Thank you.

Good morning.

I'm going to try to get through this without totally crying.

Noah, in my language, my name is Crystal Echo Hawk.

I'm a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Kitkahawkee Band.

And my Pawnee name is Ski-Hah-Doo-Hah-Twa, which means lights-in-the-room woman.

And I am just so honored to be here with you all today.

The other thing that was really

I like that.

How do people see us? Like, what is the systems, the sys- how these systems are operating here? And the, the more that we understand that there's big levers, you know, from the federal go- you know, government, policy, media, entertainment, K through 12 education, and popular culture, and then we look at the way that these systems are set up, right, to really, you know, perpetuate our invisibility and erasure, our-- the, the conditioning of just that nobody can see us outside an historical context, and that we, you know, have to be wearing buckskin and living in a teepee.

And that, you know, the only representation that we were seeing of, of Native women, nine times out of 10, they were being sexually assaulted, you know, beat, murdered, and wouldn't even make it to the end of the film or the TV show.

And seeing the sexualization of Native women just across media, culture, fashion, you name it.

Then you start to see that we have, like, an epidemic of, you know, missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Like, these through lines, you just start to understand at so many different levels that so many of the challenges that we face are because of the way these systems operate, right, and the way that they condition the way that people build their worldviews, which is how they shape their nor- you know, and how we shape our norms, our values, the way that we make sense of the world.

And so it was really understanding, like, okay, you know, part of the battle is that we need, we need to change the story.

... what helped move the needle over time.