Abstract
The Winona LaDuke Chronicles is a clever and inspired collection of short prose—stories that articulate the interwoven experiences of LaDuke’s life as well as showcase how they fit within the larger fabric of Indigenous existence today, life which is to be understood in the context of overwhelming environmental destruction and historical trauma, but also among the backdrop of Indigenous resiliency and beauty. Winona LaDuke is a Native American author from the White Earth Ojibwe tribe located in Minnesota. She is well known for her environmental activism evidenced in her current executive director position of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization. Many of the social and environmental issues covered in this text are common in Indigenous communities around the world, and LaDuke attributes these experiences to colonialism and the loss of humanity’s meaningful relationship to space, place, and to each other. As a thorough undertaking detailing the complexities of everyday violences of Indigenous realities and, at the same time, illuminating the power of Indigenous resistance through tradition and relationship to place, this book should be of interest to scholars in Indigenous studies, women’s and gender studies, American studies, and anthropology.
In the first chapter, “On Place,” LaDuke begins her telling in Moningwunakaauning Minis, known as Madeline Island in Wisconsin, which is the center of Anishinaabe Midewewin (Medicine) Society. She narrates the history of loss which resulted in the removal of Indians from Anishinaabe Akiing—our Anishinaabe homeland in the Great Lakes region—and the subsequent mining, logging, and ecological destruction which disenfranchised Anishinaabek and made settler families rich. As the history of removal in the Great Lakes region unfolds through treaties, natural resource extraction, pollution, pipelines, and poverty, LaDuke contrasts the destructive mentality of mainstream America to that of Indigenous love of place: “Americans are transient, taught an American dream of greener pastures elsewhere. This belittles relationship to Place. It holds no responsibility—only a sense of entitlement—to mineral rights, water rights, and private property—enshrined in the Constitution” (pp. 65–66). I attend the same Midewewin Lodge as LaDuke on the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin and have witnessed the climate-change-induced ecological destructions which are again forcing Indigenous peoples from ceremonial spaces. To these ends, LaDuke laments, “how [is it] that we are Anishinaabeg, Potawatomi, Odawa, Ho-Chunk, in this world of jackhammer noise which surrounds us, the constant din, the loss of Beings and Memories, the ecological, spiritual and cultural amnesia which can be so contagious” (p. 6). She later describes these environmental issues in terms of “full-cost accounting” which is difficult to calculate, because it is impossible to account for the total spiritual and cultural effects on the land and on us (p. 15).
The direct relationship that natural resource extraction has to violence against Native women is a central theme of “Writings on Women, Idle No More and Canadian Colonialism.” Expedited by a “new onslaught of militarization” in the USA and Canada, tribes are dealing with high rates of sex trafficking symptomatic of the “man camps” of large natural resource extraction sites on or near reservation lands (p. 137). LaDuke teases apart the complexities of these issues while highlighting the resistance and strength of Native women, especially in the Idle No More Movement in Canada and the Zapatista Movement in Mexico—two movements which showcase the promise of “ongoing indigenization of western hemisphere politics” (p. 144).
LaDuke returns to the Great Lakes in “Black Snake and the Pipeline Chronicles.” This chapter is saturated in detail regarding the onslaught of environmental risks that tribes in the Great Lakes region are forced to take as a result of “manufactured consent” by big oil and natural gas companies and facilitated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s inadequate consultation process. The near eradication of manoomin (wild rice), which is an important traditional food for us is one example. Another is the 2010 Enbridge pipeline rupture near Kalamazoo, Michigan—located about 40 miles from my tribe, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians reservation in Dowagiac, Michigan (p. 176).
“Short Stories and Fargo Forum Communications” is a collection of LaDuke’s prior publications that she uses to show the entanglement of Indigenous experiences around the world. One particularly telling example of this is the 19th-century Irish Potato Famine. With LaDuke’s expertise in issues of food sovereignty (a topic she revisits at length in the fifth chapter “On Food”), she tells the story of the potato—a South American crop with over 3,000 varieties and “yielding variations in nutritional contents, pest resistance and agility to become the food that would feed the world” (p. 89). A result of forced mono-cropping and the export of wheat grains to British colonies, the Irish Potato Famine was a result of a brutal brand of British colonialism. As a direct response, another community who also exists in a regime of colonial violence, the Choctaw Nation sent US$710—roughly US$1 million today—to Ireland in 1845 to help ease their suffering (p. 91). Vignettes like these together with the homage chapter to anti-colonial leaders around the world in “Tributes and Gratitude to Those Who Have Joined the Ancestors” articulate a shared imagination by Indigenous communities, people of color, and non-Indigenous allies to create a more desirable future centered on respect for all life.
The happenings that LaDuke describes have extensive geographic and temporal relevance for those interested in climate change, colonialism, and social issues around the world. However, due to the brevity of the issues covered, this text might not be appropriate for those interested in gaining an exhaustive understanding of environmental or tribally specific topics. Also, there are sometimes obscure cultural references made in LaDuke’s writing which may fall by the wayside for some readers (Midewewin ceremonial items such as migis shell, for example). With that said, The Winona LaDuke Chronicles is a timely and imaginative text, providing an inspirited roadmap to dream of alternative possibilities and more desirable futures that respect the integrity of the Earth and of each other.