Winona LaDuke Native American Eco- Justice 2019 Forward August 2 2026 by K.Kieswetter

In Trump 2.0 the American President is eschewing decades of a Green energy platform and policies to return America to the good old days, in hs view, of carbon usage and manipulation of markets for the benefit of his acolytes,family,  and inner circle. The Bold Beutiful Bill has benefitted the top 10% (maybe) of the population while disenfranchising many voters that threaten the longevity of the Republican Party and  the gravy train that he has created in the White House. Notabley left out are millions of Americans who cannot afford health care because the government refuses to renew the Afforrdable Care Act Subsidies  that benefit middle to low income Americans who now have to forego treatments. Trump has started a war with Iran which he has no way out of that is costing billions when he promised no new wars. In the grand scheme, Trump may be deliverung major distrasctions from his culpability in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking imbroglio. Below is the text of a speecch LaDuke gave in 2019. Where Trump says no to windmills  and an aboriginal and even the Buddhist tenet of interconnectedness, Trump has turned America  inward and away from well grounded and established partnerships established since the end of WW2 in 1945.   With American energy reserves at their lowest since 1983 and stockplies of weapons dwindling, a cataclysmic event(s) may be upon America before the mid terms in November where the USA or Israerl may resort to tactical nukes against Iran. Given the loss of the House of Representatives and Senate in November and the likelihood of Impeacheachment,  Mr Trump should be resigning his position by Spring 2027. He would do well to listen to LaDuke and alter his rhetoric,  but this Leopsrd wil not change his spots. Enjoy Winona's message. 

Kevin Kieswetter

August 2 2026

 

 

 

 

 WINONA LaDUKE
Native American Eco-Justice
University of Montana, Missoula, MT 26 February 2019
Winona LaDuke is a brilliant and articulate representative of indigenous perspectives. At the age of seventeen she spoke at
the UN on behalf of Native Americans. She is a founding member of Women of All Red Nations and director of the Land
Recovery Project on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. She was the 1996 and 2000 vice-presidential candidate of
the Green Party, the first Native American to run for national office. She is the author of All Our Relations, Recovering the
Sacred, The Militarization of Indian Country and The Winona LaDuke Chronicles.
[Welcome in Ojibwe] I’m from the White Earth
Reservation and Bear Clan and am really honored to be here
with you.
You asked me to speak about the idea of being good
ancestors. As I think about this moment in time and who we
are, we’ve got a pretty good gig. I live in a place where you
can still drink the water from a lake. I live in a place where
you can get sugar from a tree. Wild rice is in abundance. I
live in a place that we have a good life that the creator gave
us. And I would like to keep that covenant. That’s how I
think of it and how I think we are instructed, is that we have
this agreement with the creator and the natural world to do
our part and to be good humans. So this lecture is a little bit
about that and kind of the conundrum we got ourselves into
and how we’re going to get ourselves out, from my
perspective.
I’m going to start with talking about making America
great again. This is my idea of when America was great,
with 8,000 varieties of corn. [visual] We were all pretty
busy over here before everybody came over. A lot of
agrobiodiversity, tremendous agrobiodiversity. I think of
that because that’s when America was greatest, when there
were 8,000 varieties of corn. America was great when there
were as well 50 million buffalo. That would be when
America was great. The single largest migratory herd in the
world transformed ecosystems and lived in a territory
where there were 250 different species of grass, this
territory. Tremendous biodiversity. That is where life is, is
in biodiversity. Today in this same landscape you and I
know that that does not exist. Thankfully, there is still the
bison range, and I would like to see the control of that and
the management of that returned to the Salish and Kootenai
people—because that is how America is going to get great,
by returning some stuff that was taken. That’s how you fix
things.
But in the same territory where there were once 50
million buffalo there are today about 28 million cattle, that
require an entire fossil-fuels economy to take care of them.
And everybody here knows that a cow will flee a blizzard,
will run from it, but a buffalo will walk into it. If you want
to think of the animals that are going to survive in a time of
climate change, you might look at those guys. That’s when
America was great. America was great when the skies were
blackened with passenger pigeons, when every river and
lake you could drink from, and when the fish were in great
abundance. That is when America was great.
I want to remember that and I want to say I want it back.
America suffers from a great deal of historical amnesia and
also ecological amnesia. With the transience of Americans,
people do not live in the same place as their grandparents
or their great grandparents, and they certainly have no idea
of what was there. They don’t remember that that was the
place where the wild rice was or maybe that was the place
where the buffalo were. But in our territory we still have
that wild rice.
