Winona LaDuke is an author, activist, politician, and orator who speaks out in the name of the indigenous peoples of North America. Her most recent causes are food sovereignty and renewable energy. She was born in 1959. Her father is Ojibwe, of the Anishinaabeg, from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and her mother is of Jewish and European descent. She was the first one to attend university in her family, going to Harvard for her undergraduate. It was during this time she first saw recognition at a global scale. At quite a young age, she was able to address the UN on the rights of indigenous peoples.

In her speech she stated, “My point is that there is a way to transition (out of a fossil fuel economy). What we lack, largely, is a political will.”

After her undergraduate, she went back home to Minnesota and spent many years fighting for stolen land and food sovereignty, the control of their crops) for indigenous people. In the late 1990’s she ran on the Green Party ticket as Vice President alongside Ralph Nader and was brought into the limelight once more.

LaDuke has continued her work with a renewed focus in recent years on. She is at the forefront of the fight for environmentalism and indigenous sovereignty in America and the world.