Lawyers From The United States

"Trafficking is in our communities, but it does not have to be"

"We must all work together to strengthen the safety net that women need not only for healthy pregnancies, but also as they build families where both they and their children thrive"

"The Clarence Thomas hearings, in which Anita Hill represented all of us to a group of men who just didn't get it."

"Our goal is to make sure that all individuals are protected from gender-based violence, and we can't get there without dealing with the issue of racism"

"The Supreme Court is only as good as the people who are on it."

"I believe that’s why we should – how we should be looking at Dobbs, not just as an indicator of what is going to happen on reproductive rights, but also what will happen to us as a country in terms of how much we value the civil rights of individuals and especially marginalized people"

"Hope doesn’t necessarily come from the tangible things, it doesn’t have to come because something monumental happened. It can come from something small that gives people hope"

"One of the things that we’re not talking about enough is prevention"

"Some of these things are encouraging, some are entirely discouraging when we start to look at the numbers, but all of it points to the fact that this could be a moment where, if these things come together, we can actually make some change"

"Because she is a Republican, Attorney General Fitch is probably cozier with the insurance companies than were her two predecessors"

"Ms. Teehee has a wealth of experience working in Washington, DC with representatives from both sides of the aisle."

"She has a storied career of advocating and working on issues for both the Cherokee Nation and Indian Country in general, these two attributes make her appointment as the first-ever delegate an easy decision and I am happy to support her nomination and Chief Hoskin's efforts to exercise our treaty rights."

"Even though I’d be representing the governmental interests of the Cherokee Nation, I imagine I wouldn’t see myself as any different than being an extra voice to not only represent the governmental interests of my tribe but also to aid in advancing Indian Country generally."

"Extraordinary responsibility and is grateful for an opportunity to serve the Cherokee Nation. This journey is just beginning and we have a long way to go to see this through to fruition."

"That the United States fulfills its treaty rights would send a huge message, not only to the Indian tribes of this country but internationally."

"We are a sovereign nation that is capable of exercising a sovereign right to move forward with appointing a delegate to honor our treaties."

"It is an interesting time. It's also an historic time because we've seen, on one hand, an administration that has prioritized native issues."

"It would be small measure of justice for those who lost their lives on a forced march."

"Allowing me to take up the seat, values its indigenous populations and honors legal documents through the treaties that they signed with the Indians even if it’s nearly 200 years later."

"A Cherokee Nation delegate to Congress is a negotiated right that our ancestors advocated for, and today, our tribal nation is stronger than ever and ready to defend all our constitutional and treaty rights."

"Darden won a handsome primary victory on August 5, 1941 against two antimachine candidates. Although an appendectomy limited his campaigning, he repeated his success in the November election, handily defeating Republican Benjamin Muse, who was running only to preserve the semblance of a two-party system in Virginia."

"Governors of Virginia are appointed by Harry Byrd, subject to confirmation by the electorate... He ruled not with a command but with a nod."

"Teehee’s fingerprints are on a wide variety of policy and laws affecting Indigenous people, from the Violence Against Women Act to the creation of Congress' first Native American caucus"

"Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party."

"We know this is just the beginning and there is much work ahead, but we are being thorough in terms of implementation and ask our leaders in Washington to work with us through this process and on legislation that provides the Cherokee Nation with the delegate to which we are lawfully entitled."

"there are all of these researchers who were looking at South Louisiana before Katrina, many people concerned about sea level rise and all of these things for a very long time, but it wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t information brought to the communities. The universities knew it, but the communities didn’t know."

"And that was a moment where you sort of have this — it’s surreal. You don’t — who can believe your land won’t be there anymore? Most people still can’t conceptually understand that."

"there are bad people in this world, but mostly, there are just people who don’t know."

"that land, for people like me, was tied to our freedom. You know, that land, the land and the right to be there was tied to — it was the difference between being enslaved and not. It was — it is a culture that has birthed a lot of people. And to lose that — it felt in that moment that we would lose everything."

"people ask me all the time, if you know your land is going to go, why are you still fighting?...I don’t know what they’re expecting, you know? We going down swinging if we going."

"Here in the Gulf South, we know climate disaster. Hurricane Katrina changed my life. I moved back home, to Slidell, Louisiana, in 2006. I realized my community needed lawyers-someone to read all the papers a disaster creates. They were being asked, in the middle of trauma, to sign away their rights. I'm only the third lawyer to come from my community. So I read the papers, and I decided to stay."

"it was the most honest answer I’d ever gotten."

"Our firsthand experiences in the Gulf South-Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida-affirm the call of scientists to rapidly address climate change and make frontline communities more resilient in the process."

"Creole people were free people of color, and they could own land before many Black folks could. And so my family had been there before it was America, before it was the U.S."

"Policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions must also clean up the toxic lands left behind by oil and gas, with the same financial support and urgency. In this cleanup, and in every other aspect of the fair and just transition, the costs and burden must be paid by the industries that have polluted communities and deliberately deceived the public about the threat their operations pose to our climate."

"I don’t have this law degree for nothing. And the laws as they are written right now are not meant for me, and they’re not meant for my community, and they’re not meant to help people, and they’re not meant to save people, and they’re not meant to do those things with the utmost humanity and dignity. They are meant to preserve a middle-class tax base, period, almost every law that we have. How does this affect the taxpayer? is the analysis that is used."

"Our work proves that media depictions of the Green New Deal as a program for liberal elites could not be further from the truth. Here on the third coast, poor black, white, brown, and native people, small businesses, neighborhood associations, and regular folks from all walks of life are ready for a Green New Deal, and we know the same is true of people all across this country."

"I think that’s the part that scares me the most. We’re losing generations of people who know the anatomy of these things. And we’re getting new people into our space who have no clue what a hurricane is, and the hurricanes that we know to describe are not the ones we’re facing now."

"The British Petroleum oil drilling disaster of 2010, when the BP-leased and Transocean-owned Deepwater Horizon exploded, releasing nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, is remembered for its ecological impact, but less remembered are the eleven oil rig workers who perished."

"now the land is perpetually saturated, because the water is rising, the water table is rising, the lake is rising"

"Love leads to joy...The joy comes from love. To combat this thing, to combat the oil industry’s fear of losing profit, I have got to help to bring joy of the community’s love of everything that they are."

"I can’t believe that it is the U.S. government — it’s our government, it’s our representatives, under every administration in these international talks — that are stopping the conversation that says: finance the work needed for the people who are feeling the impacts of climate; finance that, because you caused it. It’s our country saying no. That, to me, is like, come on now. We’re better than that. This is lives we’re talking about. This is mass migration. This is people’s lives. This is heat deaths. This is fires. This is storms. Put everything into this. We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to vote? We’re fighting over whether or not people should have the right to their bodies? That is child’s play compared to what this climate crisis is. Where is the righteous indignation on this issue? And why can’t we get past that?"

"I’ve learned that even people who are — who see the world differently from you, they love something. And if we take the time to share what we love with one another, we can see each other’s humanity, and we can feel each other’s value. And if we can connect in a real way, that’s what we need to accompany each other, because some of what is going to be asked is that you just let me be. You know. As relocation and all of this stuff happens, some people are going to choose something other than what you would choose."

"if we believe in luck, then there’s some responsibility that goes with that. If we’re lucky enough to live in this country and to have what we have, then we don’t just get to recycle and feel better about ourselves. It’s time to show up at the hard places, right? Everybody else is waiting for us to admit that we are the engine of the harm. And so that takes courage. I mean, you know, who wants to admit that about themselves? It is courage, you know? We don’t like to look in the mirror. That stuff takes courage. I fight with those things all the time; like, what’s the line between the blame that stops you from action and the acknowledgement that catapults you to do the right thing? You’ve got to practice that. You’ve got to practice that one every day, or else — and you can’t be mad at people, because there’s a journey. I used to get very mad at people...I mean, you know, the amount of patience it takes for middle-class white folks to understand the plight of brown people in this country is just, like, how much longer do you need me to sit here and be nice about this? At some point, it feels like you’re not listening to me. And now that’s just disrespectful, which we don’t do in the South, because disrespect is a — that’s a line. So the courage is something to practice, and patience is, too. But we are facing a crisis that we have maybe seven years at most to make some corrections on, so we’ve all got to get to that a little quicker."

"to really, really admit that you understand what is happening to the planet, it will break your heart. If you don’t cry deep, hard tears for the state of this planet and all of the people on it, you don’t yet understand the problem. And so once you get to that place, the only thing that can bring you out of that kind of darkness is belief in something greater than yourself."

"We’re going to lose everything, and my last name is Battle. What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to fight. I’m supposed to fight, but I’m supposed to fight with tools that build people up, not tools that take people down and take them out. And that’s love. That’s patience. That’s all of those things that they taught you in Sunday school. They were right."

"This is not about greenhouse gas reduction. This is about do we value people equally? And if we do, we’ve got some recalibrating to do, as a planet."

"we’re going to need that level of creativity to get out of this thing, and I am hopeful that the next generation, that has a lot of challenges, also has enough creativity to get out of it, to get to the next level."

"the sea level rise is real, and for those of us who are very close to the sea, we can see it."

"it was a moment for me that I understood, well, I have a purpose here. We’ve got to change these laws. We’ve got to change the society. It is the structures that we are living in that is the problem. I am not talking about you liking me, or me liking you, anymore. We’re now going to talk about, does this work for the least of us, which goes back to that very Catholic upbringing...That’s what I learned. That’s who we’re supposed to care about. That’s who we’re supposed to take the time to make things work for."