This is kind of the conflict. And I don’t want to
misrepresent the situation and say that there is a way to
converge those world views, because there is not. There are
two very different world views of how one should relate to
this world. I refer to it as Windigo economics, the
economics of cannibalism. I think that this is the time when
we start discussing what that looks like. Everyone in
Montana knows that, or I hope that you do, that almost
every Indian reservation has a pretty good-sized dam on it.
Those dams were not for us. Instead of a covenant, the
relationship of a constant level of consumption and a
constant level of extraction.
So in the moment in time where we are, it’s not going
so great. This is a picture from Fort McMurray, which is up
in the middle of the tar sands. [visual] This was a fire that
they had two years ago. I don’t know if you saw that fire,
but there was smoke from those fires in Ontario and in
Alberta, in northern Minnesota. Some days you would
wake up and it would be a red sky. So we see that. But this
could have been the entire West Coast of the U.S., this
could have been the destructive Camp Fire in Northern
California. I have flown into Missoula before, and I’ve seen
firefighters coming in. We all know this is what is going on,
this is what climate change looks like, this is what happens
as a consequence of climate change.
There are many aspects, but I was talking a little bit
about infrastructure earlier. This is how much it costs us.
They are saying that Munich Re, the world’s largest
reinsuring company, suggested that by 2020 we would be
spending 20% of world GNP on climate-change-related
disasters. Now, they might have been a little high or a little
low. I have no idea. But all I know is that no one has a plan
for this one. What we have is a lot of tribes, states, cities
going like this. When the reality is that around us the
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decisions that have been made in this economy, that has
consumed more than it needs and has been highly
extractive, we have no plan collectively on how we’re
going to survive this next stage.
At this moment in time, as I talked about the scorched
path or the green path, I am with all of you. I have spent my
entire life in the fossil-fuel era. I’ve had a great time. Did
you all have a pretty good time? It’s okay, admit it. It’s been
a blast. I went to drive-ins, I flew around. Do you remember
drive-in movies? Sometimes I get my flowers from
Colombia two days after they are picked. I like to eat my
goji berries from the Himalayas or something. I always
laugh at that organic food. I eat organic food mostly, but I
remember one time my niece was there, and she had this
perfect vegetarian meal consisting of goji berries and
coconut flakes and all this other cool stuff. She’s, like,
“Look.” I was, like, “Yeah, the carbon footprint of that
vegetarian meal is really high.” So my point is that we live
in this period of time, and I’ve enjoyed it.
And what I’m really after is kind of a graceful transition
out of it. In the big picture, we’ve entered this era where
we’ve jacked our society up on fossil fuels. Each of our
households is consuming a vast amount, and most of our
lifestyles are predicated on access to cheap fossil fuels. So
we’ve become addicted. That’s the reality. We’re all
addicts. And the thing with addicts is that addicts do a lot
of bad stuff. I’ll be honest with you, and you all know it,
because some of you probably have addicts in your family.
They rationalize and they lie and it’s always your problem.
We’ve entered this era, which Montana is well into,
which is an era known as extreme extraction, which means
that you’re kind of at the bottom of the barrel. So everything
else that’s out there to get is not easy. There’s not oil
gushing anymore. Extreme extraction is lopping off the top
of mountains in Appalachia. That’s an extreme behavior.
And that’s not even for coal for this country; that’s coal
that’s being exported. Extreme behavior, extreme
extraction, extreme energy is drilling 20,000 feet under the
ocean because you can and hoping that that’s going to work
out for you, until you get the Deepwater Horizon. Extreme
extraction is blowing up the bedrock of Mother Earth,
shoving 602 chemicals down there, and hoping what goes
down will not come up. Fracking. Bottom of the barrel.
Extreme extraction is tar sands, the dirtiest oil in the world.
At a certain point you’ve got to say, How bad is your
habit, which you can do. I want to be one of the people that
says, “We didn’t leave the Stone Age because we ran out of
rocks. We’re going to leave the fossil-fuel era because it’s
time.”
In the era of extreme extraction—and I’m going to talk
a little bit about what we’re doing in our community—but
I spent the last five years fighting pipelines. I didn’t grow
up and say “I want to fight pipelines.” This was not my
plan. My plan was to continue wild rice harvesting, grow
organic food, and build a renewable energy economy.
That’s a good one, huh? You all like that? That seemed
pretty good. And then one day they announced this proposal
to put this big pipeline across our territory. This pipeline
was called the Sandpiper. It was a fracked-oil pipeline out
of North Dakota. They announced that pipeline is going to
come across our territory. And you can see my reservation,
White Earth, which is where that line is supposed to go.
They announced it, and I said, “That’s not going to work
out.” So I go and I start studying up on pipelines.
I’m like all of you. I’m just like, well, that’s a pipeline.
