Cooper Union. Today we're looking at indigenous rights in the times of Thanksgiving and we're looking at indigenous resistance from the Russell Tribunal to today. I'm very fortunate to have three guests with us who are very experienced in this Russell Tribunal and have participated throughout and continued up until today to make sure that the human rights of indigenous peoples is respected protected and promoted around the planet. I would first like to welcome Phyllis Young who is an amazing activist who participated in the Russell Tribunal that took place in Rotterdam, Holland 40 years ago. Phyllis, could you share with us why you attended and participated in the Russell Tribunal? Chante wa shtein na fitchu zapi. I offer you my hand with a good heart. A woman who stands by the water, a woman who loves the water. Those are my given names by my people and my family. We were 10 years into the movement in the international community starting in 1974, founding of the international Indian Treaty Council here at Standing Rock after Wundit Nee. We embarked on finding membership and having a place at the table in the United Nations in 1977. We convened at the Geneva conference of which I was a coordinator and met the great Edith Valentine there. I worked with her for many years and so I'm very privileged to be able to transition and to speak on issues as the movement evolved and so it's a privilege to be here today and to have participated in the virtual Russell Tribunal in Rotterdam and we owe a lot to the country of the Netherlands, to those who facilitate it for us to speak and to have a voice and to seek the dignity that all people should have. I come here, I thank you once again speaking for Indigenous peoples all over but we were 10 years into the movement in the international community and we embarked on having a voice through the Bertrand Russell. When we came I talked about Mario Jaruna who was the chair in absentia and we protested worldwide and enabled him to present at the last of the days so victory in protest and marches and we continue in that fashion in a good and peaceful manner so it was a time for us to step up. We were called upon by the Chiefs. We come from a very egalitarian society, a universal society, a pluralistic people so we have a worldview, a universal view so I feel like we could feel the spirit and the pain and the absence of Indigenous people. At that time we didn't have the word Indigenous because we coined that phrase in the United Nations when we came together. I thought we are all Lakota, I thought we were Indian, I thought we were very exclusive but we are not and so we termed the phrase Indigenous to include all natural peoples of every land in the world so unity and so when we were in our adolescence when we came to the Russell Tribunal we understood our struggle and we understood the technologies that were being used against us and for them to use sterilization was critical to our numbers and our populations because we were diminishing in the Western Hemisphere, North and South America were targets as well as India, Egypt and Africa so we had a common voice, we had common ground and so we were ready and we stated our case at the Tribunal. We were not part of a juried decision but we embarked nevertheless on making a statement on the survival of our people, primarily the women, long story short, Oceti Shakui, more men and more women have been sterilized under their program. Thank you so much and it's important to share that the struggle that you're talking about has been centuries long but the resistance is even stronger. You also said that you weren't on the jury but we have a person Stefano who's also a professor who can share with us his role at the Russell Tribunal 40 years ago as well as the most recent three-day seminar that brought all the people together who participated 40 years ago. Stefano? Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here accompanying the company of Phyllis, T.P., you, Josh, three wonderful, two wonderful women and one wonderful man. I came to the Russell Tribunal because at that time in 1980 I had been very active as an anthropologist, Euro-American anthropology. I was born in Italy originally. The unfortunate place of my birth is Genova, which was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. Look at the destiny of life. I saw, but in any case, I migrated as a young man to Peru looking for a change of life and in the 70s I got heavily involved in a very important social movement that took place in Peru that was trying to change Peru from a sort of feudal society where 400 families owned 97% of the land and 90% of the people were indigenous or 80% of the people were indigenous, are indigenous, and the minority of mestizo and white and criollo people on all the land, all the means of production, etc. So the revolution was trying to change that. It lasted only five years. It was displaced by a military coup supported by the CIA and the US and Kissinger at the time and all the good guys that have ruled over this country. And I was sending to exile to Mexico, self-exiled. I decided to live Peru because of the danger that I was facing. And so when I was invited to the Russell Tribunal, I had in my background this type of curriculum. I'm an anthropology. I learned anthropology with native people in the Amazon, the Achanica people. And so my participation in the jury of Russell Tribunal was from the point of view of a Westerner Latin American citizen that had learned from the indigenous people of the Amazon and the Andes and then later Mexico and Mesoamerica about the struggle of survival. And so I participated with a few ideas and I was surrounded by very important non-indigenous people with the exception of Juruna, who was the Brazilian Shavante representative of the native people of Latin America, South America, or the Americas. But the rest of us were all Westerners, Euro-Americans. Irma Bonfil, Mestizo from Mexico, Darcy Ribeiro, a very good anthropology from Brazil, Eduardo Galeano that then became a famous author, passed away a couple of years ago, unfortunately, and other people that were all from the Western side of the world. So in a sense, was a confrontation, was an accusation of the West brought forward by the indigenous people. And we were all, we knew of what was happening in Indian country, all over the Americas, but to witness the presence of people, native people telling us native women, native people, little child like Deepi at that time, telling us their own story with their own voice was a shocking event that altered completely our already altered consciousness and push us to be more and more proactive in what we were doing as