Getting good government is like raising kids

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Two-time U.S. vice-presidential candidate Winona LaDuke says trying to get governments and corporations to act responsibly is in many ways like raising children.

"If I tell my kids not to steal, I must tell the government not to steal," she told hundreds of enthusiastic supporters during a recent presentation in Montana.

LaDuke, a resident of Minnesota's White Earth Indian Reservation, has three children of her own and helps raise four others in her rural household. She said the longer she's a mother, the more parallels she sees between child-rearing and political activism.

With such a hectic home life, LaDuke, who ran with American consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000 on the national Green Party ticket, said a primary rule with her children is that old messes must be cleaned up before new messes are started.

"Why can't we run our country like that?" she asked the crowd brought in by more than two dozen sponsoring groups in Missoula, home of the University of Montana. "If you don't know how to clean up your mess, don't make it in the first place."

LaDuke, 42, is no stranger to political complexities. Her mother is a Russian Jew from New York; her father is a Native Ojibwe. She holds an undergraduate degree in economic development from Harvard University and a master's degree in rural development from Ohio's Antioch College. She made her first presentation to the United Nations while still a teenager. In 1997, Ms. magazine named her one of its women of the year. In 1994, Time magazine said she was one of America's top 50 promising leaders under the age of 40.

LaDuke cut her activist teeth fighting uranium mines and their deadly legacies in and around southwestern U.S. reservations. She says she was appalled when she first learned how little most tribes received from the multi-national corporations that conducted the operations. And then there was the aftermath of abandoned mines and waste piles, which continue to plague many tribal members and reservation communities with radiation problems.

Such atrocities, among many others throughout the world, are helping fuel Green Party expansion as well as greater awareness about the rights of Indigenous peoples, LaDuke said.

She and Nader received nearly three per cent of the national vote in the 2000 presidential election. LaDuke said one of her biggest frustrations is Americans who will not take responsibility for their actions-and those of their government. She's also deeply troubled by the glaring disparity between the rich and the poor in the United States, as well as the country's quickness to use military force to resolve conflicts around the world.

"We must renew and redouble our efforts to wage peace," she said, adding that Americans also need to open their eyes to the social and environmental impacts they cause by being the largest consumers of natural resources in the world.

"We are pretty much pigs," LaDuke later told participants at a private fundraiser on the Flathead Indian Reservation. "It means we live in a continuing reality of wanting something that someone else has."

LaDuke, a member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinabeg, said Native peoples, with their historical ties to the land, must be leaders in the fight to regain a consciousness of caring for the environment. If the natural world is not healed and protected, all humans will pay.

"In the end, we are all accountable to natural law," she said. "If you pollute the water, you will drink it. If you pollute the air, you will breathe it. If you arm everyone in the world, there will be a lot of violence."

LaDuke, author of the novel, Last Standing Woman, and the nonfiction work, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, said she didn't bother voting until 1996.

"I didn't think it was worthwhile," she said of her past absence from the polls. "There really wasn't anybody to vote for in my assessment."

LaDuke said her attitude changed when Nader tapped her as his runnin mate that year and she realized progressives were getting serious about high-level change.

But LaDuke said she's unsure whether she'll run again in 2004 because of family and other commitments. Catching up from the last campaign has taken a huge amount of work.

"I know those other guys didn't have to come home and do laundry and try to keep their little organization going," LaDuke explained.

Pamela Kingfisher is executive director of the Texas-based Indigenous Women's Network where LaDuke serves as co-chairwoman. The group monitors and intervenes in dozens of development projects around the world where Native peoples are impacted, including the fight over oil, gas and timber extraction in northern Alberta, where the Lubicon First Nation is fighting for its cultural survival.

The network also is a leader in trying to stop oil development in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the Aboriginal rights of the Gwich'in Nation are threatened. As a rallying point for organizers, LaDuke frequently notes the successes of Canada's Cree Nation in scaling back hydroelectric projects in the James Bay region through lawsuits and negotiation.

Kingfisher, a member of the Cherokee Nation, says her activist tendencies were nurtured early in life as she learned about the inner workings of the nation's nuclear weapons program. But, she said, a hard-fought victory over a nuclear processing plant in Oklahoma brought home the fact that to be successful, environmentalists must come up with alternatives to projects they don't like.

"It is important to say what is wrong," LaDuke added. "It is also important to say what is right."

Both Kingfisher and LaDuke noted that traditional tribal systems have been so decimated by colonialism that they're just now starting to recover. A resurgence of interest in Native languages and culture is helping create strong, new Indian leaders, they said, including "women warriors" like themselves. But there are a staggering number of battlesto be fought, starting with Native people gaining the respect and political clout they need to progress?despite sometimes overwhelming odds.

"If it had been one-man, one-vote when (Sioux leader) Sitting Bull was around, I think things would have been a lot different," said LaDuke, who was once arrested in California for chaining herself to a phone-book factory that made its products from 1,000-year-old trees. "That what is good in this country had been struggled for. Every change in this country came from people who struggled."

Kingfisher, 49, and LaDuke each took issue with claims from national political leaders that the recent terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. are the worst atrocities that have ever occurred on American soil. What the politicians so conveniently forget is that Indian people have sustained incalculable losses since Europeans first arrived, they said. And the toll from the abuse and neglect in many cases continues to this day, especially when it comes to land use.

"We have a predator-prey relationship with our land, and the land is the prey" LaDuke said. "Those issues will plague us in this society as ever-open sores."

Nonetheless, there is hope, LaDuke and Kingfisher agreed. An extensive get-out-the-vote drive in Montana resulted in six Indian men and women-the most ever-serving this year in the state legislature. Innumerable environmental battles around the globe are being won in the streets and in the courthouses, and tribes are standing up and asserting their rights in nearly every venue.

"We need to remember when we were a healthy people" and harken back to those days, Kingfisher said. "Native Americans have had very little political will. We haven't had access.

We've had it beaten out of us."

Tribes and reservations, LaDuke said, must also continue to fight an ongoing imbalance in trade that allows too many resources to be meted out to middlemen who then turn profits that should instead be headed to tribal coffers.

Likewise, LaDuke said new strategies must be developed to find funding for more tribal non-profits, one of the least-desirable entities in the eyes of most philanthropic organizations because of their geographic isolation and a general lack of familiarity. With increased donations flowing into relief efforts tied to the terrorist attacks, there will be even less money around for social justice groups, tribal or non-tribal, the next couple of years, Kingfisher predicted.

"All these issues cross-cut," said Kingfisher. "It's more important now more than ever to work together. We can no longer be separatists about our issues."

LaDuke took it a step further and urged all participants to consider careers in the public-interest sector.

"You'll never make a lot of money," she said, "but you'll sleep good at night."