by Lisa Curtis
STAFF WRITER

Opening with a traditional greeting in the language of her native tribe, the Anishinaabekwe, twice-nominated Green Party Vice President Winona LaDuke told the audience she was going to make them think about “being human and the process of recovering [their] humanity.”

LaDuke began with stories of sacred places with names such as, “The Place Where the Thunder Beings Rest,” “The Falls of a Woman’s Hair” and “The Place Where Life Begins.” As she described these places, she told of the many legal battles the Native Americans have had to fight in order to keep these places sacred. Native Americans weren’t given religious freedom until the 1978 Indian Religious Freedom Act, and even after its passage they continue to fight to protect sacred sites on a case-by-case basis.

Unfortunately the problems for Native Americans don’t merely lie in their sacred sites. LaDuke has also been influential in fighting off large corporations that want to drill or mine on the Indian Reservations. Ironically, the very land that the U.S. once found distasteful enough to bestow upon the Native Americans in the late 1860s has now been found to contain valuable natural resources.

Indian reservations contain two-thirds of all uranium and one third of all Western low-sulfur coal. Corporations approach Native Americans, many of whom don’t speak English, and offer large amounts of money to extract those resources. LaDuke has often found herself explaining to communities the harmful effects of radon emissions and other mine pollutants.

While at Harvard, LaDuke worked in the Los Alamos Science lab. To this day she remembers the words of an article she read there exactly. It said, “Perhaps the solution to the radon emission problem is to zone the land into uranium mining and milling districts so as to forbid human habitation.…” This article shocked her in light of the multitude of uranium mining that takes place on reservations and helped spur her career as an environmental activist.

How does hearing about the tragedies faced by Native Americans help us (a mainly white, non-native audience) recover our own humanity? LaDuke tells us that the term “white” is a social construct that disregards the idea that we are immigrants to this land; we all come from somewhere.

It is this lack of acknowledgment of our own history, this lack of “attachment to place,” that distances us from ourselves and from our land. We live in a “melting pot” where children are often told to “go off and seek [their] fortune.” These two social constructs serve to make Americans a culture that moves often and fails to develop an attachment to the land. Like LaDuke said, “If we viewed this land as holy we would treat it differently.”

As it stands, Americans consume six times more energy than the world average, produce 50 trillion pounds of garbage a year, and have the highest carbon dioxide output in the world, a gas widely recognized as contributing to global warming. But LaDuke hasn’t given up hope, instead working to promote wind power and sustainability on reservations thorough the White Earth Land Recovery Project. “If we can do it, you guys can do it,” she told the audience. “You are in a place of privilege and you’re a smart bunch, there’s no reason for you not to make change.”