Winona La Duke

I have discovered Winona LaDuke.

See one of her many speeches hereWinona LaDuke to Speak
At UW-Eau Claire Forum 
  March 22, 2004— Winona LaDuke, an activist for social and environmental issues who served as the Green Party vice presidential candidate in the 1996 and 2000 elections, will close the 62nd season of The Forum at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire on Wednesday, April 7.
Her presentation titled “Environmental Justice from a Native Perspective” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Zorn Arena. LaDuke’s lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session and a reception.
An Ojibwe who lives on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, LaDuke is program director of Honor the Earth, a national Native American environmental justice program. She is founding director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a reservation-based land acquisition, environmental advocacy and cultural organization, a former board member of Greenpeace USA and co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network.
Born in Los Angeles, LaDuke is a graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities. In 1995 Time magazine named her as one of America’s 50 most promising leaders under 40 years of age. She was awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women’s Leadership Fellowship and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.
“The U.S. is the wealthiest and most dominant country in the world, and we can’t keep the lights on in New York City nor can we provide continuous power in a ‘liberated’ Baghdad,’ LaDuke wrote in a recent column for Indian Country Today. “Centralized power production based on fossil fuel and nuclear resources has served to centralize political power, to disconnect communities from responsibility and control over energy, and to create a vast wasteful system. We need to recover democracy. And one key element is democratizing power production.
“We are undeniably addicted whether to an economy based on burning of fossil fuels and wasteful production systems, or to oil,” LaDuke wrote. “We have allowed our addictions to overtake our common sense and a good portion of our decency. We live in a country with the largest disparity of wealth between rich and poor of any industrialized country in the world.”
LaDuke is the author of “All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life” (1999), a non-fiction work on Native environmentalism. “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings” was published in 2002.