The last Dakota Access Pipeline protesters have been removed, but the legal battles continue as native tribes begin filing challenges.

We speak with two Native American attorneys, Arlinda Locklear and Heather Kendall-Miller, about their decades-long struggles to protect Native American land, resource and identity rights.

Locklear is a private practice attorney in Washington D.C. She was the first Native American woman to successfully argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Locklear’s legal work includes representing her own Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. For over twenty years, the tribe has sought federal recognition. Kendall-Miller is senior staff attorney for the Anchorage, Alaska office of the Native American Rights Fund. The first Alaska Native to graduate from Harvard Law School, she helped win the historic Katie John litigation in 2001 which ensured subsistence hunting and fishing rights for Alaska Natives.

Locklear and  Kendall-Miller recently spoke at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian in Evanston, Illinois.