I’ll actually not opposed to pipelines. I really like water and
sewer. You know what I’m saying? It’s not the pipe. It’s
what’s in it that’s the problem. We have in this country, as
most people know, crumbling infrastructure. And one of the
things is that rather than fix old infrastructure, they just
want to put in brand-new infrastructure for oil companies.
That’s my problem: I want pipelines for people, not for oil
companies. That’s kind of how I’m thinking about it.
So they announced this pipeline and I was, like, That’s
not going to work. So we go, get ourselves educated about
it and learn a lot about it, and then we started informing our
own community. And then we started informing the non-
Indian people in our area about this pipeline project coming
in. My theory was, if you could get the Norwegians mad,
they’re like a persistent, plucky bunch. So we built a
multiracial alliance with a lot of Norwegians and Swedes,
and we showed up at every hearing. We had a lot of
ceremonies and a lot of civic participation.
And then a lawsuit was filed by this little group called
Friends of the Headwaters. And that lawsuit said to the
State of Minnesota that you should do an environmental
impact statement on the proposed of 640,000-barrel-a-day
pipeline. You shouldn’t just let them do it. So we had to sue
them to get them to do an EIS. I’d like the system to work;
I feel like the system is supposed to work. So we had to sue
them. And then they appealed that. Finally, the appeals
court ordered them to do an Environmental Impact
Statement on this proposed pipeline project called the
Sandpiper. So that was like two and a half, three years in,
battling away. And just after they started that EIS on that
project, the Enbridge Corporation cancelled the Sandpiper;
they cancelled the pipeline. So what I want to say is it is
possible to defeat a big pipeline project. In 2016 we
defeated the Enbridge Corporation. They’re the third
largest corporation in Canada and the biggest pipeline
company.
And then what that company did is that company, the
Enbridge Corporation, purchased 20% of the Dakota
Access Pipeline, shored that up financially. So we followed
them out to North Dakota. How many of you went out to
Standing Rock? That’s so great, fellow veterans from
Standing Rock. Nice to see you all. So people know what
this is like out there. We followed Enbridge out there, and
this is what we saw. And this is what we saw when they put
the dogs on our people. [visual] And when they put the dogs
on our people, I called Enbridge. They had appointed some
people to talk to us. They were called the tribal liaisons. We
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referred to them as the Indian Whisperers. We burned
through a couple of Indian Whisperers, and then they gave
me somebody more important to talk to. That was the
Indian Listener. She was up in Calgary. Her name was
Linda Cody. I was, like, “Linda, you’ve got to call the dogs
off. You just financed 38% of that pipeline. You’ve got a
lot of money in it, and you need to call the dogs off.” She
didn’t respond. Nothing. I, texted her, I called her, I wrote
her. So I hold Enbridge responsible. It was 28% of the
injuries, 28% of this, what you saw out there.
This is what you saw out there. [visual] I didn’t
understand what this equipment was. I had to ask someone.
But the piece of equipment on the right is called MRAP,
mine-resistant ambush-protected. That is used in the
military. It says “Stutzman County.” And if anyone knows
anything about Stutzman County, Stutzman County might
have 5,000 people in it. They really have no need for an
MRAP—you understand what I’m saying?--that drives
through a building. And there’s not any buildings in
Stutzman County. You all understand. It’s like eastern
Montana. So why have you got something that looks like
that?
The second piece of equipment there is called an LRAD,
a long-range acoustic device. That’s intended to blow your
ear drums out. This is all what happens when you surplus
military equipment to civilian police forces. This is
something that should not happen in this country. You
should not be surplusing military equipment to civilian
police forces so that they can protect corporations.
This is basically a question to me of should the rights of
corporations supersede the rights of persons. People in this
room likely know that under the law corporations are
considered natural persons, are considered artificial
persons. In addition, with Citizens United, they are
bestowed with certain rights. I’ve been thinking a lot about
this. And if a corporation is a person—like, first of all, they
aren’t a person because a person has a soul and a
corporation does not have a soul, right? But if they want to
be called a person, it seems to me like after you go through
about three or four corporate mergers, you suffer from a
multiple personality disorder, if you all understand what
I’m saying, so you would not actually be competent in court
to stand as a person. This is my new argument on their
argument. Plus, you’re probably psychotic on top of that.
This is one of the things we’re going to have to untangle, is
the rights of humans versus the rights of corporations.
And just the brutality that we experienced at Standing
Rock. For those of you who were there, we know. I did not
sustain any injuries and I was not arrested. But my family
was arrested and my family was injured, and I lost a horse
at Standing Rock. I will never forgive North Dakota for the
$38 million worth of military that they unleashed on me.
