Winona LaDuke
American Indian activist for women's, children's and environmental rights Winona LaDuke is this year's Women's History Month speaker. St. Thomas' Luann Dummer Center for Women is sponsoring her presentation, "Women and Native Struggles: Toward Ecological Transformation," which will be held 7:30-9 p.m. Tuesday, March 10, in O'Shaughnessy Education Center auditorium. It is free and open to the public.
LaDuke's career as an activist spans roughly three decades, during which she has founded and/or co-founded the Indigenous Women's Network, the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor the Earth, for which she serves as executive director "to create awareness and support for Native environmental issues and to develop needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities." The organization "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."
A 1982 Harvard graduate, LaDuke is an Ojibwe and lives on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. She was the vice presidential candidate under the Green Party ballot, with Ralph Nader running for president, in 1996 and again in 2000, when she gave her first lecture at St. Thomas.
Tuesday's lecture will mark the fourth time that LaDuke has spoken at St. Thomas, and her most recent time back since 2004.
