Winona LaDuke: Return to Rice Lake
Wild rice, or manoomin in Ojibway, is the way of life for this village, and for most of the White Earth Reservation. It feeds the body and it feeds the soul, with hundreds of thousands of pounds produced for not only our community but for sale. Today the manoomin is feeding the souls, as tribal members and friends come and gather to honor the rice, and to challenge not only Enbridge, but the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which has just allocated 5 billion gallons of water to Enbridge for Line 3, in the middle of the deepest drought we can remember.
“You can feel the wind talk to the rice.”
Lew Murray, Rice Lake Village
It’s Rice Lake Village on the White Earth Reservation – at the site of the mother lode of wild rice, Lower Rice Lake. Lew Murray stands in front of the gathering — about 200 or so people. They have come together to greet the runners who’ve just covered 26 miles to honor the wild rice — and protect it. This is a joyful crowd. Local residents are just starting to get together out-of-doors after pandemic restrictions ease, and we are all happy to see each other.
Q&A: Winona LaDuke - The Nation
Q&A: Winona LaDuke
A conversation with the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate.
LF: So you decided to ride horseback along the route of the pipeline?
WL: On our reservation, the Enbridge Corporation is applying to nearly double the capacity of its Clipper line to 880,000 barrels per day—that is bigger than Keystone—and they want to build a third pipeline called Sandpiper next to our largest wild rice bed, to carry hydro-fracked oil from the Bakken oil field [in North Dakota] to Superior, Wisconsin. That amount of oil going across northern Minnesota—land of 10,000 lakes—would make this an oil superhighway. I had this dream that we should ride our horses against the current of the oil.
After that, we were invited to ride horse [into Washington]. It was an amazing spiritual experience. Nine teepees on the Mall, saying no to dirty oil and no to climate change, urging President Obama to do the right thing.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/qa-winona-laduke/