And as we face them again in Minnesota, as we face
Enbridge, we have said, “You are not bringing the tanks
here because we will not stand for it.” So it will be
interesting to say what happens until Minnesota. Winter in
Standing Rock that was a lot to accomplish, to be able to
feed 3,000 people in the middle of the winter when you’re
barricaded in. It’s remarkable what our people were able to
do. I just want to say that, because when people work
together, you can make a change and you can make a
difference.
For many of us Standing Rock was really a Selma
moment in the environmental movement—this moment
where all of your mettle and determination is tested as you
face down large multinational corporations with lots of
guns and you say, “We’re still standing, we’re still
standing.” That really, in my experience, has had a very
significant impact on all of us, and it remains so today.
As I think about it, when Trump came in and approved
that pipeline, which was wrong, this company came back to
us, Enbridge, and they announced Line Three, which is a
tar-sands pipeline of 915,000 barrels a day. We’ve been
facing them now for six years. We are battling them in the
courts and we are battling them in the regulatory system in
the U.S. But what I want to say is that if you missed your
opportunity to go to Standing Rock, if they issue the rest of
those permits and move ahead this summer, camping in
Minnesota is very nice. Half of the proposed pipeline in
northern Minnesota, the Enbridge tar-sands pipeline that we
are fighting, half of that line is on public land and none of
that line is built. My position is that I’m a member of the
public and I can camp for up to 14 days on public land. And
camping is nice in Minnesota. You can camp right by a lake
on the pipeline—on the pipeline that they will not build.
But this is our larger battle.
Just like in the last part of my what-is-wrong-with-thesystem,
I just want to point this out to you. This is a map of
pipelines that are proposed in North America. This is
because they are rebuilding the infrastructure of this
country and of Canada, which is a pretty dysfunctional
economy in itself. But if you look at this map, there are five
pipelines proposed two years ago to get the land-locked tar
sands, the dirtiest oil in the world, out. This one up there on
the top is called Energy East. That goes from Alberta to
New Brunswick. The second pipeline is Enbridge Northern
Gateway. The third pipeline is Trans Mountain. The fourth
one is the Keystone XL. And the fifth one is Enbridge’s
Line Three. That’s just to give you a little picture of the
North American tar-sands pipeline battles.
Having said that, what I want to point out is that the
Energy East pipeline, the longest pipeline, never received
the approval of the National Energy Board because the
premiers of none of those provinces nor the mayor of
Montreal want that had pipeline. So that pipeline never
happened and never is going to happen.
That second pipeline, the Northern Gateway pipeline of
Enbridge, also did not happen. Huge opposition, not
approved. So we’re down to three pipelines. You all follow
me on this? The dirtiest oil in the world.
The third pipeline is Trans Mountain. They’re moving
ahead with it. It’s a Canadian pipeline but owned by a Texas
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company called Kinder Morgan. In August, a little bit
earlier, the unrest, the civil disobedience, the arrests, and
the opposition to that pipeline had grown so massively that
they were not getting anywhere, so Kinder Morgan said,
You know, Canada, we want to back out a little bit because
we don’t feel confident about the social climate for this
pipeline. It was, like, no kidding. And then what
happened—somebody might have noticed this—is that the
Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, panicked, and he
bought that pipeline, nationalized the pipeline, purchasing
it for $4.9 billion. It’s known as the Trans Mountain
Pipeline. I think we should just call it Trudeau West. He
spent $4.9 billion on a pipeline, and the day after he bought
the pipeline, the Canadian Appeals Court ruled that all of
the permits were null and void on that pipeline because they
had not consulted with First Nations. So where are we at?
Three down, right? And that is in court, but I’m saying
Canada is kind of in a big mess over that because spending
$4.9 billion on something that isn’t happening is expensive.
Then Keystone. And we all know what Trump did. He
has this little fairy wand and he’s just, like, I’m going to
reverse everything that Obama did because I’m president.
As you know, the Montana court said, You just can’t
reverse things because you’re president. You have to give
a reason. So that is in litigation here. It’s here in Montana
and it was sent back.
Finally, the last pipeline. That leaves one pipeline, right?
That pipeline is our battle at home, and we hope that the
system works. If the system works, they will not ever
approve this pipeline. If the system does not work, we will
be in a very brutal battle in Minnesota this summer. But, as
I said, camping in Minnesota will be really nice.
This is what it looks like in Minnesota on the ground.
[visual] This is not North Dakota. This is thousands of
people. Sixty-eight thousand people testified against that
pipeline. This is this summer in downtown Bemidji. As
they started to amass the police forces to oppose us, a bunch
of clergy joined together and blocked the streets in
downtown Bemidji, and then we all got arrested. There’s
my arrest photo. [visual] I’m, like, all happy, huh? Well, it
took them a long time to arrest me, so I was, like, Okay, I’m
going to go home now. Thanks. So my thoughts are, if
you’re going to get arrested, you might just link yourself
right up to a church person. Your sentencing will be a lot
more lenient.
