*While her famous parents are off on some private island decompressing, former First Daughter Malia Obama was at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where she was spotted Monday participating in a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Actress Shailene Woodley saw her at the event, which was organized in solidarity with the people of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.
“It was amazing to see Malia. I saw her last night when we did the event with [Standing Rock] Chairman Dave Archambault. And it was incredible to see her there,” Woodley told the PBS show Democracy Now. “To witness a human being and a woman coming into her own outside of her family and outside of the attachments that this country has on her, but someone who’s willing to participate in democracy because she chooses to, because she recognizes, regardless of her last name, that if she doesn’t participate in democracy, there will be no world for her future children.”
Woodley has been one of most high-profile advocates against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would carry crude oil across sacred lands, potentially contaminating the population’s fresh water source and disturbing sacred grounds. She and 26 others were arrested for criminal trespassing while protesting the pipeline in October.
Amid massive protests at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the Obama administration stopped construction on the pipeline in December. But after President Trump took office, he reversed the decision by signing an executive order to continue building on the land.
As previously reported, Malia Obama, 18, nabbed an internship with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, but it’s unclear whether she attended Sundance as part of her job.
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