Winona LaDuke seems like the perfect person to talk with about the myriad and connected threats we face as a democracy and as a people. Over her long career as an environmentalist and political activist, she has, as she puts it, “spent most of my life fighting stupid projects created by white guys in cities, from what I can figure. I’ve fought uranium mining, coal strip-mining projects, mega-dam projects, nuclear waste dumps—how many more stupid ideas can you come up with? Oh wait, they came up with another one!”
An enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg, LaDuke has become an internationally renowned social justice leader, dispensing indigenous wisdom in her many books and speaking engagements. She’s garnered recognition from Time magazine and the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and ran twice for Vice President with Ralph Nader on the Green Party ticket. She is also founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and co-founder and executive director of the indigenous environmental group Honor The Earth.
These days, LaDuke splits her time between projects ranging from a solar panel manufacturing facility to hemp farming—all while serving as a leader in the fight against the extension of Line 3, which would run across 340 miles of northern Minnesota (see story, page 24). LaDuke, seasoned from a lifetime of battles against dire threats to humanity, simply calls it “the last tar sands pipeline.”
Q: Is there one threat that you see as most pressing?
Winona LaDuke: I kind of look at it a little differently. I’m an economist by training, and I refer to this as Wiindigo economics—it’s like the economics of a cannibal. So what you’re dealing with is a system that behaves like an Ojibwe Wiindigo, a giant being that used to rampage through the north woods. I mostly consider myself a water protector. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to protect our water. The threats are pretty far-reaching. I don’t really buy into the “which one is the worst” and I also don’t really wanna buy into making people more fearful. I want to really assess the situation, look at our own complicit nature in it.
Q: What can we learn from indigenous peoples and wisdom about facing these issues?
LaDuke: Our people killed the Wiindigo, and now we have to kill the Wiindigo. You’ve gotta change that mindset. People have to act like they plan on staying here. I consider myself not a patriot to the flag, but a patriot to the land. You have to take care of this land here, you’ve gotta support us, because we’re not going anywhere.
[Indigenous peoples] have a lot of long-term perspective and knowledge and we also understand that you live and you survive. My son said, “You know, native people live in a post-apocalyptic world, Mom.” And he’s absolutely right. So as much as I’m saying “you fight the Wiindigo,” I’m also saying that there’s a lot of ways that change is made.
Q: Can you give some examples?
LaDuke: I believe that you officially have to move to relocalization. Whether it’s food or energy. Because in a post-fossil-fuel world, you have to move stuff around a lot less. You’ve got to move a lot less. And when you do move stuff, you’ve got to move it by electric train pretty much, because that’s so much more efficient, and we need to begin that transition.
We’re facing this really big pipeline [Line 3] up here, and we’ve been facing this company [Enbridge] for six years. And in six years, I’ve seen them lose two pipelines. In Canada, there were five pipeline proposals two years ago, and we’re down to Keystone and Line 3 at this point. No one really wants these, you’re at the end of the fossil-fuel era. I just remind people, “We didn’t leave the Stone Age because we ran out of rocks.” You move on. Be visionary and be innovative.
Q: What is some of this visionary work you’re doing?
LaDuke: My tribe is fighting this [Line 3] beast, and we just built a solar panel manufacturing facility called 8th Fire Solar. You can save about 20 percent of your heating bill with those babies, and you know, that’s not a bad idea. So, you know, you make the future. I’m a hemp farmer. I intend to build fiber hemp, and be part of the fiber hemp economy. You gotta just start somewhere.
We’ve defeated a lot of projects, a lot of bad ideas never happened.
Q: So, one way of resisting is proactively making a different future?
LaDuke: We’ve defeated a lot of projects, a lot of bad ideas never happened—and people don’t really know that. I think it’s important to remember they wanted a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000 and they don’t got ,em. The industry’s closing down. That money needs to go to feed the next economy. So you fight these guys in the courts, on the ground, in the regulatory process, and in the polls, and then you just make the next economy because this one is just so fragile and it’s imploding. Shipping food around the world, like goji berries, well, that requires a lot of fossil fuel. Fix the local economy, that’s way cooler.
Q: You’ve written about the White Earth Band of Ojibwe officially recognizing the rights of wild rice. How is recognizing the rights of nature a useful tool?
LaDuke: We live in a society with a legal system that recognizes the rights of corporations. Corporations are considered persons under the law. And so that’s baffling because a corporation is not a person; a person has a soul, a corporation doesn’t have a soul. And if a corporation was a person, by the time you get three or four mergers, a couple of buyouts, a name change, you’ve got a personality disorder. You’re not fit. So who should have rights? Life should have rights. Mother Earth should have a right. To our tribe, wild rice is who we are. Throughout our region, our people, we recognize the rights of wild rice in our indigenous legal system. The United States’ legal system is not evolved, but ours is.
Q: Do you think that Line 3 is going to go the way of the other pipelines that Enbridge has lost?
LaDuke: Yes. I refer to this as “the last tar sands pipeline.” That’s where we’re at. It’s gonna be the most expensive pipeline they never built. By the time they get to the Minnesota border, the people here, we fought them off for a year. We expect that if everything goes against us, they will begin construction this winter, a brutal time. Of the 300 miles of pipe that isn’t built, half of it is on public lands and campgrounds throughout the north country. I don’t know how much they’ll get done, most of it will happen in the spring, so we’ll invite everyone to begin coming to Minnesota.
Q: When you put it that way, building the pipeline seems impossible. What else makes you hopeful for the future?
LaDuke: There’s a lot of smart young people with lots of good ideas. I don’t call it the Green New Deal. I call it the Sitting Bull Plan. That’s when you put your minds together to see what kind of future you can put together for your children.
This is a crazy moment that we refer to as the Time of the Seventh Fire, where there’s two paths. One is really well worn and forged, and the other path is not. It’s green. And we have to make a choice about which path we go on. We’ve got to fight off the Wiindigo, and we’ve got to make the choice about how to move ahead.