Audio: Winona LaDuke, Attracta Mooney get down to Earth in David Suzuki Podcast, Episode 4

Winona LaDuke, Attracta Mooney get down to Earth in David Suzuki Podcast, Episode 4

By David Suzuki

Activist, author and farmer Winona LaDuke and financial journalist Attracta Mooney.

We are land animals, so it’s no surprise that we refer to our planet as “Earth,” even though water covers more than 70 per cent of its surface. For thousands of years, Indigenous cultures have understood that we and Earth are one. What happens to the planet happens to us, and there are natural limits to what we can take from it.

COVID-19 has confronted us with those limits. Sixty per cent of all diseases that afflict humankind have leapt from other animals. As we drive wildlife into ever-constricted spaces, the opportunity for novel viruses to spread to us increases, as we’ve seen with hanta, Ebola, HIV, dengue, SARS and now COVID-19.

Population growth and development have spread a layer of human protoplasm all over the globe, while hyper-globalization makes it difficult to contain a new disease. The pandemic reminds us that it is a delusion to think we are separate from the natural world. It also gives us a chance to rethink and reimagine our relationship with Earth, and how we can protect it now and into the future.

The fourth episode of my new podcast’s first season, “COVID-19 and the Basic Elements of Life,” brings together an international journalist and an acclaimed activist to help us understand how we might halt the destruction of our only home and offers hope that even the unlikeliest of cousins — environmentalists and financial leaders — can find common ground when it comes to the climate crisis.

Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe member of the White Earth Nation who has spent decades advocating for environmental protections. She’s travelled around the world speaking about Indigenous rights and the importance of protecting the environment. She’s executive director of the environmental organization Honor the Earth and has written five books on environmentalism and human rights.

“I’m all ready for the next economy, because the last economy didn’t work out too well for us,” she says. “Now is the time to make something that makes sense. A lot of it is local, because that’s the nature of what we really need to do. We need to diminish globalization and restart, regrow local self-reliance.”

Attracta Mooney, a financial journalist, has been the investment correspondent for the Financial Times since 2013. Not everyone immediately connects the dots between investment banks and fighting climate change. But, like Winona, Attracta sees something promising happening where COVID-19, climate change and investment meet.

That’s the nature of what we really need to do. We need to diminish globalization and restart, regrow local self-reliance.

Winona LaDuke

One might expect the pandemic to stop climate change from being a big issue for the investment community. But Attracta says the opposite has happened.

“We’ve seen that [investors] seem to have been taking climate change even more seriously than before,” she says. “One money manager said to me that this is because the pandemic has shown just how catastrophic a single event can be on their investments or on the world. And their concern now is that climate change could do the same thing.”

It’s fascinating to see that our current situation may be opening a door for us all — one that could lead us to a greener and more responsible financial future.

It’s no secret the health of Canada’s economy depends on the health of its natural resources, and one of those assets is the boreal forest. It is the largest intact forest on the planet, bigger than the Amazon.

Indigenous Peoples may consider a river, mountain or forest to be sacred; not as something to be sacrosanct, kept pristine and worshipped, but spiritually alive, culturally important or just worthy of respect.

In this episode, I am thrilled to speak with Melissa Mollen Dupuis as our guest expert. Melissa is a member of the Innu community of Ekuanitshit on Quebec’s Côte-Nord. A celebrated activist and filmmaker, Melissa is also a lead boreal forest and caribou campaigner for the David Suzuki Foundation, based out of our Quebec office.

“The boreal forest, for me, is one of the most beautiful forests in the world,” Melissa says. “There’s so many medicinal plants, small fruits, the animals. But that relation that we built has fed us for thousands of years. And if we were not managing to empty out the boreal forest, we could probably manage to have that equilibrium still there.”

The boreal forest is now at risk because of resource extraction, which is fracturing the land. The lives it supports are at risk.

“I think this is a wake-up call for Indigenous knowledge of living on the land,” Melissa adds. “For so long, [the boreal forest] has been seen as the fridge I describe, and now people are noticing how we know that relation — how we manage that relation and how we can live in that forest and not just see it as a space of resources.”

Nicknamed the “lungs of the north,” the boreal forest is truly one of the most magical ecosystems I’ve ever seen. It’s devastating to see it — and many of its key species like the boreal woodland caribou — at risk.

Historically — in the boreal and around the world — we’ve thought nothing of dumping our toxic compounds like pesticides, waste engine oil or paints onto the soil. We dig up the earth, push it around, drown it under dams or pave it over with roads and buildings. But as Melissa illustrates, soil is alive and makes it possible for us to feed ourselves. We must find a different relationship with soil, land and earth, and care for it so it can continue to nourish us.

A healthy relationship with Earth requires a healthy relationship with earth

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Replay: Building Indigenous Food Sovereignty with Indigenous Food Circle was live. September 16

Understanding Our Food Systems is a collaborative participatory, action-based project led by fourteen First Nations communities and supported by a collaborative partnership between the Thunder Bay District Health Unit and the Indigenous Food Circle.

