Winona LaDuke famous quotes

04-17-2025

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist
-- Winona LaDuke

#Drinking #Water #Warfare
I find that I have more allies on the left than on the right, and that is because the left is, by and large, filled with people who are challenging the present paradigm and power structure. Iâ€™m interested in totally transforming the structure that exists now, because it is not sustainable.
-- Winona LaDuke

#People #Challenges #Allies
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.
-- Winona LaDuke

#People #Soul #Earth
Our forests are not for toilet paper. They are worth more standing than cut. That deserves to be defended, not only by native peoples but also by environmentalists.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Cutting #Paper #Toilets
The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact was that you couldn't vote in this country if you did not own land, and that was basically you had to be a white man who owned land. Now how did they get that land? They basically had to steal it from someone, and that would be probably the Indians. And so most of the initial founding fathers were, while they may have had some really nice ideas about democracy, they had a lot of issues with people of color. They had a lot of issues with people who held things that they coveted.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Country #Nice #Father
One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but donâ€™t feel powerless. White people donâ€™t feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that theyâ€™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.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Teaching #White #Differences
The only compensation for land is land,
-- Winona LaDuke

#Land #Compensation
I donâ€™t understand all the nuances of the womenâ€™s movement. But I do understand that there are feminists who want to challenge the dominant paradigm, not only of patriarchy, but of where the original wealth came from and the relationship of that wealth to other peoples and the earth. That is the only way that that I think you can really get to the depth of the problem.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Thinking #Feminist #Challenges
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.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Mother #Hard Work #Land
In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Integrity #Native American #Government
In the time of the sacred sites and the crashing of ecosystems and worlds, it may be worth not making a commodity out of all that is revered.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Ecosystems #May #Sacred
I see a lot of damage to Mother Earth. I see water being taken from creeks where water belongs to animals, not to oil companies.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Mother #Taken #Animal
Native people - about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Fighting #Land #Two
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.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Struggle #Giving #Long
The aboriginal peoples of Australia illustrate the conflict between technology and the natural world succinctly, by asking, 'What will you do when the clever men destroy your water?' That, in truth, is what the world is coming to.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Clever #Technology #Men
To native peoples, there is no such thing as the first, second, and third worlds; there is only an exploiting world ... whether its technological system is capitalist or communist ... and a host world. Native peoples, who occupy more land, make up the host world.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Land #World #Firsts
The idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently out of order with natural law.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Mean #Views #Order
Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time
-- Winona LaDuke

#Country #Struggle #Responsibility
What our Seventh Generation will have is a consequence of our actions today.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Our Actions #Today #Generations
You've got to get people to believe that change is possible... You have to show that you can fight things successfully even if you don't win.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Change #Believe #Fighting
Iâ€™m not a patriot to a flag, Iâ€™m a patriot to a land.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Land #Flags #Patriot
I would like to see as many people patriotic to a land as I have seen patriotic to a flag.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Patriotic #Land #People
There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Hands #Fairy #Individual
The difference between a white man and an Indian is this- A white man wants to leave money to his children. An Indian wants to leave forests.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Children #Men #White
It is essential to collectively struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth. In that is our strength, and the security, not in the predator, but in the security of our Mother, for our future generations. In that we can insure our security as the Mothers of our Nations.
-- Winona LaDuke

#Mother #Daughter #Women

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