{"id":142683,"date":"2021-11-05T10:47:33","date_gmt":"2021-11-05T14:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=142683"},"modified":"2025-11-11T08:43:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T13:43:31","slug":"otis-lecturer-winona-laduke-you-need-to-make-a-choice-between-two-paths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2021\/11\/05\/otis-lecturer-winona-laduke-you-need-to-make-a-choice-between-two-paths\/","title":{"rendered":"Otis Lecturer Winona LaDuke: ‘You need to make a choice between two paths’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What do hemp, centuries-old squash seeds, and a lake of carefully tended wild rice have in common? The future, according to environmentalist, economist, writer, and activist Winona LaDuke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The coronavirus pandemic has changed economies globally, crippling large and small businesses alike. Supply and demand never seem to match, and countries\u2019 unwillingness to give up fossil fuels has delivered a setback to the world\u2019s climate change goals, while increasingly extreme weather events \u2014 drought, heat, floods, and rising ocean waters \u2014 underscore the need to take action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even with modern and sustainable methods of generating power, conserving water, and consuming more efficiently, not all the solutions we need are new. Sometimes, reaching back into the past and consulting the cultures who lived here before us \u2014 and live here today alongside us \u2014 can reveal the answer we\u2019re all looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was LaDuke\u2019s message last Monday while delivering Bates\u2019 24th annual Otis Lecture, \u201cThe 7th Fire and a Just Transition: Indigenous People and the Next Economy<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Students
A day after her Oct. 25 Otis Lecture, Winona LaDuke speaks with students in two environmental studies courses, “Ecology of Food and Farming” and “Water and Watersheds” in the Keck Classroom of Pettengill Hall (Theophil Syslo | Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

LaDuke is a member of the Ojibwe people, part of the larger Anishinaabe group of North American Indigenous cultures. The \u201c7th Fire\u201d of her talk\u2019s title draws from Anishinaabe prophecies made 500 years ago. Our troubled world is in the time of the Seventh Fire, she explained. The promise of a sustainable, green, and socio-economically just future is the Eighth Fire, and LaDuke wants us all to be ready for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe were told that we would have a choice in the time of the Seventh Fire between two paths,\u201d said LaDuke. \u201cIt said one path would be well-worn and it would be scorched. And the other path would not be well worn; it would be green. They said, \u2018You need to make a choice between two paths.\u2019 And I would suggest to you that that is not actually just an Anishinaabe conundrum: I think that\u2019s really an American conundrum.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“We have some experience with sustainability. I would suggest to you that the U.S. does not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Few with any environmental awareness would argue against the dire need to create some sort of post\u2013fossil fuel world, with an intentional shift toward solar power, greater sustainability in food and materials, and protection of natural resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But getting there? That\u2019s the rub. And from LaDuke\u2019s perspective and expertise as an Indiginous activist, one of the many crimes of American colonialism is how it has systematically pushed aside \u2014 and tried to erase \u2014 sustainable and effective practices and ways of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, the Ojibwe people have harvested the same crop of lake-grown wild rice for over 10,000 years, bringing in up to 500 pounds of rice a day \u201cwith just two sticks and a canoe,\u201d LaDuke said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That, she added, is an example of what sustainability is. \u201cYou take care of your lake, make sure the water levels are good. So we have some experience with sustainability. I would suggest to you that the U.S. does not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To illustrate that point, LaDuke often tells the story of when anthropologists<\/a> visited the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to study Ojibwe rice-harvesting practices and left with a disdain for the limitations of its simplicity. In The Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes<\/em>, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1900, it is said that \u201cwild rice, which had led to their advance thus far, held them back from further progress, unless, indeed, they left it behind them, for with them it was incapable of extensive cultivation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Madeleine