social scientists, intellectual activists, etc. So for me, the Russell Tribunal has been a a very important event in my life, as it was 10 years earlier, the first Barbados meeting of again, only Westerners in the island of Barbados, all of us anthropologists that denounced the role, the colonialist role of anthropology at that time that was conniving and behaving in very a Eurocentric, Eurocentric ways and using the indigenous people as an object of study without ever being concerned about what was happening to them in real life, the destruction of the culture, the territory, etc. So the trajectory went from my participation in the Peruvian Revolution of the 68-74, the Barbados meeting and ended up in the Russell Tribunal and from there I started to navigate this troubled, very conflictive waters of the relation of the West, of capitalist West, the global West and global North with the indigenous people of America and I continue to do this, as I speak today, I'm the only survivor of the jury. It's a strange honor to be the only survivor. I hope I lost a few more years so that I can keep working on this issue but and I definitely hope you do too. We think you'll be living a long time and we know that indigenous peoples came to the Netherlands 40 years ago to speak truth to power and the values and vision of indigenous peoples is really the solution to many of the global crises he's facing humanity today and what's important then is also the voices of the young and amazingly enough, Tipe, you're too young to almost be at the meeting. Can you tell us how you came to the Russell Tribunal and how you continue to advocate and walk in the footsteps of your mother as well? Tipe? Hello, my name is Tipe, and I come from Standing Rock. It's an honor to be here to talk about the Russell Tribunal. Again, I don't remember being there but I've seen the pictures and I know that it was an amazing honor and as a participant in the 40th anniversary seminar, that was a privilege to really witness and be a part of that as well. My mom took me with her in the cradleboard and all of the things that we're talking about, all of the ways of being in our indigenous knowledge, all of that is through her lived experience of having me in that cradleboard and having that connection so that I as a baby took in all of these experiences into my heart, my spirit and really set me on my course and carved my path for me to be in indigenous language revitalization as well as indigenous education as we reclaim spaces and create new spaces for our people, our children to really live healthy, fulfilled lives as Lakota, to be free to think and speak and embody all of our values from the time that we're born until the time that we leave this earth. All of those things were set in motion and through the lived experience of those who attended the Russell Tribunal as my mother did as well as my uncle Bill. And so I know that she had the experience of being around other indigenous people learning from each other, strengthening each other. And that very much has been my experience in language revitalization strength from, you know, the Kanaka Mali relatives, the Mali relatives in BC. All of the amazing work that is happening for indigenous language revitalization, you know, is in that same sense where we can really strengthen each other and learn from each other. And you know, I see those parallels in the experience of the amazing lived experience of my mother as well as her continuing to be a strong voice in someone that our people can really rally behind and know that she represents true love of our people, that there's no other real authentic agenda other than that, that the love of our people motivates us to continue to do the work. And that's what she has embodied. And I'm really grateful for having her as my mother and role model in that because it's very much opened the doors for me to be on the journey that I'm on. Thank you so much. And it is amazing to go from the cradleboard to now to the classroom and making sure that language lives. And of course, we know that's the way that where culture thrives and survives. Ilys, you shared also a bit about partnering and meeting with other indigenous peoples and TP shared as well that we continue to learn from one another and build this global movement. Could you share maybe recently about Standing Rock and some of the campaigns that were going on to protect the water and to protect the sacred spaces? We were at different stages in our struggles. And I was able to measure time and space in the genocide that was occurring in the western hemisphere in Guatemala, the massacres that we endured at Wundit Nih. My absolute hero in my life was a Mapuche because I understood the terror and the death squads and the separating of their bodies by horses and tractors as technology evolved. So I traveled the survival international with a Mapuche and I was able to understand their stories and relate to them. Although it was in my collective memory of terror and how we survived the women as well. So I could measure the stages of that terrorism and genocide as it was occurring. And it was maybe a hundred years ago that we were in a massacre but it was happening in Central America and South America. So I could relate and that re-energized me to find the best ways to answer the new evolving technologies that were methods of genocide. And water was a key issue. And so we have 33 treaties, the Lakota and Lakota with the United States. For three centuries we have had 33 treaties. The United Nations had a 15-year study, came out with recommendations, and we have a five-step process that we need to go through. But the UN recognized the treaty status under the Vienna Convention 62, which the Mohawks were the strongest party to it. So it was able to measure all of the technologies, the stages, and to keep our struggle alive for the Black Hills, for the sacredness, the principles that we need to still evolve and adopt and adapt for the world because we have always been the canary in the mind. So I'm able to strategize for the future even though we don't have a word for that in our language. We can conserve the water and we can create international legal principles to protect sacred sites, sacred landscapes that are critical to our survival for freedom of religion, our spirituality, and to worship in the way we want to with the freedom, with no boundaries and no barriers and so, or no buffer zones. So we need to be free to worship, which we fought for, they, the United States prohibited our spirituality from 1910 to 1978. And in 1978 we took that back at the act of Congress. The freedom of religion was endorsed by the U.S. Congress. The