Winona LaDuke Quotes

I’m looking down the barrel of a very big pipeline, which is a $7 billion boondoggle of stranded assets. We’ll talk about that later. But I’m looking down the pipeline, you know, at the barrel of this pipeline, and I’m looking: What could $7 billion do in Minnesota? What could it do to make a New Green Deal?

I will argue that native societies' knowledge surpasses the scientific and social knowledge of the dominant society in its ability to provide information and a management style for environmental planning. Frankly, these native societies have existed as the only example of sustainable living in North America for more than 300 years.

I have heard that a number of times in my life. "You guys should get over it, it happened a long time ago." You cannot get over it if you are still in the same circumstance as a consequence of what happened a hundred years ago. You cannot get over it if you are still in exactly the same relationship as you were a hundred years ago. Some try to keep their trees and some try to take them.

While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of the most invasive industrial interventions imaginable.

The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact is that you couldn't vote in this country if you did not own land, and that 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 probably be the Indians.

A Navajo woman said to me, “In our old mythologies and stories, they talked of monster slayers.” She says we need a new generation of monster slayers. I think that’s such a powerful analogy, and it’s so true. It’s a David and Goliath moment, and we’ve got to hang in there because they are weakening…

Simply stated, if we can no longer nurse our children, if we can no longer bear children, and if our bodies are wracked with poisons, we will have accomplished little in the way of determining our destiny or improving our conditions.

Indian people know how to take care of this land.

It's hard to tell people to vote when their votes don't seem to count.

There is a peculiar kind of hatred in the northwoods, a hatred born of living with with three generations of complicity in the theft of lives and land. What is worse is that each day, those who hold this position of privilege must come face to face with those whom they have dispossessed. To others who rightfully should share in the complicity and the guilt, Indians are far away and long ago. But in reservation border towns, Indians are ever-present.

This is not a struggle for women of the dominant society in so-called "first world" countries to have equal pay and equal status if that pay and status continues to be based on a consumption model that is unsustainable. It is a struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth.

Native American teachings describe the relations all around-animals, fish, trees, and rocks as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together.

American public policy has come to reflect short-term interests, fiscal years, "deficit reduction" programs, and is increasingly absent of any intergenerational perspective. That long-term perspective is crucial to our well-being and a valuable role for democratic government.

If you appoint Indian people, don’t just make them pretty Indian people that sit in your administration. Let them do their job. Indigenous thinking is what we need in the colonial administration. That’s when change happens.

The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air, water, and land. Contaminating the commons must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as defacing private property is wrong. On that basis, the Seventh Generation Amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, "The right of citizens of the U.S. to enjoy and use air, water, sunlight, and other renewable resources determined by the Congress to be common property shall not be impaired, nor shall such use impair their availability for use by the future generations."