Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Met her twice here in NM, she's the real deal

Voices from White Earth
Gaa-waabaabiganikaag
by Winona LaDuke
Thirteenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
October 1993, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 1994 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Winona LaDuke

May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug 
End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737, 
www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html.

You can listen to this lecture online at Archive.org


Introduction by Nancy Jack Todd,
member of the Board,
E. F. Schumacher Society

E. F. Schumacher wrote of a sensibility, a paradigm, a worldview, in which 
human beings might exist in long-lived intimacy and harmony with the natural 
world. But for most of us that possibility remains a longing, an instinctual 
hope for a condition we have never known. For Winona LaDuke it is a living 
heritage, the beleaguered but surviving belief system and chosen way of life 
of her people, the Mississippi band of Anishinaabeg of the White Earth 
Reservation in Northern Minnesota.

Harvard graduate Winona LaDuke is a natural leader, an interpreter of Native 
American views, and a compelling spokesperson for the suffering of indigenous 
peoples and their struggle to reclaim their ancestral lands. She breaths life 
and experience into Schumacher's invoking of "the truths revealed in nature's 
living processes."



Thank you for inviting me to come here and talk about some of the things that 
are important to the Anishinaabeg and to the wider community of native 
peoples. I am here to share some of our perspectives. I've read a lot of the 
writing by some of you in this room, and I really appreciate what you to say. 
Thank you also for the work that you do. I've been to some of the places 
where you do these things, and you do a good job. In addition, I want to 
thank some of the students here. Kael Loftus and Matt Taylor and others 
really helped us a lot in our James Bay struggle. If you think that what you 
do doesn't make a difference, I want to tell you that the students who worked 
on James Bay a couple of years ago--and some are still working on it--have 
made a big difference. I want to acknowledge all of you for the work you have 
done.

Today I'd like to talk about keewaydahn, which means "going home" in the 
Anishinaabeg language. It's something like what Wes Jackson said earlier in 
today's program about the process of going home and finding home. I think 
that is essentially what we need to be talking about. It is a challenge that 
people of this society face in belonging to a settler culture. They have been 
raised in this land, but they do not know its ceremony, its song, or its 
naming. Early settlers re-used names from other places, calling their 
settlements "New England," "New Haven," and "New York." But at the same time 
there are many indigenous names that co-exist with them. I think naming, as 
well as knowing why names are, is very important in restoring your 
relationship with the earth and finding your place. Restoring this 
relationship is our challenge.

To introduce myself I'll tell you a little bit about my work and about where 
I come from. I'm basically a community organizer, like a lot of you. I 
returned to the White Earth Reservation about ten years ago after being 
raised off-reservation, which is a common circumstance for our people. I then 
began to work on the land issue, trying to win back or buy back our 
reservation lands. In our community I am identified as Muckwuck or Bear clan, 
Mississippi band, Anishinaabeg. That's my place in the universe. The 
headwaters of the Mississippi are on our reservation; where the river starts 
is where we are in the world.

Anishinaabeg is our name for ourselves in our own language; it means 
"people." We are called Ojibways in Canada and Chippewas in the United 
States. Our aboriginal territory, and where we live today, is in the northern 
part of five American states and the southern part of four Canadian 
provinces. It's in the center of the continent and is called the Wild Rice 
Bowl or the Great Lakes region. Today we are probably the single largest 
native population in North America: there are at least two hundred and fifty 
thousand of us. We're on both sides of the border, and most people don't know 
who we are or know much about us. That ignorance stems in part from the way 
Americans are taught about native people.

There are about seven hundred different native communities in North America. 
Roughly one hundred are Ojibway or Anishinaabeg communities, but we're 
different bands. In Alaska there are two hundred native communities; in 
California there are eighty. In Washington state there are fourteen different 
kinds of Indian people living on the Yakima Reservation alone. All different 
kinds of indigenous people live in North America: all culturally and 
historically diverse. The same situation is found on a larger scale when you 
look at the entire continent, the Western Hemisphere, and the world. I want 
you to rethink the geography of North America in terms of cultural geography, 
in terms of land occupancy.

