Keynote Speaker

Friday, September 16 at 7 PM; Taylor Auditorium (Registration opens at 6:15)

Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth and a member of the Anishinaabe Tribe, will present the 22nd Headwaters Conference keynote address at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 16.

Winona LaDuke, the author of six books, is a rural development economist and activist.   A graduate of Harvard, with graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters in Rural Development from Antioch University.  LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. In 1994, Time magazine named her one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and in 1997 she was named Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. In 2007, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Thomas Merton Award, the Ann Bancroft Award, the Global Green Award, and the prestigious International Slow Food Award for working to protect wild rice and local biodiversity. LaDuke also served as Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. In addition to numerous articles, LaDuke is the author of Last Standing Woman (fiction), All Our Relations (non-fiction), In the Sugarbush (children's non-fiction), and The Winona LaDuke Reader, and Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (South End Press).  Her most recent book, the Militarization of Indian Country is forthcoming from Michigan State Press in the fall of 2011. 

An enrolled member of the Mississippi band of Ojibwe, LaDuke lives with her family on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.  She is also the Founding Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a reservation based non-profit devoted to restoring the land-base and culture of the White Earth Anishinaabeg. She helped found Honor the Earth in 1993 and has served in a leadership position since the organization’s inception.

She continues to work on issues of sustainable development, ecological economics, food security and food sovereignty and resiliency strategies in a time of climate change.  Her lectures span these areas, as well as Native American rights, Principled Leadership development, and  Economics for the Seventh Generation.