Top 53 Winona LaDuke Quotes
#1. 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
#2. In most of America, it seems you don't matter if you're not between 25 and 50.
Winona LaDuke
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. What our Seventh Generation will have is a consequence of our actions today.
Winona LaDuke
#6. 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
#7. I'm not a patriot to a flag, I'm a patriot to a land.
Winona LaDuke
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The thing about being an Indian person is that you feel most at home with your own people.
Winona LaDuke
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Spirituality is the foundation of all my political work.
Winona LaDuke
#29. There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals.
Winona LaDuke
#30. 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
#31. I would like to see as many people patriotic to a land as I have seen patriotic to a flag.
Winona LaDuke
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Native communities are focal points for the excrement of industrial society.
Winona LaDuke
#41. 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
#42. Actually, I consider myself to be pretty politically conservative.
Winona LaDuke
#43. Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.
Winona LaDuke
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests.
Winona LaDuke
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
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