Community rights, watershed groups bring Winona LaDuke to Eugene, promote initiative

Presenter: Winona LaDuke spoke before an enthusiastic crowd at the University of Oregon March 4. Her talk was co-hosted by groups promoting watershed rights. Speaking for Protect Lane County Watersheds, Kunu Bearchum:

Kunu Bearchum: So my name is Kunu Bearchum. I was born in Eugene, Oregon. I’m from this community. And it’s an honor to have these opening remarks here tonight for Winona LaDuke.

Community rights mean that people who live in our communities have the right to make decisions that affect our well-being. We believe that we have the right and responsibility to protect our watersheds.

[00:00:37] Laws that allow harmful activities have to be challenged and replaced, so that’s what we are going to do.

[00:00:45] We are working to get the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights initiative on the ballot to secure the rights of our waters, unpolluted by harmful activities by big corporations and government.

[00:00:59] The rights of nature movement is gaining momentum globally and Protect Lane County Watersheds is an active participant. But we need your help. If you’re interested in becoming a water protector right here where you live, please consider working on our initiative program.

[00:01:21] Angela Davis famously said, ‘Action is the antidote to despair.’ So, here are some ways that you can help.

[00:01:32] Number one, endorse and donate to the Protect Lane County Watersheds initiative. Two, you can volunteer. We need help with fundraising, social media outreach, graphic design, event production, parties, artistic offerings, poetry, music, every revolution needs a soundtrack.

[00:01:54] If this is you, please get in touch with us. Attend a community rights action meeting, invite us to a house party, to a get-together, and spread the word. And finally, if you have not signed our petition yet, please do so before leaving today.

[00:02:11] Now for the reason why we are all here today. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president of the United States as the nominee of the Green Party on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader. She attended Harvard University, where she joined a group of Indigenous activists and graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, focusing on rural economic development.

[00:02:44] In 1989, LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project. Its goal to buy land back in the reservation that non-Natives had bought and to create enterprises that provide work for the Anishinaabe. By the year 2000, the foundation had bought 1,200 acres, which it held in conservation trust for eventual cession to the Tribe.

[00:03:09] And just this morning at 5 a.m., she woke up and got on a Zoom and was interviewed by Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now, speaking about the Dakota Access Pipeline lawsuit against Greenpeace that aims to silence indigenous people’s protests across the United States. So please make some noise now for Winona LaDuke.

[00:03:36] Presenter: She shared a widely-held vision for making America great again. Winona LaDuke:

[00:03:42] Winona LaDuke: I’m a wild rice harvester, I’m a farmer, and I live in a place, I say, ‘I live where the wild things are.’ Because that is true on a worldwide scale: 75% of the world’s biodiversity is in Indigenous territories, right? Four percent of the world’s population, 75% of the biodiversity. And so I spend a lot of time fighting for the places where the wild things are, you know, as we all must. But it also fills our souls and our hearts when we see those beautiful things, you know, those beautiful parts of creation.

[00:04:17] So I think about, let us talk about making America great again. And this is my idea of when America was great: America was great when there were 50 million buffalo. That’s when America was great, when there were 50 million buffalo. Single largest migratory herd in the world, living on 250 different species of grass, and the largest biome in North America, the Northern Plains, the Plains, right? That’s when America was great.

[00:04:48] America was great—there are still 800 varieties of potatoes, not bad, right? And America was great when there were 10,000 varieties of corn, right? That’s when America was great, when you could drink the water from every stream and river and life was all around us. That’s when America was great.

[00:05:06] So don’t forget that greatness. You know, Americans have a lot of—I think it’s historical amnesia but also we have ecological amnesia and part of what our opportunity is is to remember what was there and sometimes we can bring that back.

[00:05:25] You know, I’ve seen it in my lifetime. I have seen the sturgeon come back in my rivers in Northern Minnesota and I have seen dams go down. Right? I can see how you can bring back the greatness of America.

[00:05:41] And part of what this moment is, which is a moment that is in not only the time of prophecies, which is where we are, but it is the moment of absolute change, chaos, crisis, and opportunity. So I want to talk about some of the prophecies that I have heard in my life.

[00:06:04] You know, I’m older now and as a young woman I got, you know, I got to hear a lot of those cool old dudes talk. I got to hear a lot of those cool people talk in my younger days, and I listened. You know, we didn’t know some of what they were saying, right? But he used to talk about this time in the world where there would be two paths ahead.

[00:06:24] It’s not unlike the Ojibwe story of the choice between, in the time of the seventh fire, between two paths. It is said that we have a choice between one path that is well-worn but scorched, or a path that is not well-worn, but it is green. It would be our choice upon which path to embark.

[00:06:43] And that’s what our prophets told us so long ago as Anishinaabe people: You got to choose a path. And so he has these two paths that he would explain to us and he would say we would have two paths as humans upon which to travel. And one path stays with the earth. You can see that path, right?

