 My name is Ladonna Brave Bull Allard. My real name is Tamakawash Dewey, her good earth woman. I am Ihunktua Hunkpatina and Pabiska Dakota on my father's side. I am Hunkpapa Sihasipa and Ogwala Lakota on my mother's side. So I'm Lakota-Dakota, but I was raised Dakota. I know the outside world probably doesn't understand that, but we understand it here. And I am an enrolled member of the Stani Raksu tribe. I am the historian, genealogist. I work for the Tribal Historic Preservation Office as Section 106 coordinator. 152 years ago, the Whitestone Massacre happened, which the people in this community, the Cannonball community, are from descendants of that massacre. We are the survivors of that massacre. One of the things that, you know, we always say is this massacre happened. America forgot they killed us and we have just spending this time trying to figure out how to survive. So my grandfather was a medicine man. His name was Tataka Ohitika, a brave buffalo. My grandma told me that in the 1940s we were self-sufficient. We planted our own gardens. We owned our own cattle. Everybody in every community, we owned our own homes. And then in 1948, the government made the Pixlone Act, which is the Army Corps. And the Army Corps decided to build a dam above us and build a dam below us. So Oahi Dam is below us. Sakakawia Dam is above us. And they designated us as a reservoir. And so they came and they moved our people out of their homes. They took our homes. They moved them up into the communities and put it in this income housing. We lost whole communities. Whole communities had to move. You know, somebody said, well, did your grandparents go, no, I went through this. I lived here. I remember the trees and the forest. I remember coming down and collecting water to drink from this river. Come down and haul water up to the house. We drank this water. We lived with this water. We had huge gardens here. This is me. This is not something long time ago. This is me who lived through this. And so they came and they flooded it. They took all our trees, all our forest when they flooded us. They took all of our medicines, our plants, the things that we survive in. And so if you talk to the people that are my age and older, you can hear the grief in their voice because we still grieve for the loss of this land. And they moved us on top of the hills where it is a more of a clay-based soil so we could no longer grow gardens. We could no longer plant trees. We could no longer do the things that we did. Then they put them in communities where people were not used to living. And so we have these housing projects now of low-income housing where they could not own. So our communities changed drastically, but we figured we can do this. We can survive. So everybody came at that time, and I don't know if people understand, at that time when the Army Corps came in, we had businesses, we had stores, we had restaurants, we had the Army Corps and the government bought out all these businesses, and they never came back and redeveloped again. So we don't have infrastructure anymore. We don't have the gas stations and the stores and stuff. We got to travel to Bismarck Mandir and to Margarige. So they took our economic infrastructure from us. So we started again. Indian people, we have a system. We're communal people, so everybody shares what we have. My grandfather was a Lakota Kotak. He won the silver medal for World War I when we were not U.S. citizens. My Uncle John is World War II. My father is Korean War. My brothers are Vietnam, and all of my cousins are, and every action that has happened thereafter, we hold some of the highest medals of honor. And so we thought we were doing the best we can with America. And so when they told us that they were putting this pipeline in, but refusing to acknowledge us, if you look at the Dakota Access maps, they don't even acknowledge our nation. We're not blacked out. Some people make maps and they do the reservation boundaries. We're not even in there. They said they did not have to consult with us. That pipeline is 500 feet from our reservation line. When that pipeline breaks and it will break, it will hit early, early Head Start children in two seconds. It will take out our elementary in five seconds. In 45 minutes, it'll take out our major water intake that feeds water to all the people here. I don't understand why we are expendable in America. I keep telling people, we do our best. We have always been here. This is our land. Why should we fight to live in our own land? Why should we have to do that over and over again? We start our lives. We do our best to live. Why? I would never hurt anybody. I have always done my best to do good things in my community. Why can't they just let us live? We love this land. Half of the time, I feel bad because they make us feel bad for loving this land. But most importantly, we love the water. Every year, our people sacrifice. We go four days without drinking water so that it reminds us how important this water is. And I ask everybody, do you go with four days without water? What happens to your body on that third day? Your body starts shutting down. Every time we drink water, we say mini-vichoni, water of life. We cannot live without water. So I don't understand why America doesn't understand how important water is. So we have no choice. We have to stand. No matter what happens, we have to stand to save the water.