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in Northern Minnesota.

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Join us on Wednesday, September 16th 2020 1-4 pm for conversations with 3 Anishnaabeg communities working towards community food sovereignty and a keynote from Winona LeDuke.

Book Review of Winona LaDuke: "A Bard for Environmental Justice"

Written by: Georgianne Nienaber

Writer and author

Winona LaDuke’s latest book reads like a prayer. These are holy words— inspirational stories taken straight from the heart of indigenous communities throughout the world. The Winona LaDuke Chronicles: Stories From the Front Lines in the Battle for Environmental Justice is lyrical, instructional, and infused with wry humor when the weight of the message becomes unbearable. LaDuke provides a roadmap through tribal nations’ belief systems; offering a spiritual compass and invaluable insight into the relationship of prophesy to the realities of climate change, economic collapse, food scarcity and basic human rights. As it happens, prophesy does come true and redemption is possible despite this encyclopedia of environmental and spiritual insults.

Are we hell-bent on embracing environmental calamity or is atonement and redemption possible through the lessons offered by indigenous belief systems? How fascinating to learn that corn has a history, that seeds have a profound spiritual meaning, and that plants have a sacred relationship with humans. Provide the environment in which food will flourish and there will be no need for genetic crop engineering.

LaDuke is one of the great overlooked orators of our time, and she brings this prowess to every page.

Her standard biography is well known. A two time Green Party vice-presidential candidate, LaDuke has 40 years of activism behind her. A graduate of Harvard University, LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg. In the preface to Chronicles, she offers testimony to all that life teaches. As for those two losing vice-presidential campaigns, in the essay, “Recovering from the Drama of Elections,” LaDuke calls out Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and offers valuable and obvious advice. “People want to be heard.” American politics should be defined by diversity rather than establishment money and corporations afforded the status of personhood.

The metaphors of fire and resurrection infuse the story telling. 

“I have now more winters behind me than before me. It has been a grand journey. I am grateful for the many miles, rivers, and places and people of beauty,” LaDuke writes.

It was after the loss of her home to fire in the early days of a bleak 2008 winter; a loss that included books, a lifetime of memorabilia, and sacred objects, that the orator and writer temporarily lost her voice. LaDuke says she could not write, could not sleep and could barely speak. Memory became tenuous as she struggled with the even more profound losses of her father, the father of her children, and her sister. She equates the rock bottom feeling of PTSD with being “a casualty of the modern Indian Wars.” She had lost her loves, her heart and some of her closest friends. But “after the burn” indigenous people know that the fields, the forests and the prairies rebound with new growth. LaDuke found this growth in the writing and the story telling. Now a self-described “modern day bard,” she travels across the land, sharing stories from other lands and writing them down along the way.

These are her chronicles, at once universal and very personal.

In these days of the great Canadian fire that has devastated Fort McMurray, it is a stunning coincidence that in the early pages of Chronicles, LaDuke tells the story of a 2014 meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu there. The town, which has endured much suffering in the current news cycles, is the booming center of the Alberta Tar Sands projects. It is also the ancestral home of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Tutu was there to speak about climate change and global warming. Media coverage criticized Tutu as being misinformed. Tutu warned that pipelines and oil contribute to the devastation of First Nation lands and livelihood and that the resulting climate change would be devastating.

Scientists attribute the Alberta firestorms to climate change. A prophecy fulfilled?

The essay “My Recommended Daily Allowance of Radiation,” slams the North Dakota Department of Health for approving the increase of radioactive materials scuttled in landfills by a factor of 10 or 1000 percent. (from 5 pico curies per liter to 50) It seems the fracking industry was dumping 27 tons a day at 47 pico curies per liter and the illegal dumping issue needed a quick fix. This all scary stuff and LaDuke lays out the rationale for avoiding radioactive materials, especially since not all of it was making it to the landfills. Radioactive filter socks were thrown in ditches and kids found them to be interesting toys.

In that characteristic flash of wry humor, LaDuke quotes a female representative from the North Dakota Oil and Gas Industry. “Nuclear radiation isn’t so bad,” the rep said. “It’s not like Godzilla or anything. It’s more like Norm from Cheers, just sitting at the bar.”

“I want more of whatever psychedelic drug she’s taking,” LaDuke writes.

“In the Time of the Sacred Places” describes two paths to the future. One is scorched and one is green, and the Anishinaabeg would have to choose. (So do we all) Ancient teachings speak of a mandate to respect the sacred. In the millennia since the ancient prophecy, sacred Beings still emerge. LaDuke writes that they emerge in “lightning strikes at unexpected times, the seemingly endless fires of climate change, tornadoes that flatten” and floods.

As the Haudenosaunee teaching says, “...Our future is seven generations past and present.” We must assume responsibility. LaDuke’s fine book is our map.

REVIEW ABOVE Written by: Georgianne Nienaber, Writer and author