Now, if you look at the United States, about 4 percent of the land is held by 
Indian people. That is the extent of today's Indian reservations. The 
Southwest has the largest native population, and there's a significant 
population on the Great Plains. In northern Minnesota there are seven big 
reservations, all Ojibway or Anishinaabeg. But if you go to Canada, about 85 
percent of the population north of the fiftieth parallel is native. So if you 
look at it in terms of land occupancy and geography, in about two-thirds of 
Canada the majority of the population is native. I'm not even including 
Nunevat, which is an Inuit-controlled area the size of India in what used to 
be called the Northwest Territories.

If you look at the whole of North America, you find that the majority of the 
population is native in about a third of the continent. Within this larger 
area indigenous people maintain their own ways of living and their cultural 
practices. This is our view of the continent, and it is different from the 
view of most other North Americans. When we look at the United States and 
Canada, we see our reservations and reserves as islands in the continent. 
When Indian people talk about their travels, they often mention reservations 
rather than cities: "I went to Rosebud, and then I went over to North 
Cheyenne." This is the indigenous view of North America.

Going beyond North America, I want to talk about the Western Hemisphere and 
the world from an indigenous perspective. My intent is to present you with an 
indigenous worldview and our perception of the world. There are a number of 
countries in the Western Hemisphere in which native peoples are the majority 
of the population: in Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia. In some South 
American countries we control as much as 22 to 40 percent of the land. 
Overall, the Western Hemisphere is not predominantly white. Indigenous people 
continue their ways of living based on generations and generations of 
knowledge and practice on the land.

On a worldwide scale there are about five thousand nations. Nations are 
groups of indigenous peoples who share common language, culture, history, 
territory, and government institutions. That is how international law defines 
a nation. And that is who we are: nations of people who have existed for 
thousands of years. There are about a hundred and seventy--maybe more now, 
about a hundred and eighty-five--states that are recognized by the United 
Nations. For the most part, these states are the result of colonial empires 
or colonial demarcations. And whereas indigenous nations have existed for 
thousands of years, many of the states which exist in the world today have 
been around only since World War II. That is a big difference. Yet the 
dominant worldview of industrial society is determined by these young states, 
not by the five thousand ancient nations.

The estimated number of indigenous people in the world depends on how you 
define indigenous people. It is said that there are currently about five 
hundred million of us in the world today, including such peoples as the 
Tibetans, the Masai, the Wara Wara, and the Quechua. I define indigenous 
peoples as those who have continued their way of living for thousands of 
years according to their original instructions.

That is a quick background on indigenous people. It should help you 
understand that my perspective, the perspective of indigenous peoples, is 
entirely different from that of the dominant society in this country.

Indigenous peoples believe fundamentally in natural law and a state of 
balance. We believe that all societies and cultural practices must exist in 
accordance with natural law in order to be sustainable. We also believe that 
cultural diversity is as essential as biological diversity to maintaining 
sustainable societies. Indigenous peoples have lived on earth sustainably for 
thousands of years, and I suggest to you that indigenous ways of living are 
the only sustainable ways of living. Because of that, I believe there is 
something to be learned from indigenous thinking and indigenous ways. I don't 
think many of you would argue that industrial society is sustainable. I think 
that in two or three hundred years this society will be extinct because a 
society based on conquest cannot survive when there's nothing left to conquer.

Indigenous people have taken great care to fashion their societies in 
accordance with natural law, which is the highest law. It is superior to the 
laws made by nations, states, and municipalities. It is the law to which we 
are all accountable. There are no Twelve Commandments of natural law, but 
there are some things which I believe to be true about natural law. And this 
is my experience from listening to a lot of our older people. What I am 
telling you is not really my opinion; it's based on what has happened in our 
community, on what I've heard people say, and on their knowledge. We have 
noticed that much in nature is cyclical: the movements of moons, the tides, 
the seasons, our bodies. Time itself, in most indigenous worldviews, is 
cyclical. We also have experienced and believe that it is our essential 
nature and our need always to keep a balance in nature. Most indigenous 
ceremonies, if you look to their essence, are about the restoration of 
balance. That is our intent: to restore, and then to retain, balance. Nature 
itself continually tries to balance, to equalize.

