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By Leon Thompson
Photo: Winona LaDuke with her cousin, ECM Tribal Beat journalist Leon Thompson
May 2, 2015, 2015 (SDSU Montezuma Hall) - The Conrad Prebys Student Center at San Diego State University was filled on Earth Day, April 22, as Winona LaDuke took the stage dwarfed by the giant screen depicting the past splendor and future possibilities of her native White Earth Nation. In the language of the Anishinaabe she brought greetings and recounted the Ojibwa names for the months or moons noting that not one of them was named after a Roman Emperor.
August is Manoominike (Ricing Moon) and January the Gichimanidoo (Great Spirit Moon). Each moon brings us closer to the Earth, God and Each Other. Traditional Anishinaabe religion is Winona LaDuke's source of power and sustenance. “Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.”
She once told Mother Jones magazine, “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."
Clearly Winona has that wellspring as she delivered the Keynote Address to cap off a magnificent, student inspired, Earth Day Greenfest. Internationally acclaimed American Indian environmental activist Winona LaDuke founded Honor the Earth and is a leader in opposition to new extreme fossil fuel encroachments in North America. A lawsuit against the U.S. State Department for an approval process of a tar sands pipeline to be heard in July puts Winona in front of the Bulldozers.
Winona came to live on the White Earth reserve as a High School principal in the 1980’s. She is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organizations in the country, working to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering. The WELRP is working to recover the 800,000 acres of land that was originally the White Earth reservation.
A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona has written extensively on Native American and Environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves, as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network.
My friend Norrie Robbins who teaches geology to Kumeyaay grade-schoolers was impressed that a woman with so many accomplishments would be so inclusive, reference her children and speaking humbly as a mother.
You could hear a pin drop in the giant Student Center as Winona related the amazing Pawnee corn seed experience. In the Pawnee creation account – the original woman is comes wrapped in a corn husk.
In the mid 1800’s the Pawnee were forcefully removed from their homeland in Nebraska and relocated to the middle of Oklahoma. They brought with them the staples of their diet and the special corn for which they were known.
However their seeds would not grow. A Museum in Nebraska asked if they had seeds they could donate to the Museum for an exhibit there. “The seeds remembered their home.” The seeds flourished.
Likewise Mahnomin (Wild Rice ‘the food that grows on water’) “is a gift to the Anishinaabe and part of our culture and part even of our DNA as a people. Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.”
“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.”
Perhaps someday Winona LaDuke will be Chief of the White Earth Nation. Certainly her compassion and accomplishments on behalf of the Tribe name her to be so. Winona brings a spirit and vision that inspires American Indians and indeed the World.
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