And I'm So, Hi Crystal, thanks so much for joining us on the Red Nation podcast.

Can you start by introducing yourself?

Yes, I'm a Pivouana, good morning, Mayne Wostanae. My name's Crystal Tubles. I'm Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and I am the director of the Land Back

campaign for Indian Collective. Great. I was wondering if you could just maybe start by giving a little bit of background about yourself as a military

veteran and how that transformation took place from becoming a veteran or somebody who is an active service

to an active war resistor.

Yeah, you know, it's it's literally a lifelong journey and something I'm

still coming into and still reconciling, but I think you, I enlisted in the military when I was, you know, 18 years old and I think when you're 18 years old, you think you know everything. You think you have life figured out and all of that and I was also coming out of an

abusive relationship and so I was craving like stability and structure and like financial stability and structure and the military got me because of all of that stuff,

but also because I was raised, you know raised by organizers in our community, both my parents organize and have fought

against coal mining and all of these things and they always drilled into me to like serve my people and to be

of service to my people and so recruiters they have it figured out and they they know

just what to say to get you and they basically, you know, they said serve your people and serve your country and serve your community and I was also, you know, in a weekend place of recovering from abuse and all of that and it got me you know and I thought that was the way I'm going to serve my people.

That was the way I'm going to contribute to my community. And so I enlisted and there were a couple

key moments in my service where it really stood out to me that this is not the space for me and that was when you know whenever I first enlisted and had to raise my right hand and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and my body like physically started to like shake and it was like the visceral response to to my decision but you know I just pushed it to the side and I kept going and I enlisted and then the second one was when you know when you go through basic training and you and then even when you deploy you go through a series of vaccinations for all of the things, right?

And they vaccinated me for smallpox.

And it was a really like traumatic moment of just like, oh my God, they're giving me smallpox. And like it just, it hit me really hard and it was a really difficult thing and I tried to argue my way out of it.

I tried to not get that.

And I tried to explain why.

And you know, no one listened. They didn't give a shit, you know, it was just like you're just a cow

I have to walk through this line that you know and get shots and so that happened and then the final thing that really did it was when I deployed to

Kuwait in 2009 to 2010 I was in Kuwait and I would go and there's folks that work on the military installations

...