Statues to brutal colonizers are falling everywhere
By Winona LaDuke “Historian Here: Tearing down a statue is not erasing history. Putting up a statue on land whose original caretakers you can’t name is.” – Nick Estes, Lakota Historian. Across the country statues of empire are tumbling. The idols are indeed falling, the American idols that is. This is not just about statutes. […]
Pipelines: How risky do you wanna be?
By Winona LaDuke Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) continues to be an embarrassment to state regulatory authorities, slogging ahead with what we might call the last tar sands pipeline. On June 25, Little Big Horn Day, the PUC reaffirmed approvals of the Enbridge Line 3 project- route and need. The White Earth Nation, Red Lake […]
Landowners challenge Eminent Domain and Line 3 faces new challenges
By Winona LaDuke While the Enbridge Company seeks to push ahead with Line 3 in Minnesota, the future of this pipeline, Enbridge and the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipeline remain twirled in their fate with oil markets and the COVID 19 Pandemic. The world is rapidly changing In late May, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison […]
Hemp is about transforming our communities
By Hannah Broadbent There have always been leaders who have paved the way in the fight for tribal sovereignty. Leaders who have thought of different solutions in which to provide economic growth and independence to our communities. There’s one not-so-new plant that has leaders today more hopeful than ever, that is, cannabis. Well, hemp– a […]
When the bat challenged the Wiindigo
By Winona LaDuke Think of crisis as opportunity. The Chinese characters for crisis are wei ji. Danger and opportunity. That’s now. Take a breath, maybe look at the night sky and see if you can see any stars. Enjoy this moment and breathe when Mother Earth gets a breath from our closed factories. Let’s be […]
The long, exhausting battle against Enbridge for our lands and water
By Winona LaDuke Enbridge’s 7-year battle for a new pipe line has worn us all thin. We have poured out by the thousands, over 68,000 people went to testify against the Enbridge tar sands pipeline. We have driven thousands of miles. We have cried, talked about how much we love our water, and we have […]
Thanksgiving is Time for Reparations
By Winona LaDuke It’s Thanksgiving Morning. Everywhere in America. Thanksgiving needs to mean something to Native people. Something like justice and reparations. I’m not going to do long speech about the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims. It’s a brutal history which begins with the beheading of their leaders (those heads were displayed on spikes for decades […]
Making deals with the Devil or with the Creator
By Winona LaDuke Last month’s 383,000 gallon oil spill of the Keystone Pipeline in Edinburgh, North Dakota is the deal with the devil. For those of us who live in the land of lakes, just imagine what 383,000 gallons of oil would do to the Hay Creek, Fishhook Lake watershed, and what “clean up” would […]
My courtship with cannabis/hemp: treat her well
By Winona LaDuke You can learn a lot from a plant. For the past four years I’ve been hanging out with cannabis plants. She’s an amazing plant. I have a bit of a maternal streak which seems to translate well to animals and plants (children, I am not so sure), and I’ve been growing cannabis. […]
Enbridge encounters more setbacks
By Winona LaDuke On September 28, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency denied an essential permit to the Enbridge Line 3 Project, adding more setbacks for a highly controversial project. Continued setbacks are putting more at risk for the company, which is also being sued to get a forced removal of it’s aging Line 5 pipe […]
A New Breath – White Earth Chairman Fairbanks
By Winona LaDuke I’ve been to a lot of inaugurations in my life, they are always full of promise, hope and, more recently dread. The inauguration of Michael Fairbanks as White Earth Tribal Chairman, felt light to the heart. Seeing our leader in traditional regalia, dancing to the drums, was a powerful moment in my […]
Reconciliation Pipeline: how to shackle Native people, again
By Winona LaDuke You can’t make this stuff up. At the end of the fossil fuel era, the plan is to transfer the liability to Native people. And it’s not going to work. Dressed up as “equity positions”, or “reconciliation”, across the continent, corporations and governments are trying to pawn off bad projects on Native […]