Winona LaDuke

The thing about being an Indian person is that you feel most at home with your own people.

In most of America, it seems you don't matter if you're not between 25 and 50.

Spirituality is the foundation of all my political work.

I see a lot of damage to Mother Earth. I see water being taken from creeks where water belongs to animals, not to oil companies.

On my reservation, we had one of the most abundant fisheries in the world and hundreds of thousands of acres of wild rice beds. We've lost a lot of it, but there's still natural wealth that could support our communities.

I'm interested in what kind of food we're going to eat as the climate changes. I'm interested in what kind of economy we're going to have in another 1,000 years.

The United States - you know, native people are large landowners, but the military has a huge chunk of our territories. And in those, there are a number of places that are our sacred sites.

Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together.

What we all need to do is find the wellspring that keeps us going, that gives us the strength and patience to keep up this struggle for a long time.

Food sovereignty is an affirmation of who we are as indigenous peoples and a way, one of the most surefooted ways, to restore our relationship with the world around us.

Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.