The story I’m telling you is to keep at it and you’ve got
a shot at stopping these lines and a lot of stupid projects.
But more than that, the answers to me are found in the next
economy. So I refer to this as the Sitting Bull Plan. Some
people might refer to this as the Green New Deal, but I refer
to this as the Sitting Bull Plan. And I think about that great
spiritual leader so long ago who was a great political and
military strategist. What he said was, “Let us put our minds
together to see what kind of future we can make for our
children.” That is what we really must do. If you want your
future to be made for you by someone in Helena or someone
in Washington, D.C., you’re probably going to be pretty
disappointed with what they line up for you. If we are the
people who are going to make our future, then no time like
the present to begin thinking of what that looks like. I refer
to this as the Sitting Bull Plan. I’m going to talk a little bit
about what that looks like.
The next economy will be regenerative, it will be
renewable, it will be organic. In my estimation, a lot of
women should make more decisions. The last 200 years has
been a lot of poor decision making. The fact is that
renewable energy produces for more jobs per capita and per
dollar than do fossil fuels.
This is what the next economy looks like. [visual] I’m
not sure how it worked out that Indian reservations are the
windiest places in this country, but we are. And I think that
anybody from Blackfeet knows that is true, is that right?
It’s really windy up there. But you guys have class 7 winds,
as does most of the Northern Plains. So to me, that is the
mark of an export economy, if you’re looking at the big
picture of things, because if you have 17,000 times more
wind than you can use, you might want to share it.
So the next economy is what energy justice looks like—
that we’re not the last people to get renewable energy in our
communities. We’re the people who are not only at the table
but my position is—my friend Bob Goff used to say,
“You’re either at the table or you’re on the menu.” Do you
all follow me on this? So I don’t actually want to be just at
the table, I want to set the table and I want to figure out
what we’re eating.
Because to me this whole question of where we are
going, we need to be very proactive in what that looks like
in redefining the terrain. This is some work that I’ve just
started looking at, which is railroads. [visual] A lot of
reservations actually have railroads near them. There is this
group called the Solutionary Rail project, and what they are
looking at is electrifying railroads. Montana certainly has a
lot of railroads. But we are the last country to have
electrified trains. Just to give you an example of that, if you
think about it, the equivalent of the Marshall Plan being the
Sitting Bull Plan, if you want to rebuild the infrastructure
in this country, which we have a D in infrastructure, right,
if we want to start working on that, we might as well do it
well.
One of the significant differences in how you move
things is the difference between combustion and electricity.
So the engine in a car is only about 16% efficient, the
vehicle that most of us drove here in. A combustion engine
is about 16% efficient. An electric engine is 65% efficient.
Similarly, if you look at trains, in the situation of trains,
95% of the electricity that is generated, if you had an
electric train, goes directly to the wheels as opposed to 30%
of it makes it to the wheels if you are running a diesel
engine. So one of the proposals that these guys have at
Solutionary Rail is in electrifying the trains, and in
electrifying these trains, actually using the rail lines as a
way to transmit electricity, to be the power lines, because
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you already have an energy corridor. I’m not the person to
sort that out.
I’m probably the person who’s going to work on it on
my reservation, because my reservation has one rail line
that goes through three of our main villages. It’s very rarely
used now. My tribe should really look at both electrifying
it and rebuilding the rail system so it works, because
everybody would probably prefer to have a rail system that
works. We live in a country where—I think the description
by someone was that we have a rail system that would be
an embarrassment to Bulgaria. You all understand what I’m
saying. If we’re going to be a first-world country, let’s be a
classy first-world country, not like what we’ve got.
This is another example of how you make a change.
[visual] This is the Kayenta solar project on the Navajo
reservation. Thirteen thousand homes are served off of this
project. There is a huge amount of potential in a lot of our
communities. Navajo has huge potential for renewable
energy generation, particularly solar, and also has a huge
amount of transmission lines that come from the five coalfired
generators that have been on the Navajo reservation.
So there is the potential to actualize it at a small scale and
the potential to actualize it at a much larger scale.
There is a lot of work on putting solar on brown fields.
This is a project in the middle of the tar sands. This woman
is named Melina Laboucan-Massimo. She’s a good friend
of mine. I was on her master’s committee at the University
of Victoria a couple of years ago. Her village, Little
Buffalo, just on the south side of the tar sands, surrounded
by oil extraction, didn’t have electricity at their health
clinic. What they had was a diesel generator to power the
electricity to power their health clinic. I just want to the
point that out, because that’s like a snapshot of what energy
justice does not look like—when you are producing all this,
have all the impacts in your community, have all the health
impacts, and you don’t even have power in your village,
right?