Madeleine Lee \u201924 of Providence, R.I., asks a question to Winona LaDuke on Oct. 26, 2021. A day after her Otis Lecture, LaDuke spoke with students in two environmental studies courses, “Ecology of Food and Farming” and “Water and Watersheds” in the Keck Classroom of Pettengill Hall. (Theophil Syslo | Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The point is, Indigenous practices and ways of life are presented as a thing of the past, says LaDuke. Methods of growing and gathering food, building communities, and sharing culture are often seen as outdated and inefficient. Producing food for local \u2014 and not global \u2014 communities without an eye toward commercialization doesn\u2019t fit what many of us see as progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wild rice is also central to another of LaDuke\u2019s themes, biodiversity. \u201cIn this world that we\u2019re in today, it is essential for all of us to protect where the wild things are,\u201d LaDuke said. \u201cThat\u2019s where I say I live: where the wild things are. And that is how we survive: by protecting biodiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around 13 years ago, LaDuke was given some very old squash seeds. (There are a few stories about their origin<\/a>.) She gave some away and planted the rest and they yielded big, bright orange, bumpy squash, now a heirloom variety, which LaDuke named Gete Okosomin, meaning \u201creally cool old squash.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even centuries-old seeds remember how to grow, and those ties to the earth can help create stronger, more diverse crops. \u201cThe solutions are to grow local, and to grow indigenous varieties,\u201d LaDuke said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

<\/meta>\u201cThe next economy should be owned by the people who didn\u2019t benefit from the last one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Hemp is another example of a once-powerful economic driver that was relegated to throwback status. Industrial hemp was used to make a variety of industrial and consumer products, including textiles. LaDuke has said that<\/a> \u201canything that you can do with fossil fuels you can do with hemp, plus more. Just think about the fact that the word ‘canvas’ comes from cannabis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in 1937, industrial hemp was made illegal. \u201cAbout 100 years ago, we had a choice between a carbohydrate economy and a hydrocarbon economy<\/a>,\u201d she added. \u201cAnd we made a wrong choice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaDuke grows hemp on her farm near Callaway, Minn. She\u2019s cultivating it as a perennial, which means that she\u2019s not focusing on the CBD properties but the plant itself, and the way it interacts with the soil. Growing hemp perennially means it can sequester carbon in the soil for longer<\/a>, and the plant is healthier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As CBD products continue their march into the marketplace and hemp potentially replaces more fossil-fuel plastics, LaDuke believes the people at the forefront of those industries should be Indigenous and people of color, asserting that \u201cthe next economy should be owned by the people who didn\u2019t benefit from the last one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaDuke\u2019s recent activism includes her efforts to fight the expansion of the Line 3 pipeline<\/a> in northern Minnesota. The pipeline carries tar sands, a type of heavy crude oil. Replacing and building new pipelines to transport tar sands continues to power the demand for unsustainable energy while ignoring Indigenous land rights and the climate crisis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Winona
Winona LaDuke presents the 24th annual Otis Lecture in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. The image displayed behind her refers to LaDuke’s arrest and brief imprisonment in July 2021 during protests against the Line 3 pipeline expansion in northern Minnesota. “This is how you know your friends like you,” LaDuke said. “When they come to pick you up in jail.” (Anna Gouveia ’22 for Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, there’s still no coherent energy framework in the U.S. that accounts for climate change and its disasters, LaDuke said. \u201cThere’s no plan.\u201d And with no national plan, it can be difficult to see any action that can be taken, outside of political and social activism. Which returns her to the promise of the Eighth Fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaDuke quoted Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHistorically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou have an opportunity to transform things,\u201d LaDuke said. \u201cThe question is, what can you do in those moments? What do you learn from them? How do you adapt?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do hemp, centuries old squash seeds, and a lake of carefully tended wild rice have in common? The future, according to environmentalist, economist, writer, and activist Winona LaDuke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1422,"featured_media":142689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,243,232,11009],"tags":[3125,11532,6954,6961,11177],"class_list":["post-142683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-annual-events","category-environment-sustainability","category-the-college","tag-ecoreps","tag-green-innovation-grants","tag-philip-j-otis-endowment","tag-philip-j-otis-lecture","tag-tom-twist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1422"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142683"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171044,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142683\/revisions\/171044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}