First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"There should be beauty in "process," whether it is harvesting with intelligence, whether it is the use of recycled materials, or whether it is observing energy efficiency."
"Sometimes when you ask people to consume less, to not use it and toss it, there's this puzzled look like, "That sounds painful. That sounds like I'm not going to really get what I want, and I have a right to it." That's what we have to deconstruct."
"Just because the coal exists, do they have to strip mine it? Just because the water flows, does that mean they have to dam it? Just because the trees are there, does that mean they have to cut them? At what point do we restrain ourselves in this society so that something is left because it has value on its own?"
"I spend a lot of time fighting with county commissioners because they look at my reservation and refer to it as timber resources; I call it a forest. It's a very different way of thinking. I do not look out there and see timber resources; I see a forest. That does not mean that I'm opposed to logging. It does mean that I'm opposed to lazy logging, which is what I call clear-cutting. You can selectively cut in a beautiful manner, and leave a forest standing."
"Forests are worth more standing than cut."
"In Minnesota, they say we made nice about it a long time ago. They say, "You Indians should get over it." Well that's really nice to say when you are holding all the assets. Why are Indian people the poorest people in this country in every economic or social statistic at the bottom or the top of where you don't want to be? Is that because we're stupid? No. It's because we have structural poverty enforced by intergenerational appropriation of our wealth. That's the reality."
"A house is more than a shelter: It is home, it is something that reflects you."
"I haven't seen anyone improve on the tepee-you can have a fire inside it, and you can love it."
"While I was introduced as an activist, I consider myself more a concerned parent. To be a mother in this day and age, you have to be concerned with a wide array of issues."
"I am fully aware of how little an American education teaches you about Native people."
"I always greet people in my language because I believe that cultural diversity is as beautiful as biodiversity, and that is reflected in language."
"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air, water, and land. Contaminating the commons must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as defacing private property is wrong. On that basis, the Seventh Generation Amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, "The right of citizens of the U.S. to enjoy and use air, water, sunlight, and other renewable resources determined by the Congress to be common property shall not be impaired, nor shall such use impair their availability for use by the future generations.""
"There is, in many Indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be."
"The challenge at the cusp of the millennium is to transform human laws to match natural laws, not vice versa. And to correspondingly transform wasteful production and voracious consumption. America and industrial society must move from a society based on conquest to one steeped in the practice of survival. In order to do that, we must close the circle. The linear nature of industrial production itself, in which labor and technology turn natural wealth into consumer products and wastes, must be transformed into a cyclical system."
"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares its intent to be to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves, and our posterity." In reality, U.S. laws have been transformed by corporate interests to cater to elite interests in society."
"In the final analysis, the survival of Native America is fundamentally about the collective survival of all human beings. The question of who gets to determine the destiny of the land, and of the people who live on it-those with the money or those who pray on the land-is a question that is alive throughout society."
"While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of the most invasive industrial interventions imaginable."
"There is a direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity."
"Native American teachings describe the relations all around-animals, fish, trees, and rocks as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together."
"the poverty of dispossession is almost overwhelming. So is the poverty of complicity and guilt. That shame combined with guilt and a feeling of powerlessness, creates an atmosphere in which hatred buds, blossoms and flourishes. The hatred passes from father to son and from mother to daughter. Each generation feels the hatred and it penetrates deeper to justify a myth. Norman Grist suffered from Indian Hating Disease. He had it bad, knotted tightly and pungently in his gut"
"There is a peculiar kind of hatred in the northwoods, a hatred born of living with with three generations of complicity in the theft of lives and land. What is worse is that each day, those who hold this position of privilege must come face to face with those whom they have dispossessed. To others who rightfully should share in the complicity and the guilt, Indians are far away and long ago. But in reservation border towns, Indians are ever-present."
"It's hard to imagine those who framed the U.S. Constitution could have imagined the U.S. at the millennium. It's harder yet to imagine what we'll pass on, if we don't think of the seventh generation from now."
"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These most basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air or water, thereby taking life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. These rights are also damaged by those who cause a crash of our fish or destroy our oceans. Such "taking" must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as a taking of private property is a fundamental wrong."
"If private property has found safe haven in the Fifth Amendment, where is common property equally protected?"
"Public policy is lagging behind our ability to destroy ourselves."
"American public policy has come to reflect short-term interests, fiscal years, "deficit reduction" programs, and is increasingly absent of any intergenerational perspective. That long-term perspective is crucial to our well-being and a valuable role for democratic government."
"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares as one of its purposes, to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our posterity." Should not those blessings include air fit to breathe, water decent enough to drink, and land which is as beautiful for our descendants as it was for our ancestors?"
"The framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that document, but had little idea of what was to come. Since that time we've seen the land of the continent change dramatically-culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically. Today, the social and technological foundation of the society has, in fact, outstripped the law itself. It's time to amend the Constitution to preserve "the commons" for all of us. It's time for a Common Property, or Seventh Generation, Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
"This is not a struggle for women of the dominant society in so-called "first world" countries to have equal pay and equal status if that pay and status continues to be based on a consumption model that is unsustainable. It is a struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth."
"Consumption causes the commodification of the sacred, the natural world, cultures, children, and women. And unless we speak and take meaningful action to address the high levels of consumption, we will never have any security for our individual human rights as women."
"Simply stated, if we can no longer nurse our children, if we can no longer bear children, and if our bodies are wracked with poisons, we will have accomplished little in the way of determining our destiny or improving our conditions."