For her master’s thesis she put up—she didn’t just talk
about it, she put up 20 kilowatts of solar to power her health
clinic. That’s Melina Laboucan, really a gifted young
woman. [visual] And this is me with our little solar project
on my reservation. [visual] I was, like, “Melina, I’m going
to try to do that, too.” This is 20 kilowatts of solar that
powers a tribal school in my village.
Here we are putting up solar thermal panels. In Montana
this would work really well, too. It’s super cold in
Minnesota in the wintertime, but it’s also sunny. And that’s
Montana. Within that, on the south-facing walls you can
install one of these panels. And that’s a panel that’s flat. It’s
about to go up into that space. That 4-by-8 panel is dark
inside, so the sun comes into it, and when it hits about 90
degrees, the thermostat cranks on a blower fan and it blows
warm air into the house. In northern Minnesota and in the
Dakotas, some of those places where they have had these
panels, you can save about 20% to 30% of your heating bill
if you have solar thermal. In the time of climate change, in
the time when more of our grid will be going down, in the
time when more and more people face fuel poverty, in the
time when we don’t know what’s going to happen with the
weather, no time like the present to try to reduce some of
the risk for your communities. This is really low-hanging
fruit. These things cost about, I don’t know, $2,000 or so,
and then the installation is probably another thousand.
This is work that we are doing in my community.
[visual] This work is growing back a lot of our old varieties
of corn. In the time of climate change and in the moment
that we’re in, it turns out that a lot of these old varieties are
a lot more resilient. It’s called Bear Island flint. I want to
say that I was an undergraduate at Harvard, but my father
went to school to the eighth grade. He came to see me one
day. He was super proud of me, but he said, “Winona,
you’re a really smart young woman, but I don’t want to hear
your philosophy if you can’t grow corn.” So I became a
corn grower at a certain point. That was really interesting
to say to a young woman who is studying so hard.
But plants have taught me a great deal. The variety that
I grow mostly is Bear Island flint corn. I received about this
much from this plant geneticist and I received it about 25
years ago, like a little handful that had been collected on
Bear Island and kept at the GRIN seed bank and they have
grown it out. So now we have fields of it. The first time I
grew it, it was kind of short, and I thought I had failed. Then
I realized all it really had to do was to put on an ear.
Actually, it was about this tall. But I thought, I’m not that
good of a corn grower. But it just had to the put on an ear.
That’s all a corn has to do. My corn varieties are shorter,
but it turned out they were frost-resistant and droughtresistant.
Also, when the big winds came through, they
knocked over the 6-foot-tall Monsanto Roundup Ready
varieties, but mine stood. So twice the protein, half the
calories. This is what you make hominy out of. And the
other thing is that when you have a dry corn, it has a low
carbon impact to store it.
These are a couple other varieties. I’ve never grown the
Pawnee Eagle corn. I just think it’s a stunning corn. That’s
what I mean, tremendous agrobiodiversity. And the other
corn is a Pink Lady corn. I have grown that. People used to
ask me how come I grew pink corn, and I said, “Because I
like pink.” Someone said, “No, you should grow blue
corn,” and I said, “No, you should grow blue corn. There’s
8,000 varieties. You can grow whatever color you want.”
To me, there is the tremendous agrobiodiversity and also
the question of food security. In the time that we face now,
the average meal travels 1500 miles or 1400 miles from
farmer to table. What’s going to happen when the price of
fossil fuels increases? And what’s going to happen in times
of climate change. You definitely want to relocalize your
food economy. In that, reducing the carbon footprint of
your food economy is a significant part of beginning to
mitigate climate change.
My favorite project is my hemp. I am a hemp farmer. I
have for three years had a permit from the State of
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Minnesota to grow industrial hemp. I can’t grow anything
with THC in it. I grow fiber hemp. I also did grow some
CBD varieties this year, but my primary interest is in fiber
hemp. This is my hemp skirt. [visual] Minnesota used to
have 11 hemp mills. We used to grow our clothes, and we
had a whole economy based on it. And not only did we have
11 hemp mills, we also made rope. And I just want it back.
So I’ve been working on it for a couple of years. Fiber hemp
has three times the tensile strength of cotton, twice as much
production per acre as cotton. An average shirt and jeans
takes 5,000 gallons of water if it’s made of cotton. Hemp
does not have the same water requirements. That’s just a
little bit about it. You can build houses. It’s a very versatile
crop.
I’m really interested in the future of hemp. Winona’s
Hemp is working on a new project: My project is to be build
a hemp mill in Minnesota. So if you’re at all interested, look
at our stuff. But I want to say that I found a mill. And the
mill that I’m building on my reservation next to the rail line
is kind of like that Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a
Time.” You know that Johnny Cash song? He gets a car and
he puts it together one piece at a time, right? So my mill has
all these pieces from vintage mills. Isn’t that interesting?
