Winona LaDuke urges land-based sustainability, criticizes coal and nuclear, outlines White Earth energy and food work

Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe enrolled member of the Mississippi Band and executive director of Honor the Earth, urged Missoula attendees Thursday to embrace land-based, intergenerational approaches to sustainability and described steps her White Earth community has taken on energy and food security.

LaDuke opened by describing Indigenous, cyclical worldviews and the “creator’s law” that she said should guide human behavior and resource use. “It is possible to have a world without emperors,” she told the audience, arguing that modern, linear approaches such as trading pollution credits, heavy reliance on fossil fuels, and monocultural agriculture are unsustainable.

The talk focused on three interlinked challenges LaDuke identified as defining the coming decades: climate change, peak oil and food security. She criticized what she called federal and corporate responses that rely on “clean coal” or nuclear power, and said large-scale coal and nuclear plans overlook local impacts, including water use and community health. “There is no such thing as clean coal,” she said, and described longstanding opposition to uranium mining and nuclear technologies…