Josie was a peaceful demonstrator at a Trump power of tests. Josie, along with others,
including myself, was practicing her constitutional rights. In conjunction with her demonstration,
Josie began an indigenous practice that our ancestors have done for multiple years and
generations, which is called smudging in order to bless the space. While Josie was conducting
the sacred practice, she was approached by Denver Police Department and was told to turn
off her smudge stick because the smoke was getting in the air. For the record, she was
performing this ritual outside of the street. In accordance with the support of the constitutional
rights, Josie did not comply to these unlawful demands. Because of that, Josie was then handcuffed
detained and her sacred smudge stick was forcefully taken by her from the Denver Police Department.
And Josie was taken behind a police van to have her mug shot taken and was issued a citation
to appear in court. Today, as Josie appeared in court, the city attorney has decided to drop
all charges against Josie. That her charge of failure to obey a lawful order was in fact
not a lawful order as infringed upon her constitutional rights.
Hello everybody. Thank you so much for being here. All the support absolutely means the
world to me. I'm so thankful that people took the time out of their lives to come and support
me. And I'm really excited that the charges were dropped. I do want to let folks know that
we will be proceeding with other actions, lawful actions against the Denver Police
Department, specifically the officers that were involved in my detainment. So that will
be happening. And as we have been doing with this situation as well, I would love the
input of the community. I am thankful to be in this position and really humbled to be
in this position where my voice is being heard. But in that position, I want to make sure
that our voices are being heard. And so I really welcome opinions and input from community
members, especially our elders in the community and really ensuring that Indigenous peoples
are no longer oppressed in this nation that is literally built on the colonization of
our people and the slaughter of our people. And so I will continue to fight and I'm so
thankful that you all are here and this is by no means the end of this. It's not the
end of the beginning. So thank you all so much. It really means the world to me and I
really, really appreciate each and every one of you being here.
You could continue to check updates on the Justice for Josie Facebook page. We will have
a community meeting, a follow-up meeting to see where we go from there. We also have
this as an offering to the Denver Police Department and urge them to have more cultural and
sensitivity-based training for their police officers. In order for this to not happen
we also offer this as a forum, if you will, to open a relationship in order for us to
better understand each other and continue to work something out to be able to be in
peace in our community as well. We have the petition right here, 6,977 and we continue
to go ahead and plan to get more in the follow-up meeting that we're going to go ahead and have.
We're going to push people to go ahead and positively to go ahead and ask for more signatures
to get more signatures and when we have a certain amount of our go, we're going to go
together as a group nonviolently and in harmony to the Denver Police Department and personally
hand these over to Chief White and let him know how many people are in support of these
indigenous practices and that the constitutional rights of our indigenous people must be respected
and cannot be violated. Thank you all.
