Activist Winona LaDuke encourages people to understand that our future depends on humans recognizing the rights of the natural world
This article by Alyssa Kelly appeared in the Char-Koosta News on March 28th, 2019.
MISSOULA — From blazing temperatures and billion dollar wildfires igniting across the country, to rising sea levels and entire animal species going extinct, scientific projections resulting from human activity in the near future are apocalyptic.
Indigenous Activist Winona LaDuke (Ojibwe) said the bleak reports mark a critical point. “At this moment in time, we collectively have this spiritual opportunity to choose between two paths,” she’s said. “In our teachings this is called: ‘the time of the seventh fire.’ One of the paths is well worn but scorched, and the other is green. It’s going to be our choice to decide which path to embark.”
LaDuke graced the stage of the Wilma Theater to discuss what it means, “to be a good ancestor” as part of the University of Montana’s Presidential Lecture Series. “The paradigm that got us into this set of problems is not going to be the paradigm to get us out,” she said “We have this agreement with the Creator and the natural world to do our part and to be good humans.”
The “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005),” which was developed by 1,360 experts worldwide, reports that “over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history… This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.”
Moving forward, LaDuke said society must look back on its history. “I want to start by talking about making America great again,” she said. “America was great when there were 8,000 varieties of corn, 250,000 species of grass, and there were 50 million buffalo. Life is in biodiversity and what they had back then doesn’t exist right now. America suffers from historical and ecological amnesia. People don’t know the places where the wild rice used to grow anymore.”
Read the rest of this article at its original source HERE.