Warrior Lawyer Profile: Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska

Fighting for Indigenous and Environmental Justice

Lawyers are taught to respect and uphold the law and the legal system we work in. But in settler colonial states like Canada and the United States, lawyers must contend with the inherent tension that arises from the foundational injustice of Indigenous dispossession. At the same time, settler colonial laws are not the only laws governing these lands.

Part of being a Warrior Lawyer is having the courage and commitment to stand up against injustice, even if it means violating the very laws you were trained to uphold.

From small-town kid to environmental activist

Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska is a Tribal attorney and activist. She is Ojibwe of the bear clan and a citizen of Couchiching First Nation. She is best known for her activism as a land and water protector, fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock and the Line 3 Pipeline in Anishinaabe territories.

Her legal career has been far from traditional. Apart from engaging in direct-action resistance efforts, she has also worked for a private firm and environmental nonprofits and served as the Native American advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign. She has contributed to many publications, including Al Jazeera, Medium, Green European Journal, New York Times, and CNN. Her work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the Good Housekeeping 2017 Awesome Women award and the Rose-Walters Prize from Dickinson College.

Houska exists across multiple worlds and uses this positionality to educate, build solidarity, and create change. She grew up in a small predominantly white town in Minnesota, a stone’s throw from her nation’s reserve lands in Ontario. After becoming the first in her family to attend university, she learned the Anishinaabe language and attended law school at the University of Minnesota. She then moved to Washington, D.C., initially working as a Tribal attorney at a private Indigenous-led firm.

When she first arrived in D.C. as a new lawyer, the city’s NFL team was still sporting a racial slur as their official name. And it was plastered everywhere, along with their mascot. She began building a network of folks dedicated to fighting harmful colonial stereotyping of Indigenous peoples and co-founded a non-profit called Not Your Mascots. Around the same time, Houska also became involved in environmental advocacy and eventually chose to leave a more traditional law practice behind for full-time advocacy.

Fighting environmental injustice 

Houska’s story teaches us that environmental justice is about far more than just preserving nature. Even before entering the advocacy world full-time, she had already been on the front lines at Standing Rock. She lived for long periods in resistance camps along with others contesting construction of the pipeline through Standing Rock Sioux Treaty lands without consent. 

Houska understands the story of Standing Rock to be interconnected with broader struggles for social, environmental, racial, and Indigenous justice. Resistance efforts raised concerns about the pipeline’s downstream contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, though they were centred around larger demands for Indigenous self-determination.

Standing Rock highlighted the interconnected issues of environmental racism and police violence. The pipeline’s original route ran just north of Bismarck, North Dakota, a predominantly white community. Ironically, it was rerouted to cross the Mississippi River – the only source of water of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation – due to contamination risks. At one point in construction, the company chose to skip 25 miles ahead of schedule just to bulldoze a sacred site near Standing Rock. Private security firms and local law enforcement were paid by the pipeline company to violently arrest water protectors and remove them from the land. They used pain compliance techniques against Houska and others, shot them with rubber bullets, teargassed them, and locked them in dog kennels.

Houska has spoken out about the connections between the violence displayed at Standing Rock and the systemic invisibilization of Indigenous peoples. She explains how American popular culture and the public education system in particular perpetrate racial stereotyping and the erasure of Indigenous cultures, arguing that “when you aren’t viewed as real people, it’s a lot easier to run over your rights.”

She advocates for the adoption of the doctrine of free, prior, and informed consent, in line with state obligations under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as an important first step towards advancing Indigenous rights and combatting systemic discrimination.

Resilience, resurgence, and reconnecting with the land

Beyond any specific legal tools, Houska also embodies a transformative approach to justice, grounded in relationships with land, place, and community. After Standing Rock, she described feeling “the loss of our camps and reclamation of old lifeways, the emptiness of feeling deep, undeniable purpose here and gone again.”

Hopelessness is no stranger in the face of such deeply rooted injustice. But in spite of this, Houska and countless others continue to fight. In 2018, she moved home to northern Minnesota and founded the Giniw Collective, an “Indigenous womxn, two-spirit led frontlines resistance to Protect our Mother, Live in Balance, and Be Our Values.”

While one of the Giniw Collective’s goals was to fight the Line 3 pipeline expansion, it is part of a broader effort to build a better world for the future - one in which humans live in balance with the natural world. The focus is on helping people and local communities reconnect with the land and (re)build relations with Mother Earth by re-occupying ancestral Anishinaabe territory and living in accordance with land-based cultural knowledge, values, and practices.

Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska exemplifies the spirit of a Warrior Lawyer, reminding us of the importance of resilience, solidarity, and integrity in the face of increasing climate instability and environmental degradation. Her story shows us that direct action is about more than stopping pipelines. More fundamentally, it is about healing human relationships with the Earth and moving “away from an extractive economy into an economy of caring for each other.”