The Next Energy Economy: Environmentalist Winona LaDuke Speaks at UWM

The sounds of tribal music echoed throughout the lecture hall in Merrill Hall Thursday night, as students and faculty from the American Indian Studies Program introduced special guest, Winona LaDuke.  

LaDuke talks to the audience about her version of “Making America Great Again’’ environmentally and talks about the corn that has been man-made. She describes indigenous women as the seed keepers of the world. There are 8,000 varieties of corn, and LaDuke believes the love from these women has kept that going for this long. She says that, when there were 250 species of grass and wild rice everywhere, that was when America was once great.

“I live in a place where you can still drink the water from the lake, water from the spring. I live in a place, the same place you all live in, where you can still get sugar from a tree. I live in a place where there is food upon the water. I live in a place where our land is good,” LaDuke says. 

LaDuke spoke at the annual Dean’s Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities. Her topic of discussion was called, The Next Energy Economy: Grassroots Strategies to Mitigate Global Climate Change and How We Move Ahead.  

LaDuke is an international environmentalist, economist and author who specializes in sustainability for the environment. LaDuke is the Program Director of Honor of the Earth, a program which is designed to help fight climate change and provide environmental protection among indigenous communities.

LaDuke has also been inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007 for her continuous leadership and engagement in the community. She has written five books and is well established for her content on environmental and human right issues. 

LaDuke speaks of her home village where things are still pure. She references her home as “Where the Wild Things Are,” and says the only way it can stay this way is if preserved to be kept this way. She illustrates her home as a place where wild bears, wolves, frogs, geese, and eagles can call their home as well. 

“I don’t have historical amnesia; I don’t. I don’t have ecological amnesia,” LaDuke says. 

The renowned environmentalist says that people who have a voice and the platform have the opportunity to fix the planet that we live on. She believes that we need a new paradigm if we are going to survive. She speaks of the town, Fort McMurray, Alberta and the fires that have occurred there. She even compares the consequences to the “ecological equivalent to Auschwitz.” 

“We are living in a time of a catastrophe of Biblical proportions,” LaDuke says. 

LaDuke breaks down the natural disasters that are occurring coast-by- coast due to the world’s over use of fossil fuels. She explains that massive storms have hit the south with an unknown expiration date and outcome. “The West coast is on fire,” she exclaims, as she points out the fires that have occurred from California to the British Columbia. The Arctic’s polar ice caps are melting at a rapid rate, and there is cannibalism among polar bears due to low food resources and starvation. Lastly, she referenced the East, where she speaks of Trump and says he is “screaming at the world in catastrophic way.”   

“Nobody has a budget for natural disasters. Nobody has a budget for when you get smoked….We have a ‘D’ in infrastructure in this country,” LaDuke says.  

Exporting Oil 

Enbridge Corporation proposed the “Fracked Dual Pipeline” (Tarzan’s pipeline) to come out of North Dakota. Enbridge Corporation is the third largest pipeline corporation in Canada. LaDuke explains that the pipeline wanted to go through Minnesota territory to build the pipeline to extract oil. LaDuke studied the pipelines and the company and found out that they wanted to extract 645,000 barrels a day coming out of the Bakken oil fields in 2013. The pipeline corporation owns the network that goes all the way from Grand Rapids to Wisconsin. 

LaDuke was able to build a multi-racial alliance in Minnesota to oppose the pipeline. The multi-racial alliance was able to fight a lawsuit together which required the state of Minnesota to do an Environmental Impact Statement on the proposed pipeline. The state didn’t want to do that, so they appealed it. Once a lawsuit was filed, the Enbridge Corporation announced a cancellation. LaDuke and her alliance were able to stop the pipeline.

“Do the rights of a corporation supersede the rights of people? Do the rights of corporations supersede the rights of nature?.. How many civil rights are you going to violate…. to protect the rights of an oil company?” LaDuke says. 

LaDuke feels that social movements are the key to great change in this country and always have been. She then speaks of when the Enbridge Corporation received its permit for the pipeline that summer. The Department of Public Utilities Commission informed Enbridge that it would it cost $38 million for North Dakota to put the pipeline in. Minnesota’s police force were also at a starting price of $38 million, resulting in Enbridge Corporation funding the Minnesota police force to install the pipeline. 

“You gotta be courageous. You gotta be courageous in a face of great stupidity,” LaDuke says. 

Sierra Taliaferro, local fan of LaDuke, gave her opinion on the event and what could be next for Milwaukee.  

“I think this is a great introduction; change takes time,” she said. “If we position ourselves in a way that we can kind of be more comfortable with change, we can easily go into that direction of where we can live sustainably.”

Local Solar 

In LaDuke’s presentation,  she illustrates that about 30 percent of energy use comes from the Northern areas. The answer has to be local for more efficient use of energy, and that is the best way things will work, she says.  

Throughout her presentation, she presented pictures and examples of the Navajo Reservation’s resourcefulness in panels. She says that the answers are in local solar power. Indian Reservations are the windiest places around, so it benefits their homes when solar panels are in use to generate their homes. Solar panels save 20 percent of their heating bills, and they are planning to build more solar panels, so that every home has them.  

Hemp Farming 

LaDuke is also a hemp farmer and has been for three years in Minnesota. Her interest is in fiber hemp, and she believes that “hemp is the answer.” She informs the audience on the importance of hemp and shared that it was used for linen, and it was grown regularly before the criminalization of cannabis. She feels that hemp was the target because it is significant in all industries that are found destroying our environment.

Today, everything that the average person wears is heavily layered with fossil fuel. Cotton uses 24 percent of the world’s agricultural chemical that goes on cotton crops. Polyester, Nylon, cotton and other materials eventually break down into microfibers that have negative impact on the water, animals and the fish that we consume and are surrounded by, she says. 

“Seeds are resilient, seeds are promise, seeds are about hope,” LaDuke says. 

 LaDuke mentions her interest in butterflies and compares butterflies to the change of the environment. She says that the butterfly interests her because it liquidates itself, and these cells appear called imago cells. Imago cells appear and die off, and then more come and multiply themselves, eventually taking over the caterpillar and transforming it to a butterfly.  

“Imago cells… I think about that….the word imago, as the root of imagination. Remember that we are the imago cells of this change. We are the imago cells of this transformation. We must take our place and do what we need to do to take care and make our future beautiful.” 

After the event, students and fans of Winona LaDuke stood in line for her book signing. Artist activist and Affiliate with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Indians, Valaria Tatera, felt that the event should have been bigger and was very happy about Winona LaDuke coming to Milwaukee.

“We have Enbridge line life and, most of my art is protesting that line. I came here in support of her because I feel that what she is doing is great,” Tatera says.