According to our way of living and our way of looking at the world, most of 
the world is animate. This is reflected in our language, Anishinabemowin, in 
which most nouns are animate. Mandamin, the word for corn, is animate; mitig, 
the word for tree, is animate; so is the word for rice, manomin, and the word 
for rock or stone, asin. Looking at the world and seeing that most things are 
alive, we have come to believe, based on this perception, that they have 
spirit. They have standing on their own. Therefore, when I harvest wild rice 
on our reservation up north, I always offer asemah, tobacco, because when you 
take something, you must always give thanks to its spirit for giving itself 
to you, for it has a choice whether to give itself to you or not. In our 
cultural practice, for instance, it is not because of skill that a hunter can 
harvest a deer or a caribou; it is because he or she has been honorable and 
has given asemah. That is how you are able to harvest, not because you are a 
good hunter but because the animal gives itself to you. That is our 
perception.

And so we are always very careful when we harvest. Anthropologists call this 
reciprocity, which means something anthropological, I guess. But from our 
perspective it means that when you take, you always give. This is about 
balance and equalness. We also say that when you take, you must take only 
what you need and leave the rest. Because if you take more than you need, 
that means you are greedy. You have brought about imbalance, you have been 
selfish. To do this in our community is a very big disgrace. It is a 
violation of natural law, and it leaves you with no guarantee that you will 
be able to continue harvesting.

We have a word in our language which describes the practice of living in 
harmony with natural law: minobimaatisiiwin. This word describes how you live 
your life according to natural law, how you behave as an individual in 
relationship with other individuals and in relationship with the land and all 
the things which are animate on the land. Minobimaatisiiwin is our cultural 
practice; it is what you strive toward as an individual as well as 
collectively as a society.

We have tried to retain this way of living and this way of thinking in spite 
of all that has happened to us over the centuries. I believe we do retain 
most of these practices to a great extent in many of our societies. In our 
community they are overshadowed at times by industrialism, but they still 
exist.

I would like to contrast what I've told you about indigenous thinking with 
what I call "industrial thinking." I think the Lakota have the best term to 
describe it. It actually refers to white people, although they are not the 
only ones who think this way. Indigenous peoples have interesting terms for 
white people: they are usually not just words, they are descriptions 
encapsulated in a word. I will tell you about one: the Lakota word for a 
white person is wasichu. It derives from the first time the Lakota ever saw a 
white person. There was a white man out on the prairie in the Black Hills, 
and he was starving. He came into a Lakota camp in the middle of the night, 
and the Lakota of course were astonished to see him. They began to watch him 
to see what he was doing. He went over to the food, took something, and ran 
away. A little while later, the Lakota looked to see what he had taken: he 
had stolen a large amount of fat. So the Lakota word for a white person, 
wasichu, means "he who steals the fat." Now, that is a description which 
doesn't necessarily have to do with white people, but taking more than you 
need has to do with industrial society. He who steals the fat. That's what 
I'm talking about when I refer to the industrial worldview.

Industrial thinking is characterized by several ideas which run counter to 
indigenous ideas. First, instead of believing that natural law is preeminent, 
industrial society believes that humans are entitled to full dominion over 
nature. It believes that man--and it is usually man of course--has some 
God-given right to all that is around him, that he has been created superior 
to the rest.

Second, instead of modeling itself on the cyclical structure of nature, this 
society is patterned on linear thinking. I went all the way through its 
school system, and I remember how time, for example, is taught in this 
society. It's taught on a timeline, usually one that begins around 1492. It 
has some dates on it that were important to someone, although I could never 
figure out to whom. The timeline is a clear representation of this society's 
linear way of thinking. And certain values permeate this way of thinking, 
such as the concept of progress. Industrial society wants to keep making 
progress as it moves down the timeline, progress defined by things like 
technological advancement and economic growth. This value accompanies linear 
thinking.