sterilization was prohibited by the U.S. Congress. But we had to march, we had to demand, we had to give them our stories and go to the steps of the capital of the United States. And we prevailed, we endured. So we strategize now for the new serology research. We are the isolated gene factor in the United States as far as our genealogy and our blood. So now we talk about that for the future for this coronavirus. Thank you. That was amazing to hear your advocacy and the breadth and depth of all the amazing work that you have done. It's an honor to meet you and to hear about your campaign. And it's amazing to also see your daughter continuing these campaigns for indigenous rights. Stefano, could you maybe share some of the results of the Russell Tribunal that are relevant for the human rights of indigenous peoples today as we move forward? The balance is ambiguous to say the least, because on one hand we have new legal instrument that are international instrument and also some local national instruments that are legal. Now the application and the enforcement of this legal instrument is depending very much on the political situation of each country. We just passed through four years of practically banana republic experience in the US. We have seen how easy and vulnerable is democracy, what we consider to be a democratic situation. And so that in Latin America is our old experience. We have experienced that scene, the independence, the former decolonization in the early 19th century, 1821, 1820, 1825, 1825 and so on for different countries. So legal instruments are fundamental, but the enforcement of those measures are also fundamental and enforcement can be done with the participation only and exclusively with the participation, mobilization of the people. The people have to be in the street, the people have to demonstrate, the people have to occupy, the people have to show their strength and their ideas and the vocation of the perfect behavior in action. Because it is important that, you know, professor like me writes about these things, but it is important that the young people, the older people, everybody, the women, the men take this idea and bring this idea in their own, obviously, their own ideas into action. So the results are on one hand, I see them as with optimism, but on the other hand, I see them an invitation to continue to struggle. I mean, this, what we have seen, and I repeat insist during the last four years, shows us how vulnerable our Western institution. And if I compare to the permanent, the permanence of Indian institution, and I see, for instance, yesterday we saw Patricia Walinga from the Ecuador, from the Amazon, showing us the permanence of her ideas, the idea of her people about the environment. And so that permanence contrasts very much with the vulnerability of our Western institution. We are so proud of our democracy, but we shouldn't be proud of it. We should be proud of their democracy, the indigenous people, the way they look at the world, the way they act and are present in the world. That is what these debates, the Russell Tribunal, other seminars, other events can show us, all of us as humanity, united humanity of different languages, different ethnicity, to coexist together and get the best of all our tradition and put them together to build constantly a new world. I'm so glad, for instance, that it is reviving language. Language is fundamental. Fortunately, colonialism in Latin America wasn't successful, as in North America, with English, to displace native languages. So we have many more native languages in Latin America, south of the border of the US, starting from Navajo Hopi, all the way down south, of people that can still think, speak, create, invent in their own language. So the philosophy of the indigenous people is based and expressed in a specific language, the Lakota, the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the other tribes. Thank you, Stefano. That is a perfect point, and we can then go into Tipee sharing some of the aspects of the new revitalization programs at Standing Rock. Tipee, can you share some of that? Yes, I would be honored to. In the past 10 years alone, partnerships have really, with allies who are non Lakota and as well as other Lakota and Lakota communities, have really advanced language in a way where it's becoming more accessible to especially younger children. Standing Rock in 2012 opened a Lakota language immersion nest, which is full 100% Lakota language immersion. I was fortunate to be a co-teacher there with a fluent elder speaker for five years in the initial first five years of being in the school, and I witnessed the revitalization of our ways of thinking, our ways of being as well as our language through our community's own children. And it was really the highlight, I believe, and really nourished my spirit to keep going and figure out ways to keep advancing, keep expanding, and keep pushing for successful language efforts, not just in the classroom now, but in maybe in homes and other spaces that it's really important that we keep pushing, and we don't just, there's so much at stake, and time is really short. And with Corona, we've lost some of our most fluent, regal speakers, and so time is really short and the work is really important. And so if anyone wants to contribute, I think they would learn to really support the languages in their area, wherever they live, whoever you are. That's a way that can really help repair the damage that has been done to Indigenous peoples all over the world. Thank you so much, and it's amazing how fast time flies. That's what one of the participants said at the three webinars who had been involved in Indigenous work their entire life. I want to thank all three of you for committing a lifetime to liberation and the human rights of Indigenous peoples, and we look forward to continue the conversation into the future. But more importantly, I think as everyone summarized, it's really a combination of direct action, putting those human rights into practice and standing up for what we believe in, and then also the diplomacy at the global level to create those new international instruments, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is one of those. But as was pointed out by Stefano as well as Phyllis, now we have to go towards the implementation and the actualization of those articles into daily life. And Tipi, you're doing that with language as those are some of the most important articles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. So thank you all very much, and thank you for tuning into Cooper Union, and we'll continue to explore the most important issues at the United Nations. Mahalo.