"Today, on a worldwide scale, we remain in the same situation as one hundred years ago, only with less land and fewer people."
"What gives corporations like Conoco, Shell, Exxon, Daishowa, ITT, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the World Bank the right which supersedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women? What law gives that right to them? Not any law of the Creator or of Mother Earth. Is that right contained within their wealth? Is that right contained within their wealth, which was historically acquired immorally, unethically through colonialism and imperialism and paid for with the lives of millions of people, species of plants, and entire ecosystems? They should have no such right. And we clearly, as women and as indigenous peoples, demand and will recover that right-the right of self-determination, to determine our own destiny and that of our future generations."
"We ended up having a long, wide-ranging conversation about the difference between an extractivist mind-set (which Leanne Simpson describes bluntly as "stealing" and taking things "out of relationship") and a regenerative one. She described Anishinaabe systems as "a way of living designed to generate life, not just human life but the life of all living things." This is a concept of balance, or harmony, common to many Indigenous cultures and is often translated to mean "the good life." But Simpson told me that she preferred the translation "continuous rebirth," which she first heard from fellow Anishinaabe writer and activist Winona LaDuke."
"There is no Indigenous group in the US whose relationships to ancestral foods has not been severely impacted, if not completely disrupted. Some of these are well known, having been extensively documented, and no one has written more powerfully or prolifically on the issue than Winona LaDuke. LaDuke is the quintessential Indigenous eco-warrior, making her mark in larger Indigenous environmental justice conversation not only as a researcher but also as an activist who has worked tirelessly for decades in her own White Earth reservation community to protect Ojibwe access to wild rice, known to them as manoomin...Another high-profile issue LaDuke has written about is the disruption of the Klamath nation's relationship with salmon and sucker fish."
"In her book The Militarization of Indian Country, Anishinaabe activist and writer Winona LaDuke analyzes the continuing negative effects of the military on Native Americans, considering the consequences wrought on Native economy, land, future, and people, especially Native combat veterans and their families. Indigenous territories in New Mexico bristle with nuclear weapons storage, and Shoshone and Paiute territories in Nevada are scarred by decades of aboveground and underground nuclear weapons testing. The Navajo Nation and some New Mexico Pueblos have experienced decades of uranium strip mining, the pollution of water, and subsequent deadly health effects. "I am awed by the impact of the military on the world and on Native America," LaDuke writes. "It is pervasive.""
"Very few people will clamor to have their taxes raised. … But if you ask the same people if they like their public university system, if they like health services, if they like clean water and go down the list of what government does, they'll say they want that...There is a disconnect. They think that in some magic way, government should be able to deliver all these things without providing the revenue."
"I really love getting into the nuts and bolts of policy, ... The citizens need to become policy wonks. They need to start doing their homework."
"Deep gratitude to all who fearlessly speak truth to power in these times of widespread deceit. If war can be started by lies, maybe peace can be started by truth. Keep using your voice to make sure the truth gets out."
"Pope Francis has offered to mediate talks between #Venezuela's President Maduro & US-backed opposition Guaido - if both sides are willing to talk. Maduro says yes, but Guaido says no. If Guaido is such a champion of democracy, why does he refuse to hold peaceful dialogue? 🤔"
"The Red Cross has refused to participate in the US-led effort to deliver humanitarian aid to Juan Guaido in #Venezuela, saying that using humanitarian aid to serve a political agenda would violate its "fundamental principles of impartiality, neutrality & independence.""
"It’s time to move past lesser evil & fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it, because they DO. We can create an America & a world that works for all of us, & puts people, planet & peace over profit. The power to create that world is in our hands. Let’s get to work!"
"Chickenhawks like John Bolton are saying the quiet part out loud on why the ruling class should support the Venezuela coup: “It will make a big difference to the US economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in & produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.""
"When you think back to the lead-up to the Iraq War, do you wish we had fought harder to stop the slaughter? Now's our chance to do that as Trump's gang pushes Venezuela towards a bloodbath. Expose & resist these warmongers NOW! #NoMoreWar"
"They lied to you about Vietnam. They lied to you about Iraq. They lied to you about Syria. They lied to you about Honduras. They lied to you about Libya. So why would you believe what they're saying about Venezuela?"
"Almost 60% of US are sick of the 2 parties of war & Wall Street... but anyone who runs - or even votes - outside the 2-party box is attacked as a "spoiler" by the political/media establishment. The solution? Ranked Choice Voting, which frees you to vote for what you really want."
"After New Knowledge was caught running a false-flag operation to plant fake stories about Russian trolls in the media, their CEO & 4 co-conspirators were kicked off Facebook & Sen. Doug Jones called for a federal investigation into the firm for possible election crimes."
"The New Knowledge report on alleged Russian social media interference doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It uses cherry-picked facts to prop up a deceptive, wildly exaggerated narrative. The authors have been discredited & their methodology is hopelessly flawed."
"The same blowhard politicians talking about "bringing democracy" to Venezuela have aided & abetted the Saudi dictators executing dissidents, murdering journalists & starving millions of kids in Yemen. They don't give a damn about democracy or poor people's lives. It's about OIL."
"US has backed right-wing coups up and down Latin America for 100+ years. Not one was about democracy. All have been to enrich the global elite. But we’re supposed to believe this time in Venezuela - which has the world’s largest oil reserves - is different?"