Third, there is the attitude toward what is wild as opposed to what is 
cultivated or "tame." This society believes it must tame the wilderness. It 
also believes in the superiority of civilized over primitive peoples, a 
belief which also follows a linear model: that somehow, over time, people 
will become more civilized. Also related, of course, is the idea behind 
colonialism: that some people have the right to civilize other people. My 
experience is that people who are viewed as "primitive" are generally people 
of color, and people who are viewed as "civilized" are those of European 
descent. This prejudice still permeates industrial society and in fact even 
permeates "progressive" thinking. It holds that somehow people of European 
descent are smarter and they have some better knowledge of the world than the 
rest of us. I suggest that this is perhaps a racist
 ted the White Earth Land 
Recovery Project.

The federal, state, and county governments are the largest landholders on the 
reservation. It is good land still, rich in many things; however, when you do 
not control your land, you do not control your destiny. That's our 
experience. What has happened is that two-thirds of the deer taken on our 
reservation are taken by non-Indians, mostly by sports hunters from 
Minneapolis. In the Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge nine times as many deer 
are taken by non-Indians as by Indians because that's where sports hunters 
from Minneapolis come to hunt. Ninety percent of the fish taken on our 
reservation is taken by white people, and most of them are taken by people 
from Minneapolis who come to their summer cabins and fish on our reservation. 
Each year in our region about ten thousand acres are being clear-cut for 
paper and pulp in one county alone, mostly by the Potlatch Timber Company. We 
are watching the destruction of our ecosystem and the theft of our resources; 
in not controlling our land we are unable to control what is happening to our 
ecosystem. So we are struggling to regain control through the White Earth 
Land Recovery Project.

Our project is like several other projects in Indian communities. We are not 
trying to displace people who have settled there. A third of our land is held 
by the federal, state, and county governments. That land should just be 
returned to us. It certainly would not displace anyone. And then we have to 
ask the question about absentee land ownership. It is an ethical question 
which should be asked in this country. A third of the privately held land on 
our reservation is held by absentee landholders who do not see that land, do 
not know it, do not even know where it is. We ask these people how they feel 
about owning land on a reservation, hoping we can persuade them to return it.

Approximately sixty years ago in India the Gramdan movement dealt with 
similar issues. Some million acres were placed in village trust as a result 
of the moral influence of Vinoba Bhave. The whole issue of absentee land 
ownership needs to be addressed--particularly in America, where the idea of 
private property is so sacred, where somehow it is ethical to hold land that 
you never see. As Vinoba said, "It is highly inconsistent that those who 
possess land should not till it themselves, and those who cultivate should 
possess no land to do so."

Our project also acquires land. It owns about nine hundred acres right now. 
We bought some land as a site for a roundhouse, a building that holds one of 
our ceremonial drums. We bought back our burial grounds, which were on 
private land, because we believe that we should hold the land our ancestors 
lived on. These are all small parcels of land. We also just bought a farm, a 
fifty-eight-acre organic raspberry farm. In a couple of years we hope to get 
past the "You Pick" stage into jam production. It is a very slow process, but 
our strategy is based on this recovery of the land and also on the recovery 
of our cultural and economic practices.

We are a poor community. People look at our reservation and comment on the 85 
percent unemployment--they do not realize what we do with our time. They have 
no way of valuing our cultural practices. For instance, 85 percent of our 
people hunt, taking at least one or two deer annually, probably in violation 
of federal game laws; 75 percent of our people hunt for small game and geese; 
50 percent of our people fish by net; 50 percent of our people sugarbush and 
garden on our reservation. About the same percentage harvest wild rice, not 
just for themselves; they harvest it to sell. About half of our people 
produce handcrafts. There is no way to quantify this in America. It is called 
the "invisible economy" or the "domestic economy." Society views us as 
unemployed Indians who need wage jobs. That is not how we view ourselves. Our 
work is about strengthening and restoring our traditional economy. I have 
seen our people trained and retrained for off-reservation jobs that do not 
exist. I don't know how many Indians have gone through three or four 
carpenter and plumber training programs. It doesn't do any good, if after the 
third or fourth time you still don't have a job.

