Winona LaDuke Quotes & Sayings

Spirituality is the foundation of all my political work. — Winona LaDuke

I find that I have more allies on the left than on the right, and that is because the left is, by and large, filled with people who are challenging the present paradigm and power structure. I'm interested in totally transforming the structure that exists now, because it is not sustainable. — Winona LaDuke

America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay. — Winona LaDuke

One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don't feel powerless. White people don't feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they've been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth. — Winona LaDuke

I don't understand all the nuances of the women's movement. But I do understand that there are feminists who want to challenge the dominant paradigm, not only of patriarchy, but of where the original wealth came from and the relationship of that wealth to other peoples and the earth. That is the only way that that I think you can really get to the depth of the problem. — Winona LaDuke

The idea that you can dress up in some kind of a fake Indian outfit and get on stage is somehow acceptable in this country. That has to do with the fact that you have the Redskins, the Braves, you have people who dress up like Indians, people dress up like Indians on Halloween. That is acceptable. — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

The difference between a white man and an Indian is this- A white man wants to leave money to his children. An Indian wants to leave forests. — Winona LaDuke

Tribes have the potential to provide almost 15 percent of the country's electricity with wind power, and have 4.5 times the solar resources to power the entire U.S. — Winona LaDuke

In the time of the sacred sites and the crashing of ecosystems and worlds, it may be worth not making a commodity out of all that is revered. — Winona LaDuke

If you're going to spend most of your time in your democracy figuring out how to get oil by intervening into other people's countries and insuring that you follow it with military might, we think there's an alternative. Which would be renewable energy. — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present. — Winona LaDuke

What we all need to do is find the wellspring that keeps us going, that gives us the strength and patience to keep up this struggle for a long time. — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

The reality is, is that the military is full of native nomenclature. That's what we would call it. You've got Black Hawk helicopters, Apache Longbow helicopters. You've got Tomahawk missiles. The term used when you leave a military base in a foreign country is to go 'off the reservation, into Indian Country.' — Winona LaDuke

The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact was that you couldn't vote in this country if you did not own land, and that was basically you had to be a white man who owned land. Now how did they get that land? They basically had to steal it from someone, and that would be probably the Indians. And so most of the initial founding fathers were, while they may have had some really nice ideas about democracy, they had a lot of issues with people of color. They had a lot of issues with people who held things that they coveted. — Winona LaDuke

The only compensation for land is land, — Winona LaDuke

It's time to respect the treaties our ancestors signed and care for our land, water, and cultures so that they remain healthy for our future generations. — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals. — Winona LaDuke

Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility as people of the land. — Winona LaDuke

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank. — Winona LaDuke

I'm Harvard-educated; I'm an economist by training. I'm an author, a journalist, as well as being active in community development. — Winona LaDuke

It is essential to collectively struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth. In that is our strength, and the security, not in the predator, but in the security of our Mother, for our future generations. In that we can insure our security as the Mothers of our Nations. — Winona LaDuke

Ojibwe prophecy speaks of a time during the seventh fire when our people will have a choice between two paths. The first path is well-worn and scorched. The second path is new and green. It is our choice as communities and as individuals how we will proceed. — Winona LaDuke

What our Seventh Generation will have is a consequence of our actions today. — Winona LaDuke

It's time to transition beyond our fossil fuel addiction to a just economy based on green jobs, renewable energy, and local organic food. — Winona LaDuke

The military is the largest polluter in the country, and so you have a lot of military waste contaminating reservations - as, for example, on the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation, where 5,000 sheep died in some kind of experimental military nerve gas test 10 years ago. Many of our communities are dealing with that kind of waste, and an absence of political will to clean them up. — Winona LaDuke

What gives these corporations like CONOCO, SHELL, EXXON, DIASHAWA, ITT, RIO TINTO ZINC, and the WORLD BANK a right which supercedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women? — Winona LaDuke

The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on. — Winona LaDuke

The aboriginal peoples of Australia illustrate the conflict between technology and the natural world succinctly, by asking, 'What will you do when the clever men destroy your water?' That, in truth, is what the world is coming to. — Winona LaDuke

I'm not a patriot to a flag, I'm a patriot to a land. — Winona LaDuke

You've got to get people to believe that change is possible ... You have to show that you can fight things successfully even if you don't win. — Winona LaDuke

