Quotes from Winona LaDuke

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Spirituality is the foundation of all my political work.

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.

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.

Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests.

What our Seventh Generation will have is a consequence of our actions today.

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.