Our strategy is to strengthen our own traditional economy, thereby 
strengthening our traditional culture as well, so that we can produce 50 
percent or more of our own food independently, and can eventually produce 
enough surplus to sell. In our case most of our surplus is in wild rice. We 
are rich in terms of wild rice. The Creator, Gitchi Manitu, gave us wild 
rice--said we should eat it, said we should share it; we have traded it for 
thousands of years. A lot of our political struggle is, I am absolutely sure, 
due to the fact that Gitchi Manitu did not give wild rice to Uncle Ben to 
grow in California. Commercial wild rice is totally different from the rice 
we harvest, and it decreases the value of our rice when marketed as authentic 
wild rice.

We've been working for several years now to increase the price of the rice we 
gather from fifty cents per pound to a dollar per pound, green. We are trying 
to market our rice ourselves. We try to capture the "value added" in our 
community by selling it ourselves. We went from about five thousand pounds of 
production on our reservation to about fifty thousand pounds last year. This 
is our strategy for economic recovery.

Other parts of our strategy include language immersion programs to restore 
our language and the revival of drum ceremonies to restore our cultural 
practices. These are part of an integrated restoration process that is 
focused on the full human being.

In the larger picture, in Wisconsin and Minnesota our community is working 
hard to exercise specific treaty rights. Under the 1847 treaty we have 
reserved-use rights to a much larger area than just our reservations. These 
are called extra-territorial treaty rights. We didn't say we were going to 
live there, we only said we wanted to keep the right to use that land in our 
usual and accustomed ways. This has led us to a larger political strategy, 
for although our harvesting practices are sustainable, they require an almost 
pristine ecosystem in order to take as much fish and grow as much rice as we 
need. To achieve this the tribes are entering into a co-management agreement 
in northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota to prevent further environmental 
degradation as a first step toward preserving an extra-territorial area in 
accordance with treaty rights.

There are many similar stories all across North America. A lot can be learned 
from these stories, and we can share a great deal in terms of your strategies 
and what you're trying to do in your own communities. I see this as a 
relationship among people who share common issues, common ground, and common 
agendas. It is absolutely crucial, however, that our struggle for territorial 
integrity as well as economic and political control of our lands not be 
regarded as a threat by this society. Deep-set in settler minds I know 
there's fear of the Indian having control. I've seen it on my own 
reservation: white people who live there are deathly afraid of our gaining 
control over half our land base, which is all we're trying to do. I'm sure 
they are afraid we will treat them as badly as they have treated us.

I ask you to shake off your fear, because there's something valuable to be 
learned from our experiences, from the James Bay hydroelectric project in 
Quebec, for example, and from the Shoshone sisters in Nevada fighting the 
missile siting. Our stories are about people with a great deal of tenacity 
and courage, people who have been resisting for centuries. We are sure that 
if we do not resist, we will not survive. Our resistance will guarantee our 
children a future. In our society we think ahead to the seventh generation; 
however, we know that the ability of the seventh generation to sustain itself 
will be dependent on our ability to resist now.

Another important consideration is that traditional ecological knowledge is 
unheard knowledge in this country's institutions. Nor is it something an 
anthropologist can extract by mere research. Traditional ecological knowledge 
is passed from generation to generation; it is not an appropriate subject for 
a Ph.D. dissertation. We who live by this knowledge have the intellectual 
property rights to it, and we have the right to tell our stories ourselves. 
There is a lot to be learned from our knowledge, but you need us in order to 
learn it, whether it is the story of my children's grandfather reaching his 
hand into that beaver house or of the Haida up on the Northwest coast, who 
make totem poles and plank houses. The Haida say they can take a plank off a 
tree and still leave the tree standing. If Weyerhaeuser could do that, I 
might listen to them, but they cannot.

