Winona LaDuke: Environmental Justice from a Native Perspective

Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) is an internationally acclaimed author, orator and activist. LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. She is the Co-Director of Honor the Earth, a national advocacy group encouraging public support and funding for native environmental groups. With Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on issues of climate change, renewable energy, sustainable development, food systems and environmental justice. In her own community in northern Minnesota, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organization in the country, and a leader on the issues of culturally-based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In 1994, Time magazine named her one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and in 1997 LaDuke was named Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Thomas Merton Award, the Ann Bancroft Award and the Global Green Award, and the prestigious International Slow Food Award for working to protect wild rice and local biodiversity. In 2007, LaDuke was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In addition to numerous articles, LaDuke is the author of a number of non-fiction titles including All Our Relations, The Winona LaDuke Reader, Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming, Food is Medicine: Recovering Traditional Foods to Heal the People and her latest, The Militarization of Indian Country. She has also penned a work of fiction, Last Standing Woman, and a children’s book, In the Sugarbush. Outspoken, engaging, and unflaggingly dedicated to matters of ecological sustainability, Winona LaDuke is a powerful speaker who inspires her audiences to action and engagement