MISSOULA, Mont. ? Two-time vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke said trying to get governments and corporations to act responsibly is in many ways like raising children.
‘If I tell my kids not to steal, I must tell the government not to steal,’ she told hundreds of enthusiastic supporters during a Sept. 21 presentation in Missoula.
LaDuke, a resident of Minnesota’s White Earth Indian Reservation, has three children of her own and helps raise four others in her household. She said the longer she’s a mother, the more parallels she sees between child-rearing and political activism.
With such a hectic home life, LaDuke, who ran with consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000 on the national Green Party ticket, said a primary rule with her children is that old messes must be cleaned up before new messes are started.
‘Why can’t we run our country like that?’ she asked the crowd brought in by more than two dozen sponsoring groups, including the University of Montana’s Native American Studies Department and the Flathead Reservation Human Rights Network. ‘If you don’t know how to clean up your mess, don’t make it in the first place.’
LaDuke, 42, said one of her biggest frustrations is Americans who will not take responsibility for their actions, and those of their government. She’s also deeply troubled by the glaring disparity between the rich and the poor in this country, as well as the quickness to use military force to resolve conflicts around the world.
‘We must renew and redouble our efforts to wage peace,’ she said, adding that Americans also need to open their eyes to the social and environmental impacts they cause by being the largest consumers of natural resources in the world.
‘We are pretty much pigs,’ LaDuke later told participants at a private fund-raiser. ‘It means we live in a continuing reality of wanting something that someone else has.’
LaDuke, a member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinabeg, said Native Americans, with their historical ties to the land, must be leaders in the fight to regain a consciousness of caring for the environment. If the natural world is not healed and protected, we will pay.
‘In the end, we are all accountable to natural law,’ she said. ‘If you pollute the water, you will drink it. If you pollute the air, you will breathe it. If you arm everyone in the world, there will be a lot of violence.’
LaDuke, author of the novel, ‘Last Standing Woman,’ and the nonfiction work, ‘All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life,’ said she didn’t bother voting until 1996.
‘I didn’t think it was worthwhile. There really wasn’t anybody to vote for in my assessment.’
LaDuke said her attitude changed when Nader tapped her as his running mate that year and she realized Progressives were getting serious about high-level change. In the 2000 election, Missoula County voters posted one of the Green Party’s highest turnouts, in terms of percentages, in the nation, and Missoula school board trustee David Merrill became the party’s first candidate elected in Montana.
But LaDuke said she’s unsure whether she’ll run again in 2004 because of family and other commitments. Catching up from the last campaign has taken a huge amount of work.
‘I know those other guys didn’t have to come home and do laundry and try to keep their little organization going,’ LaDuke explained. ‘Most people don’t have a baby, run for national office and run a national concert tour all in one year.’
LaDuke was joined at both events by Pamela Kingfisher, executive director of the Texas-based Indigenous Women’s Network, which LaDuke serves as co-chairwoman, and Janet Robideau, project director for Indian People’s Action and co-director of Montana People’s Action, a statewide group that works on low-income issues.
Kingfisher, a member of the Cherokee Nation, said her activist tendencies were nurtured early in life as she learned about the inner workings of the nation’s nuclear weapons program. But, she said a hard-fought victory over a Kerr McGee nuclear processing plant in Oklahoma brought home the fact that to be successful, environmentalists must come up with alternatives to projects they don’t like.
‘It is important to say what is wrong,’ LaDuke added. ‘It is also important to say what is right.’
Both Kingfisher and LaDuke noted that traditional tribal systems have been so decimated by colonialism that they’re just now starting to recover. A resurgence of interest in Native languages and culture is helping create strong, new American Indian leaders, they said, including ‘women warriors’ like themselves. But there are a staggering number of battles to be fought, the pair noted, starting with Native Peoples gaining the respect and political clout they need to progress, despite sometimes overwhelming odds.
‘If it had been one-man, one-vote when Sitting Bull was around, I think things would have been a lot different,’ said LaDuke, who was once arrested in California for chaining herself to a phone-book factory that made its products from 1,000-year-old trees. ‘That what is good in this country had been struggled for. Every change in this country came from people who struggled.’
Kingfisher, 49, and LaDuke each took issue with claims from national political leaders that recent terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., are the worst atrocities that ever occurred on American soil. What the politicians so conveniently forget, they said, is that American Indian people have sustained incalculable losses since Europeans first arrived. And the toll from the abuse and neglect in many cases continues to this day, especially when it comes to land use.
‘We have a predator-prey relationship with our land, and the land is the prey’ LaDuke said. ‘Those issues will plague us in this society as ever-open sores.’
Nonetheless, there is hope, LaDuke and Kingfisher agreed. An extensive get-out-the-vote drive in Montana resulted in six American Indian men and women ? the most ever ? serving this year in the state Legislature.
Innumerable environmental battles across the nation are being won in the streets and in the courthouses, and tribes are standing up and asserting their rights in nearly every venue, despite the government-imposed ‘brown bureaucracies’ that threaten to drag them down from within, they said.
‘We need to remember when we were a healthy people’ and harken back to those days, Kingfisher said. ‘Native Americans have had very little political will. We haven’t had access. We’ve had it beaten out of us.’
LaDuke said tribes and reservations must also continue to fight an ongoing imbalance in trade that allows too many resources to be meted out to middlemen who then turn profits that should instead be headed to tribal coffers.
LaDuke also serves as program director of Honor the Earth, a spin-off from the Indigenous Women’s Network, and its sister, the Indigenous Environmental Network. She is founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project which helps buy back privately held land on her home reservation. Part of that work involves running Native Harvest, a Native-run business that markets wild rice and maple syrup, among other commodities.
She said new strategies must be developed to find funding for more tribal nonprofits, one of the least-desirable entities in the eyes of most philanthropic organizations because of their geographic isolation and a general lack of familiarity. With increased donations flowing into relief efforts tied to the terrorist attacks, there will be even less money around for social justice groups, tribal or non-tribal, the next couple of years, Kingfisher predicted.
‘All these issues cross-cut,’ said Kingfisher, who recently returned from South Africa, where she participated in the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance.
‘It’s more important now more than ever to work together. We can no longer be separatists about our issues.’
LaDuke took it a step farther and urged all participants to consider careers in the public-interest sector.
‘You’ll never make a lot of money, but you’ll sleep good at night.’