Traditional ecological knowledge is absolutely essential for the future. 
Crafting a relationship between us is absolutely essential. Native people are 
not quite at the table in the environmental movement--for example, in the 
management of the Great Plains. Environmental groups and state governors sat 
down and talked about how to manage the Great Plains, and nobody asked the 
Indians to come to the table. Nobody even noticed that there are about fifty 
million acres of Indian land out there in the middle of the Great Plains, 
land that according to history and law has never yet had a drink of 
water--that is, reservations have been denied water all these years because 
of water diversion projects. When water allocations are being discussed, 
someone needs to talk about how the tribes need a drink.

One proposal for the Great Plains is a Buffalo Commons, which would include 
110 prairie counties that are now financially bankrupt and are continuing to 
lose people. The intent is to restore these lands ecologically, bringing back 
the buffalo and bringing back the perennial crops and indigenous prairie 
grasses that Wes Jackson is experimenting with at the Land Institute in 
Salina, Kansas. We need to broaden the idea, though, because I don't think it 
should be just a Buffalo Commons; it should be an Indigenous Commons. If you 
look at the present population in the area, you'll find that the majority are 
indigenous peoples who already hold at least fifty million acres of the land. 
We know this land of our ancestors, and we should rightly be part of a 
sustainable future for it.

Another thing I want to touch upon is the necessity of shifting our 
perception. There is no such thing as sustainable development. Community is 
the only thing in my experience that is sustainable. We all need to be 
involved in building sustainable communities. We can each do that in our own 
way--whether it is European-American communities or DenŽ communities or 
Anishinaabeg communities--returning to and restoring the way of life that is 
based on the land. To achieve this restoration we need to reintegrate with 
cultural traditions informed by the land. That is something I don't know how 
to tell you to do, but it is something you're going to need to do. Garrett 
Hardin and others are saying that the only way you can manage a commons is if 
you share enough cultural experiences and cultural values so that you can 
keep your practices in order and in check: minobimaatisiiwin. The reason we 
have remained sustainable for all these centuries is that we are cohesive 
communities. A common set of values is needed to live together sustainably on 
the land.

Finally, I believe the issues deep in this society that need to be addressed 
are structural issues. This is a society which continues to consume too much 
of the world's resources. You know, when you consume this much in resources, 
it means constant intervention in other peoples' land and other peoples' 
countries, whether it is mine or whether it is the Crees' up in James Bay or 
whether it is someone else's. It is meaningless to talk about human rights 
unless you talk about consumption. And that's a structural change we all need 
to address. It is clear that in order for native communities to live, the 
dominant society must change, because if this society continues in the 
direction it is going, our reservations and our way of life will continue to 
bear the consequences. This society has to be changed! We have to be able to 
put aside its cultural baggage, which is industrial baggage. Do not be afraid 
of discarding it. It's not sustainable. That's the only way we're going to 
make peace between the settler and the native.

Miigwech. I want to thank you for your time. Keewaydahn. It's our way home.

----------

Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Objibwe) enrolled member of the 
Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth 
Reservation. She serves as a founding director of the White Earth Land 
Recovery Project, whose mission is to regain the Anishinaabeg people's 
original lands from federal, state, and county governments. As program 
director of the Honor the Earth Fund she is active in advocating, raising 
public support, and creating funding for Native environmental groups

After graduating from Harvard, LaDuke received her M.A. in Community Economic 
Development from Antioch College. In 1988 she received the International 
Reebok Human Rights Award. In 1994 LaDuke was nominated by Time magazine as 
one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She 
was awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the BIHA Community Service Award 
in 1997, and the Ann Bancroft Award for Women's Leadership, also in 1997. In 
1998 Ms magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the 
Earth.

LaDuke serves as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network. She is a 
founding member of the community land-rights group Anishinaabe Akeeng and of 
IKWE, a Native women's craft marketing collective

In 1997 her first novel Last Standing Woman was published, followed in 1999 
by All Our Relations, a nonfiction book on Native environmental struggles.

Winona LaDuke is the mother of three children.