Winona LaDuke Quotes

In Minnesota, they say we made nice about it a long time ago. They say, "You Indians should get over it." Well that's really nice to say when you are holding all the assets. Why are Indian people the poorest people in this country in every economic or social statistic at the bottom or the top of where you don't want to be? Is that because we're stupid? No. It's because we have structural poverty enforced by intergenerational appropriation of our wealth. That's the reality.

Lakes that you can still drink from. That's where I live. And that’s what this battle is about. It’s about, you know: Can we protect that?

"Akiing" is the word for land in our language, and in the indigenous concept of land ownership or the Anishinaabeg concept of land ownership, it is much more a concept that we belong to that land than the land belongs to us.

Winona LaDuke became involved in Native American issues after meeting Jimmy Durham, a well known Cherokee activist, while she was attending Harvard University. At the age of 18, she spoke in front of the United Nations regarding Native American rights and has remained one of the most prominent voices for American Indian economic and environmental concerns.

The Earth is our Mother. From her we get our life, and our ability to live. It is our responsibility to care for our Mother, and in caring for our Mother, we care for ourselves.

Just because the coal exists, do they have to strip mine it? Just because the water flows, does that mean they have to dam it? Just because the trees are there, does that mean they have to cut them? At what point do we restrain ourselves in this society so that something is left because it has value on its own?

Deb (Haaland)’s history here with a vision that she and other leaders have had in Washington with a just transition and the Green New Deal is exactly what we need in this country. We don’t need any more fossil fuels. We’re done. We’re done. What we need is the vision and a just transition.

One time I was sitting in Sitka, Alaska—did you ever get a chance to go there? Beautiful. Like sometimes you just go someplace. I was at a writers’ workshop. I was in Sitka, Alaska, and I was watching—you know, the eagles were capturing the salmon that had come in. And so there was like eagles diving down into the ocean, and, you know, the salmon. And there were bears. And I looked out there, and I saw this cruise ship coming into the left of my vision. And it came in, and I was like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” The cruise ship came in, and then I watched that cruise ship turn a 180 and go exactly back out. And that’s basically what we’ve got to do. You know, we have to make the next economy, and that next economy is going to be green. That next economy is going to have people like me making decisions. I’d like to be an architect for the next economy. I didn’t like the last one.

So the next economy has to be something that reaffirms our relationship to the Earth and gives us a shot. That, to me, looks like a lot of local food, organic food.

We have a lot of teachings and language about how a people can live a thousand years in the same place and not destroy things. The phrase anishinaabe akiing, for example, means the land to which the people belong. It’s not the same thing as private property or even common property. It has to do with a relationship that a people has to a place—a relationship that reaffirms the sacredness of that place…

While I was introduced as an activist, I consider myself more a concerned parent. To be a mother in this day and age, you have to be concerned with a wide array of issues.

I haven't seen anyone improve on the tepee-you can have a fire inside it, and you can love it.

There is, in many Indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be.

And in our covenant with the Creator, we understand that it is not about managing their behavior—it’s about managing ours, because we’re the ones who cause extinction of species. We’re the youngest species, and we don’t necessarily have the most smarts. We’ve bungled up along the way, and we acknowledge these mistakes in our stories and in our history as Indian people. The question is whether you have the humility and the commitment to get some learning out of these experiences.

"Minobimaatisiiwin," or the "good life," is the basic objective of the Anishinaabeg and Cree³ people who have historically, and to this day, occupied a great portion of the north-central region of the North American continent. An alternative interpretation of the word is "continuous rebirth." This is how we traditionally understand the world and how indigenous societies have come to live within natural law. Two tenets are essential to this paradigm: cyclical thinking and reciprocal relations and responsibilities to the Earth and creation.