By the Alliance Interns Newsletter Team
“This is the time of prophecies,” shared Winona LaDuke during a talk at the Alliance for Sustainability’s Planning Retreat this past July. Winona is a Native American activist, author and economist. She has a long history working to protect Indigenous land rights as the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, co-founder of Honor the Earth and a leader of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Winona currently lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she farms heritage vegetables and hemp.
The White Earth Reservation is home to over 9,000 Anishinaabe residents, many of them farmers, facing issues like poverty and food insecurity. Winona’s goal is to create a new local economy for farmers to make money with a high-value, sustainable and versatile cash crop: hemp. This is an opportunity for Indigenous people to earn income from the land, engage with their culture and grow a healthy future. The Alliance has worked with Winona to support organic agriculture, protect wild rice and provide fiscal sponsorship for her efforts.
Prophesies on the Seventh Generation and Fire and Their Meaning for Winona LaDuke
In the prophecies Winona shared, Our Seven Generations and the Seventh Fire, Native Americans foretell that we have the option of choosing between two paths – a path of destruction or a path of newness and regeneration.
For context, Our Seven Generations describes how after seven generations of interactions with White colonizers, Native Americans will rise up to help protect and heal the land. Meanwhile, the Seventh Fire states that humans will have to choose between two paths, materialism or spirituality.
Winona Creates a Hemp Farmers Cooperative
For Winona, it was a clear decision about which path she needed to take. She created the Indigenous Hemp and Cannabis Farmers Cooperative with the goal of supporting the development of a network of hemp farmers, establishing a fair trade market and generating community wealth.
The Co-op will uphold Indigenous values while expanding the possibilities for farmers. They face the sustainability challenge that their hemp needs to be sent back and forth across the country to be processed. Winona seeks to address this challenge by localizing the processing in order to create sustainable hemp production.
Addressing the Harmful Impacts of Clothes-Making with a B.C. Economy
Winona points out that the manufacturing and washing of our clothes harms our waterways and food chains. The more we wash our fleece and other synthetic clothes, the more fibers and microplastics are released into the water that goes untreated through our wastewater plants, getting into aquatic ecosystems affecting fish and wildlife, as well as our drinking water.
Not only that, but the manufacturing process is problematic. From nylon and polyester to cotton, manufacturing textiles releases harmful dust affecting workers and accounts for excessive water usage and the release of polluting dyes and other chemicals, often prioritizing profit over the environment.
Winona and her team understand how unsustainable companies push out harmful products for profit, and they want to counter it. She will use her farm to build a new economy through local agricultural products and fashion created by hemp. At the retreat, she called it a “B.C. economy — a Before Colonization economy.” On her website LaDuke states, “At Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm we are working to find ways to process our hemp and make clothes that are sustainable and kind to the Earth.”
Winona’s Sustainable Production
Hemp is farmed for fiber, feed and as a building material. It is naturally resistant to pests, meaning that there is little to no need to use harmful pesticides. Hemp is especially useful when put into a crop rotation, as it can help rid the soil of weeds. Hemp is a hardy plant, so it needs far less water than cotton, while sequestering significantly more carbon than other crops.
After doing extensive research with her team, Winona realized hemp production can play an important role in achieving sustainability both because it’s environmentally friendly and products made from help are more long-lasting. It is arguably a relatively untapped resource for the future.
Winona isn’t purely focused on hemp, however. Her farm also grows heritage food crops — native varieties of vegetables. Growing heritage crops is an important way of practicing food sovereignty by keeping traditional crops in the diet of tribal members.
She’s also seeking to address food insecurity on the White Earth Reservation. 90% of the reservation is located in a federally recognized food desert, making communal farms and gardens such as her’s even more important sources of healthy, affordable food.
The Need for an Indigenous Hemp Co-Op
At the retreat, Winona held up a Patagonia bag, made with the hemp she’s grown. She then recounted the current manufacturing process, which unfortunately requires the hemp to be sent across the country again and again, from Minnesota to North Carolina to be broken down, Virginia to be degummed, and then all the way to Mexico to be spun. The hemp is sent back to Washington to be woven and California to be cut and sewn into the bag we saw.
The process is so long and spread out that it’s easy to understand why organizations like the Indigenous Hemp and Cannabis Farmers Co-Op are necessary to support small farmers. Without it, the production process seems far too daunting for local farmers to take on by themselves, especially when so many farmers are already struggling. Winona’s goal is to eventually localize the textile manufacturing processes in her area so that it is more sustainable.
The Alliance and Our Stand with Winona
The Alliance is again exploring a partnership with Winona, this time as the fiscal sponsor of her Hemp Co-Op. We support her Co-Op’s work and effort to preserve Native American heritage and land with organic products and localizing textile production to create a future of sustainability
What the World Should Take from Winona LaDuke
A recent class shared that colonizers took over the land of Indigenous people because of how fertile and useful it was for planting and economic benefit. Not too long after the stealing, their land was useless due to overproduction. Indigenous people have kept their land fertile and abundant through their way of living, and the world can learn from it.
Supporting grassroots sustainability initiatives like LaDuke’s hemp co-op is absolutely crucial to ensuring a green future.