There’s like the Saco, Maine, equipment, there’s new
equipment out of Rhode Island and New York and South
Carolina and Italy. Is that cool or what? So stay tuned. But
we’re hoping to have one of the first operating hemp mills
in our neck of the woods for sure, a textile mill. We’re
interested in textiles.
And this is my wild rice. [visual] That’s what we’re
fighting to protect. That’s the lake that they would have put
that pipeline by. As we think of how to protect that same
rice that my ancestors for 8,000 years have harvested on
that lake, my tribe at the end of December of 2018 passed
the Rights of Wild Rice, or the Rights of Manoomin, as a
part of our tribal government. I just want to say that in the
big picture there are a couple other tribes: The Poncas have
passed The Rights of Nature, and the Ho-Chunk Nation is
looking at the rights of nature. But my tribe passed the
Rights of Wild Rice, recognizing wild rice has a right to
live uncontaminated, has a right to regeneration, has a right
to be free of genetic contamination or genetic engineering,
has a right to exist. Because we are people who are born of
wild rice. It’s a part of our migration story and it is our most
sacred food.
In this moment of time we are in, where we have a set
of legal institutions that have upheld the rights of
corporations over the rights of people, what you have is the
counter to that and the more enlightened practice not only
of tribes but of countries like Bolivia and Ecuador and
Autearoa, or New Zealand, which recognize the rights of
nature. My tribe has done that, and people are reviewing
that.
My point is that legal systems are not stagnant. There
was a time when I and every other whether it was a black
or native person wasn’t actually considered a person under
the law in this country. Now we are considered to be people
under the law, writ of habeas corpus, the right to be
considered as full human beings. There was a time when
the law did not recognize our rights as human beings. So
legal institutions will evolve. But as I said at the beginning,
the rights of Mother Earth and the rights of nature, the rights
of our beings is not something that the United States is
familiar with in its legal canons that came from papal law
and dominion. So it is time to look beyond legal canons to
indigenous legal canons and the knowledge of other
nations, like Bolivia, which declared almost a decade ago
the Rights of Mother Earth.
Kind of in closing, as I said, this is what Minnesota
looks like. These are Water Protectors. [visual] Millions of
people come to camp in Minnesota. We hope more will
come. And we launched the Welcome, Water Protectors
campaign. I was laughing, because we have these signs up
north that say “Welcome, Duck Hunters” or “Welcome,
Fishermen.” And I said, “Let us welcome our Water
Protectors.” Here are some of our Water Protectors. Please
join us this summer.
There is something about a butterfly that is really
remarkable. We all know the word “metamorphosis,” but
contained in that, a butterfly does something that other
species don’t do. When there’s a caterpillar that begins to
transition to become a butterfly, in its first round, these cells
appear. Those cells are called imago cells. Those cells
begin to appear, and the first ones are killed off. And then
more come, and those are killed off, too. And then more
come, and they’re killed off, too. And at a certain point the
imago cells overtake the cells that were the caterpillar and
that being is like liquefied inside the chrysalis. They
overtake them and they transform that caterpillar into a
butterfly. That is how that change happens. The word
“imago” is the same as the root word for imagination. I
know and feel that we are the imago cells of this time.
Change happens. Change is inevitable. It is a question of
who controls the change.
There’s group out on Pine Ridge called the Thunder
Valley Community Development Corporation. I was
reading their annual report a couple years ago, and I said,
“Man, that’s powerful, what the guy said there.” So I called
up my friend Nick Tilsen, one of my nephews. He used to
run Thunder Valley Community Corporation, really a
remarkable initiative on Pine Ridge Reservation to
transform that community near Kyle. I said, “Hey, Nick,
can I use this quote? I’m writing something.” And he was,
like, “Yeah, Auntie, but let me just tell you where that quote
came from.”
He said, “A bunch of us were going to a sweat, a bunch
of Oglalas were going to a sweat, and we was talkin’ and
we were kind of talkin’ smack. We were talking about this
person did that and that person did this.” I just want say,
even sometimes when you’re off to be your sacred being,
you’re still talkin’ smack on the way in. So they were doing
that, he said, “And then we went in the lodge.” And then he
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said, “This spirit came into the sweat lodge. And this is
what that spirit said.” This is the quote: “How long are you
going to let others determine the future for your children?
Are we not warriors? When our ancestors went into battle,
they did not know what the consequences were going to be.
All they knew was that if they did nothing, things would
not go well for their children. Do not operate out of a place
of fear. Operate out of a place of hope, because with hope
everything is possible. The time is now, the movement is
here.” That’s what that spirit told those guys.