To native peoples, there is no such thing as the first, second, and third worlds; there is only an exploiting world ... whether its technological system is capitalist or communist ... and a host world. Native peoples, who occupy more land, make up the host world. — Winona LaDuke

The United States, you know, people - one of the reasons that it is said that native people received citizenship in 1924 was so that they could be drafted. And they have been extensively drafted. — Winona LaDuke

Native communities are focal points for the excrement of industrial society. — Winona LaDuke

I look at my own reservation, the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota - on my reservation, one quarter of our money is spent on energy. All of that money basically goes to off-reservation vendors whether it is for electricity, or whether it is for fuel. — Winona LaDuke

Actually, I consider myself to be pretty politically conservative. — Winona LaDuke

I would like to see as many people patriotic to a land as I have seen patriotic to a flag. — Winona LaDuke

If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands. — Winona LaDuke

We must keep these waters for wild rice, these trees for maple syrup, our lakes for fish, and our land and aquifers for all of our relatives - whether they have fins, roots, wings, or paws. — Winona LaDuke

Native people - about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining. — Winona LaDuke

Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests. — Winona LaDuke

Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

In most of America, it seems you don't matter if you're not between 25 and 50. — Winona LaDuke

In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures. — Winona LaDuke

I think of some of my friends who have passed to the spirit world but are who here with me when I go to events and when I walk in my own community. My sisters, Ingred, my sister Marsha, and my sister Nielock. All cofounders of the Indigenous Women's Network with me. All long time women activists in the native community. — Winona LaDuke

The thing about being an Indian person is that you feel most at home with your own people. — Winona LaDuke

We are launching a campaign called Wind, Not War, which is about the alternatives to a fossil-fuels-based economy and looking at wind, an alternative energy, as key to that in terms of issues of global climate change as well as issues of democracy. — Winona LaDuke

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist — Winona LaDuke

The first thing I am is a person. I am a woman. And I am part of a nation, the Indian nation. But people either relate to you as an Indian or as a woman. They relate to you as a category. A lot of people don't realize that I am not that different from everyone else. — Winona LaDuke

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to. — Winona LaDuke

The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures. — Winona LaDuke

Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together. — Winona LaDuke

When I first came to Harvard, I thought to myself, 'What kind of an Indian am I?' because I did not grow up on a reservation. But being an Indian is a combination of things. It's your blood. It's your spirituality. And it's fighting for the Indian people. — Winona LaDuke

Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships. — Winona LaDuke

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides. — Winona LaDuke

We filed a constitutional rights lawsuit on my reservation, and I had to go out and interview all these old people. And I found that many of the old people on my reservation didn't know who was president. That kind of pointed out to me the irrelevance at times of who is in Washington. — Winona LaDuke

Across the continent, on the shores of small tributaries, in the shadows of sacred mountains, on the vast expanse of the prairies, or in the safety of the woods, prayers are being repeated, as they have for thousands of years, and common people with uncommon courage and the whispers of their ancestors in their ears continue their struggles to protect the land and water and trees on which their very existence is based. And like small tributaries joining together to form a mighty river, their force and power grows. — Winona LaDuke

Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as indigenous peoples and a way, one of the most surefooted ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us. — Winona LaDuke

Post office closures in the Dakotas and Minnesota will impact many communities, but the White Earth reservation villages, and other tribal towns of Squaw Lake, Ponemah, Brookston in Minnesota, and Manderson, Wounded Knee and Wakpala (South Dakota) as well as Mandaree in North Dakota will mean hardships for a largely Native community. — Winona LaDuke

Uranium mining in northern Canada has left over 120 million tons of radioactive waste. This amount represents enough material to cover the Trans-Canada Highway two meters deep across the country. Present production of uranium waste from Saskatchewan alone occurs at the rate of over 1 million tons annually. Since 1975, hospitalization for cancer, birth defects and circulatory illnesses in that area have increased dramatically - between 123 and 600 percent in that region. — Winona LaDuke

I see a lot of damage to Mother Earth. I see water being taken from creeks where water belongs to animals, not to oil companies. — Winona LaDuke

Our forests are not for toilet paper. They are worth more standing than cut. That deserves to be defended, not only by native peoples but also by environmentalists. — Winona LaDuke

If we build a society based on honoring the earth, we build a society which is sustainable, and has the capacity to support all life forms. — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

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. — Winona LaDuke

The idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently out of order with natural law. — Winona LaDuke