Winona LaDuke (born August 18, 1959) is an American economist, environmentalist, writer and industrial hemp grower, known for her work on tribal land claims and preservation, as well as sustainable development.
In 1996 and 2000, she ran for Vice President of the United States as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She is the executive director and a co-founder (along with the Indigo Girls) of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization that played an active role in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
In 2016, she received an electoral vote for vice president. In doing so, she became the first Green Party member to receive an electoral vote.
Early life and education
Winona (meaning "first daughter" in Dakota language) LaDuke was born in 1959 in Los Angeles, California, to Betty Bernstein and Vincent LaDuke (later known as Sun Bear). Her father was from the Ojibwe White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, and her mother of Jewish European ancestry from The Bronx, New York. LaDuke spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, but was primarily raised in Ashland, Oregon. Due to her father's heritage, she was enrolled at birth with the White Earth Nation, but did not live at White Earth, or any other reservation, until 1982. She started work at White Earth after graduating from college, when she got a job there as principal of the high school.
After her parents married, Vincent LaDuke worked as an actor in Hollywood in supporting roles in Western movies, while Betty LaDuke completed her academic studies. The couple separated when Winona was five, and her mother took a position as an art instructor at Southern Oregon College, now Southern Oregon University at Ashland, then a small logging and college town near the California border. In the 1980s, Vincent reinvented himself as a New Age spiritual leader by the name Sun Bear.
While growing up in Ashland, LaDuke attended public school and was on the debate team in high school. She attended Harvard University, where she joined a group of Indigenous activists, and graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics (rural economic development). When she moved to White Earth, she did not know the Ojibwe language, or many people, and was not quickly accepted. While working as the principal of the local Minnesota reservation high school she completed research for her master's thesis on the reservation's subsistence economy and became involved in local issues. She completed an M.A. in Community Economic Development through Antioch University's distance-learning program.
Career and activism
While attending Harvard, LaDuke heard a presentation by Jimmie Durham that she said "shook something loose" in her and changed her life. She worked for Durham, investigating the effects of uranium mining in Navajo reservations. After graduating, she moved to her father's community at White Earth, where she found work as the high school principal. In 1985 she helped found the Indigenous Women's Network. She worked with Women of All Red Nations to publicize American forced sterilization of Native American women.
Next she became involved in the struggle to recover lands for the Anishinaabe. An 1867 treaty with the United States provided a territory of more than 860,000 acres for the White Earth Indian Reservation. Under the Nelson Act of 1889, an attempt to have the Anishinaabe assimilate by adopting a European-American model of subsistence farming, communal tribal land was allotted to individual households. The US classified any excess land as surplus, allowing it to be sold to non-natives. In addition, many Anishinaabe sold their land individually over the years; these factors caused the tribe to lose control of most of its land. By the mid-20th century, the tribe held only one-tenth of the land in its reservation.
In 1989, LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) in Minnesota with the proceeds of a human rights award from Reebok. The goal is to buy back land in the reservation that non-Natives bought and to create enterprises that provide work to Anishinaabe. By 2000, the foundation had bought 1,200 acres, which it held in a conservation trust for eventual cession to the tribe.
WELRP is also working to reforest the lands and revive cultivation of wild rice, long a traditional food. It markets that and other traditional products, including hominy, jam, buffalo sausage, and other products. It has started an Ojibwe language program, a herd of buffalo, and a wind-energy project.