Winona LaDuke

Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservation.

As Program Director of the Honor the Earth Fund, she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support and create funding for frontline Native Environmental groups. She also works as Founding Director for White Earth Land Recovery Project: a reservation-based nonprofit focused on land, cultural and environmental issues. In 1996 and 2000, LaDuke ran as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Green Party with Ralph Nader. She organized substantially to increase Native American and progressive voter registration and activism.

In 1994, LaDuke was nominated by Time magazine as one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age. She has been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the BIHA Community Service Award in 1997, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women's Leadership Fellowship, and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.

A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women's organization. In 1998, Ms. magazine named her "Women of the Year" for her work with Honor the Earth. Also in 1997, her first novel, Last Standing Woman, was published by Voyager Press. In 1999, South End Press published All Our Relations, a non-fiction book on Native environmental struggles.