Winona LaDuke

Who is Winona LaDuke?

Winona LaDuke is an American Indian activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer of Anishinaabe descent. In 1996 and 2000, she ran for vice president as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader.

She is currently the executive director of both Honor the Earth and White Earth Land Recovery Project, which she founded at White Earth Reservation in 1989. She started living at the reservation for the first time in 1982, after graduating from college, and worked as a principal of a high school. LaDuke became an activist in Anishinaabe issues, helping found the Indigenous Women's Network in 1985 and becoming involved in continuing struggles to regain reservation land lost since allotments to individual households in the nineteenth century. The WELRP holds land in a conservation trust for the benefit of the tribe.