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FEATURING NICK TILSEN - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power.

This week on Rising Up for Justice, Nick Tilsen, the Founder and CEO of NDN Collective joins us. Nick is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. He has more than 20 years of experience in movement building, organizing and equitable community development.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So NDN Collective has been around for a little while. What is the organization's main goal? And it's the letters NDN, for our radio audience. How do you explain what the organization is, its main focus? 

Nick Tilsen: Yeah. So, NDN Collective, NDN is just slang for Indian. It's what we've called ourselves in sort of reclaiming that term. We've been around, we're in our eighth year of existence now. In our eighth year. We just finished our seventh year. 

NDN Collective is dedicated to building Indigenous power, and supporting the self-determination of Indigenous people that are doing the work of defending, developing, and decolonizing. And how we define that is defending air, land, water, rights, community. Developing regenerative and inclusive economies based on our values. Decolonizing through the revitalization of Indigenous languages, ceremonies, life ways. 

And NDN Collective is a movement infrastructure, that organization that supports Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island who are doing that work. And we have been a backbone organization of the Land Back movement, which is a movement dedicated to the returning of stolen Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands. 

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