Rose is an 18-year-old water protector fighting multiple injustices throughout her community. She grew up in the inner-city of St. Paul and Minneapolis. When she was fifteen Rose traveled to standing rock on a caravan by herself, leaving her city for the first time alone. It was at Standing Rock, where she fought the Dakota Access Pipeline alongside thousands of others, that she promised herself she would do this work for the rest of her life. The first protest she ever led and created brought in over one thousand people to rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Minneapolis in 2016. Soon after when she was sixteen she started fighting the line 3 tar sands pipeline in her homelands of Minnesota, which would be the largest inland oil pipeline in North America if built as planned. Rose then led a 250-mile canoe journey throughout the Mississippi River along the proposed pipeline route alongside a group of all indigenous youth to raise awareness of the pipeline. Rose was then asked to be apart of a group called the Youth Climate Intervenors. The Youth Climate Intervenors (YCI) are a group of thirteen youth who were legal Intervenors representing themselves without a lawyer in the court case against the line 3 pipeline. They were the first youth to ever file to intervene and be accepted in a pipeline case. Rose traveled to direct action camps and fought on the frontlines, in the court rooms, and even traveled to D.C. to chat with representatives about the pipeline. Lastly, she traveled to Rome, Italy with a delegation of indigenous people in 2017 to speak with the Vatican about abolishing the doctrine of discovery.
Rose won the 2018 Brower Youth Award and the 2019 Twin Cities Film Festival Award for her outstanding work fighting for her land and her people. She then went on to co-found META Liberation, the first ever safe space in the Twin Cities for only BIPOC to organize, heal, and fight against injustices together.
Outside of her organizing work she loves to dance at powwows, she is a northern cloth traditional dancer and loves to sing and heal with her people whenever she can. She has been learning her language (Dakota) for four years now and hopes to become a fluent speaker. She enjoys being outdoors, educating herself, and laughing with other indigenous womxn.
“I am excited to navigate COP 25 alongside my ancestors, who fought so hard so I could be here today. I want to bring back the knowledge I gain from this back to my community, so I can share the things I hope to see and learn. Our communities are often not included in these conversations although we are impacted first by climate change. We deserve to be at the table. I am grateful for this opportunity to see what goes on in these elite governmental spaces, so one day I can tear them down and we can uplift black, brown, and indigenous people to take charge. It’s time to decolonize!”