[00:07:00] And then the other path that goes up in the sky. And I think that that is the Elon Musk path. (Laughter) That’s what I think. I’m not absolutely sure, but that looks like the Elon Musk path. And I’m saying, ‘Stay here. Y’all stay here. Those guys, one-way trip, go to Mars. That’s awesome. Head out. We stay here, right? Okay.’

[00:07:28] So that’s what he was saying, you know, and I remember being a young woman like in the ‘80s and listening. And they would talk about this time that there would be a spiderweb in the sky and that would signify a change in the worlds, right, and in the 1970s and ’80s, we didn’t know what a spiderweb in the sky was. We were like, ‘What is that? That sounds like a military thing.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’

[00:07:54] But here we are in the time of the World Wide Web. Here we are in the time of Stargate. Here we are in the time of 5G. Here we are in the time when the energy consumed by Bitcoin mining and Google is exceeding the energy produced or consumed by many countries.

[00:08:15] We are in a time when this world that exists with the tech dudes, right, is an entirely different world. And that is the time that they talked of as the time of prophecies.

[00:08:29] This is my father. His name was Vincent LaDuke, or Sun Bear. And he used to tell me different things, and some of you knew him. I always tell this story, that he came to see me one day at Harvard. And, you know, he had about an eighth-grade education, but he was a very intelligent man, anybody who knew him. And he had a special calling.

[00:08:49] And he came to see me one day at Harvard, and he said, ‘Winona, you’re a smart young woman, but I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you can’t grow corn.’ Right?

[00:09:01] He used to also say that there would be a time when there was no food in the store. And I remember that. And you remember that too, because we just went through that. That was the time of COVID, when they dropped all that food, destroyed all that food, buried all that food, right. And that in the moment when perhaps we realized that food security would not occur on a ship, on a train, or a truck, right?

[00:09:19] But it was a time when we remembered that we should grow our food. And you know, he was right. And that time was certainly this time of now. We are people who are living in the time of prophecies. And so that is a great, great moment to be in. So keep that in your heart so that you stand up, you muster up the courage, you have thinking prayers, and we work together to challenge bad ideas. Because that’s what we do: Spend a whole life fighting bad ideas, right? And sometimes you win. If you do not fight, you do not win. That’s how that works.

[00:10:13] I saw that we won on Jordan Cove, didn’t we? That is right, you know? And I was just out on the Mole Lake Reservation in Wisconsin and I had to go look at the mine site that that tribe bought. They bought the mine site after BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto-Zinc and Kennecott and Exxon tried to mine. They tried, just one day, they just bought that damn mine site, $26 million, it cost them. But you know what? No mine. No mine. So just remember, that’s how it works. You’ve got to figure out the strategy, and there is no one strategy. There’s many, and we all have our part.

[00:10:53] So, let me talk about some things that I think we need to do and where we are going. And I like to call this the ‘Sitting Bull Plan.’ He said many things, and one of the things he said is, ‘Let us put our minds together to see what kind of future we can make for our children.’ Let us put our minds together to see what kind of future we can make for our children.

[00:11:17] And I repeat that because the truth is that there is nobody going to save us, right? We all figured out Elon is not saving anybody, right? There is no techno fix for what is going down. There is no social change fairy. There is no carbon sequestration fairy. Y’all know what I’m saying? There’s like nothing like this just, like, special little fix.

[00:11:44] This is something that takes all of us to make these changes, to make that which is beautiful. A lot of us feel kind of like jerks, ecological jerks, right? But remember that we can be beautiful and we must be our better selves. We must be our best selves, right?

[00:12:09] And in that, this is where you see these women who are caretakers of the Klamath. And then you see that when their prayers come true, the dams come down, right? The dams come down, and when the dams come down, life can return, right? And I remember a lot of us never thought we would see that.

I was reading one of the great Yurok writers, and she was talking about how she thought her generation was going to witness the death of the river. And instead, she gets to witness the rebirth of the river, right?

[00:12:57] So do not give up hope or prayers and do not give up or back down on work because it takes a long time to bring about these changes. And we must keep the memory of the movement, we must keep the memory of the stories, we must keep the memory of the animals, we must keep the memories.

[00:13:20] And that is how we make the change and then you see it, you know. So we see this change in many places, so you see that, like, 40 tribes have brought back the buffalo, right? I work at a treaty rights museum in Minnesota called Giiwedinong, and a treaty that we talk about there is the Buffalo Treaty. These are the new treaties. This is a treaty made of cooperation to bring home the buffalo. And this is how you do it.

[00:13:50] You make agreements to bring back the herds. You trade your genetics to make sure that everything is good in the herd, and you set up the land for the herds. And then you know what the thing is, is that when you bring back the buffalo, then the buffalo bring back the plants, and they bring back the birds, and they bring back the water, and they bring back the soil, right? And so that’s why you bring back the buffalo.

[00:14:16] It’s because the old thing is the thing that heals it. It’s not the new thing. It’s the old thing that’s supposed to be there, right? And in that greatness, in that greatness, you know, that is how our responsibility and relationship is restored, because we do our job—our part as humans, our part of the covenant, our part of the agreement.

