Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDukeis an American activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
CountryUnited States of America
chunk huge large native people sacred states united
The United States - you know, native people are large landowners, but the military has a huge chunk of our territories. And in those, there are a number of places that are our sacred sites.
abundant acres natural rice thousands wild
On my reservation, we had one of the most abundant fisheries in the world and hundreds of thousands of acres of wild rice beds. We've lost a lot of it, but there's still natural wealth that could support our communities.
climate eat economy food interested
I'm interested in what kind of food we're going to eat as the climate changes. I'm interested in what kind of economy we're going to have in another 1,000 years.
felt harvard introduce parties
I used to go to some Harvard parties with my athlete friends, and they would introduce me as 'Winona, the Indian activist.' It made me uncomfortable. I felt like a novelty.
arrested bad book factory gate good los people phone total trees using waste
Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using thousand-year-old trees to make phone books. I think that's a total waste of a tree.
less mostly offices operating post rural save seven tribal
Eliminating some 3600 post offices - mostly rural - will save the USPS less than seven tenths of one percent of their operating budget, but nationally, a number of tribal communities will be hit.
economist
I'm Harvard-educated; I'm an economist by training. I'm an author, a journalist, as well as being active in community development.
accustomed america depiction entirely people
America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay.
Actually, I consider myself to be pretty politically conservative.
home
The thing about being an Indian person is that you feel most at home with your own people.
In most of America, it seems you don't matter if you're not between 25 and 50.
environmental world assumption
The Lockean assumption that if we put our labor to it then it becomes our own is totally fallacious. We have to figure out how to leave things alone, and build an economic system that's not built on a linear model, but instead on a cyclical model, because that's the natural world - it's cyclical and not linear. That is going to take a lot of transformation.