Winona La Duke is an Ojibwe community organizer, economist and author who lives and works on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, where she works on Indigenous rights and environmental issues. She is the founding director of both the White Earth Land Recovery Program and Honor the Earth. Winona ran as the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party in the United States presidential elections in l996 and 2000.

Breeze blows rattling cornstalks
Gold tassels shiver in the sun
Invisible blessing

 

 

In the last ten years internationally, traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous management systems have caught the attention of many scientists globally. This is a good trend. We don’t know how long this post-deconstructionist window of cultural relativity is going to be open. We’re damn glad it’s open. We hope it stays open long enough to sneak through and get some of our ideas across about a fundamental difference between the Western scientific-oriented environmental movement, which has many good aspects, but which doesn’t fit exactly with indigenous cosmologies and world views. We need then to find out where we can work together.

We awaken in the fields, we see the sun pass overhead, we stay in that field in a deep dream, unaware of time.  Humans are the only beings with history, and not having a certain future is something that bothers us.  We search for that future, a future for our children and for our children’s children so that they, too, will be able to open their eyes, see the sun pass overhead, understand the words spoken by the land, the tree, the birds, the snake’s tense greeting as he worries about being stepped on or killed by some savage human being who doesn’t even respect the way of the water because he has light in his house all the time, and has forgotten nature’s wisdom: that days are for being part of nature and night is for resting.