Winona LaDuke and many others have been trying to stop Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline construction, which threatens the integrity of the headwaters of the Mississippi River area, where Winona and many of the other protestors live. This encapsulates all the major issues of our time: capitalism and fossil fuels vs. living in harmony with the earth, which is casting us off with a pandemic and global warming because we don’t recognize our place in the web of life and support its processes. As a group, the majority in this country also fail to honor non-white lives and cultures — the diversity, which nature exemplifies. I think we need to recognize that man-made laws and the police and military protect the capitalist, racist system and private property, rather than people or Life

Winona is currently in a local county jail, the powers-that-be hoping that the Stop Line-3 movement will fall apart without her on-site leadership. What they fail to recognize is that this is a leader-full movement that I hope will grow and continue. Native Lives and Livelihoods (wild rice, etc.) matter, and so does the earth and water on which all forms of life, including the mostly arrogant Western world, depends.