Eco-activist shares message at Mendel festival

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Joseph Naytowhow sits cross-legged inside the tipi gesturing with his hands. He is describing how the rabbit got its long ears to the 10-year-old girl before him. Naytowhow glances at the other children in the tipi but always his gaze returns to rest on the child in front of him. She hangs on his every word and seems to gain comfort from his low, soothing voice.

The group makes a sweet picture in the storytelling tent pitched close to the Mendel Art Gallery. It is part of the Living Artfully event being held on the gallery grounds this first Saturday in June.

Billed as 'a festival of art and ecology,' the eco-fair, outdoors in the warm prairie sun and close to the South Saskatchewan River, is about using art to encourage responsibility between people and the environment. There are booths set up and speakers booked but mostly it is about getting back to the land, recycling and saving the earth. The nod to art comes later when Saskatoon-based performance artist Lori Blondeau launches a photographic exhibition of her work.

An outdoor stage is set up at the bottom of a grassy slope and it is here that Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe woman from the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, will speak. She is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in Native economic development.

LaDuke begins by telling stories' stories based on her experiences as an eco-activist working hard to highlight how the values of First Nations culture need to be taken seriously. Values like respecting the land and remembering spiritual heritage. Applying the basic tenets of Ojibwe thinking, LaDuke challenges the crowd to question how mainstream society has walked over and ignored Native culture and values.

Environmental issues are always linked with economic decisions. If we don't treat the environment with respect, she points out, we won't have an economic future.

"It's worth figuring out in this millennium how to live at peace with this land," she said, insisting that we can't build a sustainable future if we're always sucking the life out of and off of the earth. She also questioned why people in Saskatchewan import most of their food, arguing that it makes sense to be self-sufficient when you consider the cost of fuel to truck stuff up here.

People are defined by a connection to land, explained the mother of five. We need to remember where we came from and who we are. The Aboriginal people are good at that, she said. Our identity can?t come from copying the world around us.

"You can't buy your life at a mall," she said.

Close to her heart and deeply ingrained in LaDuke's mission is the desire to make life a little easier for people on the White Earth reservation.

For the past 25 years, she has worked hard using the White Earth Land reservation trust fund she established to buy back the land originally belonging to the Ojibwe tribe in Minnesota. So far, 1,700 acres has been retrieved.

LaDuke has also fought against attempts to commercialize the wild rice grown on the reservation. The University of Minnesota wants to genetically alter wild rice and the Ojibwe people there are opposing them.

The fight to preserve their sacred sites has pushed LaDuke into all kinds of settings including the courthouse where she challenged the development of a golf course on Spirit Mountain, one of seven sacred Ojibwe sites.

The mountain, situated close to the reservation, is already highly commercialized.

"I'm thinking that maybe we have enough golf courses in the world and not enough sacred sites," she said.

Because of her influence and the hard work of others, the city council of Duluth decided to nix plans for the proposed greenway.

A victory for the Ojibwe people, and if LaDuke has her way, just one of many to come.