Winona LaDuke - Career

Career

While working as a principal on the reservation, LaDuke became an activist. In 1985 she helped found the Indigenous Women's Network. She worked with Women of All Red Nations to publicize the alleged high level of forced sterilization among Native American women.

Next she became involved in the struggle to recover lands for the Anishinaabe. An 1867 treaty had originally included a territory of more than 860,000 acres for the White Earth Indian Reservation. Under the Nelson Act of 1889, an attempt to have the Anishinaabe assimilate by adopting a European-American model of subsistence farming, communal tribal land had been allotted to individual households, some of whom later sold to non-Natives; that and other causes had resulted in much of the land being lost from tribal control. By the mid-20th century, the tribe held only one-tenth of that territory.

In 1989 LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) in Minnesota with the proceeds of a human rights award from Reebok. The goal its to buy back land within the reservation that had been bought by non-Natives and to create enterprises that provide work to Anishinaabe. By 2000, the foundation had bought 1200 acres, which it held in a conservation trust for eventual cession to the tribe.

The non-profit is also working on reforestation of reservation lands. It markets traditional products, including wild rice harvested by the tribe. It has started an Ojibwe language program, a herd of buffalo and a wind-energy project.

LaDuke is also Executive Director of Honor the Earth, an organization she co-founded with Indigo Girls in 1993. It was later sponsored by the Seventh Generation Fund, Indigenous Women's Network and the Indigenous Environmental Network. The Native-led organization's mission is

"to create awareness and support for Native environmental issues and to develop needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities. Honor the Earth develops these resources by using music, the arts, the media, and Indigenous wisdom to ask people to recognize our joint dependency on the Earth and be a voice for those not heard."