[00:14:41] So I have farmed for many years, 30 or so, and I raise heritage corn varieties, beans, squash, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, tobacco, and then all kind of things, like, I like eggplant too.

[00:14:56] A lot of those seeds, they’re smart. I grew a Mandan variety on my field. I grew it because it’s a drought-resistant variety. And I grew that in the year that they had a drought. I grew this corn. Monsanto varieties did not hold but my varieties did.

[00:15:11] My corn held because heritage varieties are smart. And so in the times of climate change, what we need to grow is the heritage varieties, because they’re the varieties that can adapt, and they’re the ones that are smart, and they’re the ones that didn’t need petroleum and don’t need it now…

[00:15:31] I grow hemp. And hemp is a really amazing crop and I’m really agrotextile hemp, fiber hemp varieties. And so I’ve been growing varieties from China, from France, from Spain, from the Czech Republic, from Romania, and then I really like to grow the feral varieties.

[00:15:52] So that’s what I’ve been working on with the University of Minnesota, because it turns out that ditchweed, that’s what we’re talking about. They tried to eradicate hemp, and so it’s been illegal for like 80 years, right? But some of it is hanging on, in, like, all kind of cool places, a lot of them around some of our Native reservations where the wild things are and there you find these feral varieties of hemp and I figure anything that grew illegally for 80 years is very tough. You following me on this? This is what you want, right?

[00:16:24] So I’m working with the University of Minnesota because my stepfather worked at the Oregon State University at the agricultural extension and so I was raised around guys who did plant varieties. And so what I’m interested in is building seed stock for the new green revolution, and that’s the hemp revolution. That’s the hemp revolution. But you’ve got to have the seeds for the revolution, right? You need hundreds of thousands of pounds of seeds.

[00:16:55] So think of it this way: About four acres of hemp will get you a house. Do you guys hear that? And you could grow it and put your house up in the same year and you can sequester more carbon with that than any other field crop and you can have a house that is carbon-negative and you can do it in a year, and you can actually save a forest. Y ‘all follow me on this one?

[00:17:15] They look like bamboo, you know, and what you guys need to do is, you need to get into hemp, that’s what you need to do, because that’s going to save your forests. That’s going to save your forests and that’s going to bioremediate what is going on out there. And you’re going to be able to make paper and you’re going to be able to make houses and you’re going to be able to make houses that don’t burn. That’s why you want to grow hemp.

[00:17:42] A hempcrete house, with a solar thermal panel on it, goes directly into the house. When it gets around 90 degrees, thermostat kicks off, fan goes on, puts warm air in the house. This is the housing of the future, and that is hemp panels that were put together in Bismarck, hempcrete panels, six foot wide, hauled out there on a semi, the walls put up in four hours. That’s the housing for the future, especially for a lot of tribal communities that need thousands of homes and have no trees.

[00:18:18] Presenter: The talk was titled, Prophecies, Seeds, and the Rights of Mother Earth. Winona LaDuke:

[00:18:23] Winona LaDuke: You know, I came here to speak about the rights of nature. And what I want to say is that, you know, we declared the rights of wild rice in our territory in Northern Minnesota. The rights of the river were recognized in Aotearoa; the Klamath River. The rights of mountains have been recognized. And in Ecuador, they enshrine the rights of nature in the Ecuadorian constitutional law.

[00:18:52] And a few years ago, corporations tried to get into some of the territory and the Ecuadorian Supreme Court ruled that the rights of nature superseded the rights of corporations. And, you know, that is really kind of, that’s post-colonial law, isn’t it? And that’s kind of where we need to be going, right?

[00:19:19] You know, because what those old people always told us is that the Creator’s law is the highest law, higher than the law as made by nation-states and municipalities. One would do well to live in accordance with the Creator’s law. And in our jurisprudence systems and in our covenant reaffirmation of our covenant, the rights of nature is how we reaffirm that in law.

[00:19:46] Presenter: Winona LaDuke encouraged those in attendance to support watershed rights.

[00:19:51] Winona LaDuke: Y’all got to sign that petition, right? That’s what I think. Y’all should sign that petition. Because that’s how change is made too, is sometimes you sign a darn petition. You know, you do it all. But then just remember this is a Zapatista saying, or a Mexican saying: ‘They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.’

And so that is really us. Be the seeds, right? Be the seeds. Whether it is the seeds of the food or the seeds of the ideas, the seeds of the heart, you know, be those seeds. And distribute and germinate them widely, because spring is coming, and we will need to be those people who share our seeds, because that is how change is made and that is how summer comes and food comes to our tables and dreams come to our hearts.

[00:20:50] Presenter: Winona LaDuke speaks in Eugene March 4. Her visit was co-hosted by several community rights groups, who ask volunteers to bring their talents on behalf of the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights. Learn more at the website CommunityRightsLaneCounty.org. To watch the entire event, see Todd Boyle’s YouTube channel.