Winona LaDuke Quotations

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.

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

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

Actually, I consider myself to be pretty politically conservative.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She's an old ricer and knows everybody on this reservation.

We drew a line. Just don't mess with the rice.

We don't think scientists have the right to contaminate the state grain -- and it could happen through cross-pollination, if they develop a genetically enhanced wild rice and plant it in Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota has basically said, 'Well, we aren't intending to do it. But we want the right to.' And that's the problem, is that open door. I understand academic freedom. I'm a big supporter of academic freedom. But I feel like there should be some academic responsibility.

I'm voting my conscience on November 2; I'm voting for John Kerry.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not a patriot to a flag, I’m a patriot to a land.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The only compensation for land is land,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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