Winona LaDuke

Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) economist, environmentalist, hemp farmer, and political organizer, born 1959. Of the Mississippi Band of the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Harvard-educated; ran for U.S. Vice President twice on the Green Party ticket with Ralph Nader (1996, 2000). She founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which has recovered thousands of acres of original treaty land for the tribe, and Honor the Earth, a national Indigenous environmental organization. She has spent decades on the front lines of fights against tar-sands pipelines, mining on sacred land, and the patenting of indigenous foods. She farms wild rice, runs a hemp cooperative, and writes. Her argument: the climate crisis is not separable from the colonial crisis. The same logic that converts a forest into "timber" converts a people into "labor" and a future into "growth." Indigenous traditions are not nostalgia; they are working knowledge of how to live on a continent for ten thousand years without breaking it. Core teaching: the question is not how do we save the earth. The question is how do we live as if our descendants matter. Sovereignty, food, and seed are the same fight. Do the math the elders do: think seven generations ahead. Key works: *All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life*, *Recovering the Sacred*, *The Winona LaDuke Chronicles*, *To Be a Water Protector*.