So in this moment we have this opportunity to look out
for our descendants, as our ancestors looked out for us. And
as they looked and wondered what would happen, they
thought about seven generations from now, they thought
about how they could care not only for themselves but for
their relatives, whether they had wings or fins or roots or
paws. They thought about how they could reaffirm their
covenant and make things right.
In the big picture there is a lot of crazy stuff we have
done as humans. They call us the Anthropocene era now
because we are the dominant force in changing the ecology.
But someplace in that we must remember how beautiful we
are. I think about that because corn in itself tells you that
story. Corn does not exist in nature. In nature it is teosinte.
But it is the hands and prayers of individuals who collected
and saved seeds and thought that made 8,000 varieties of
corn and made beautiful corn with eagles on each kernel
and made it of all those colors. Corn is one of those
wondrous beings that is our relationship and our covenant
to that natural world.
We are here in this moment. What a great spiritual
opportunity we have to remember, to not have historical or
ecological amnesia, and to remember this moment we have
and to be the people that our descendants can be proud.
Miigwech. Thank you for your time.
Q&A
Kiana for all that you do. What role do non-Native allies
have in this moment in time?
We’re all in this together. That’s what I know. If we’re
going to change this world and the situation that we’re in,
we must all work together. Everybody has their little gift.
But it is the working together part that is going to make
those changes happen, and at not just the same time. Over
the last years, people have understood that we’re the people
that didn’t take a piece of the pie. I don’t know how else to
put it. I live in a community that nothing ever really trickled
down to, so I didn’t really get a piece of the pie, so I don’t
want a bigger piece of the pie. I just want a totally different
pie. In that there is this whole different world view.
And the leadership for the next economy really must
come from outside of the paradigm. A lot of that leadership
is going to come from people who figured out how to live
here for 10,000 years without messing it up. So working in
ally-ship is going to be very, very critical, and looking
strategically at it. The remaining biodiversity in the world,
a good portion of it is in indigenous territories. So if you
want to do that, want to protect that, work with us.
What happened the last time you felt your heart and soul
warmed to the core?
Wow, that’s a heavy question. Last week? I live a great life.
I’m super grateful to be hanging out with you. I live in the
middle of my reservation. I have a lot of children who call
me Grandma. A lot of them don’t actually have a grandma.
That’s the reality of a lot of Indian communities: A lot of
people die way too young. I have 17 horses. And I saw eight
of those horses out with a bunch of kids on them, some of
them urban Indian kids who had never ridden. So how great
is it to be in that moment? It kind of makes me teary
thinking about how beautiful that was. And that was last
weekend. Each day try to figure out how you can make
something or nurture something. I consider myself like a
doula. You know what I’m saying? The doula of the next
economy. We all need to be the doulas. Or the doulas of the
new leadership. Let us be those who help encourage that.
Seeing beautiful young kids be so happy makes me super
happy.
“What is the best way to support, get involved, volunteer
with a local tribal community?”
I don’t know all the issues out here or all the opportunities.
I know about the Salish and Kootenai, for instance, on the
return of the bison range. I know that there are a multitude
of ways to ally and to work with indigenous communities
here, Nations, also making sure that the university has good
resources and good support for Native students. That’s
going to be very important for a lot of the Native students.
But a lot of these front-line environmental battles are
indigenous environmental battles.
Another whole aspect of that which I think I basically
discussed is that renewable energy, we don’t want to be the
last people to get that. We want to be right at the top. And
I want to see a lot more partnerships with First Nations and
tribes to ensure that there’s this transition, because it is so
true that we have borne the brunt of America’s energy
policy for 50 years. Every coal strip mine, every uranium
mine, every massive oil project, the tar sands and pipelines
are on our territories. It is time for justice. Justice looks like
renewable energy. Justice looks like that our people have
those projects and that our power is purchased.
Montana is a little bit like North Dakota in terms of its
political leanings, except for Missoula. You’re the cool
part. I know that. It’s super funny, because in North Dakota
the cool city is Fargo, which doesn’t sound as cool as
Missoula, but they just elected an Indian woman to the state
legislature. So that’s a whole other thing. I know Montana
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has a lot of voter turnout for Natives. Vote Native. If Native
people want to hold office, vote for them.
If you followed North Dakota politics, they had a piece
of legislation passed which made it impossible to vote
without a street address in North Dakota. You all remember
this? That affected a lot of Native people, because they had
a PO box. It affected white people, too, but it was
particularly targeted towards the Native people. So the man
who had introduced that legislation was defeated by a
Native woman. Ruth Anna Buffalo is the state
representative from South Fargo. I’m saying, it takes a little
while to come around. But that woman is courageous and
tough. That’s us.
Thanks for your questions.
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