Top 73 Quotes & Sayings by Winona LaDuke

I think of some of my friends who have passed to the spirit world but are who here with me when I go to events and when I walk in my own community. My sisters, Ingred, my sister Marsha, and my sister Nielock. All cofounders of the Indigenous Women's Network with me. All long time women activists in the native community.

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.

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.

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

Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests.

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.

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.

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.

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to.

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.

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

Actually, I consider myself to be pretty politically conservative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The reality is, is that the military is full of native nomenclature. That's what we would call it. You've got Black Hawk helicopters, Apache Longbow helicopters. You've got Tomahawk missiles. The term used when you leave a military base in a foreign country is to go 'off the reservation, into Indian Country.'

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.

Spirituality is the foundation of all my political work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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