Internationally Renowned Activist working on Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Environmental Justice in Native America
Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development, renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.
As Program Director of the Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice with Indigenous communities.
In her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organizations in the country, and a leader in the issues of culturally based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy and food systems. In this work, she also continues national and international work to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.
In 2007, LaDuke was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, recognizing her leadership and community commitment. In 1994, LaDuke was nominated by Time magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, Ms. Woman of the Year (with the Indigo Girls in l997), and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project. The White Earth Land Recovery Project has won many award including the prestigious 2003 International Slow Food Award for Biodiversity, recognizing the organization’s work to protect wild rice from patenting and genetic engineering
A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, LaDuke has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. She is the author of five books, including Recovering the Sacred, All our Relations and a novel, Last Standing Woman.
She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and is presently an
advisory board member for the Trust for Public Lands Native Lands
Program as well as a board member of the Christensen Fund. She is widely recognized for her work on environmental and human rights issues.
TOPICS INCLUDE:
• The Next Energy Economy: Grassroots Strategies to Mitigate Global Climate Change and How We Move Ahead
• Climate Change, Green Jobs and the Future of our Communities
• Sustainability in a Reduced Carbon Economy
• Food Security in a Time of Climate Change
• Seed Sovereignty: Who Owns the Seeds of the World, Bio-Piracy, Genetic Engineering and Indigenous Peoples
• Indigenous Thinking on the New Millannium
• Creating a Multi-Cultural Democracy: Religion, Culture, and Identity in America
• Native Women and Politics
• Activism, Justice and Future Generations
• Recovering the Sacred: An American Holy Land, and Non-Christian Faith in America
