Winona LaDuke, Honor the Earth

White Earth Land Recovery Project is working to recover the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, and community development, and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage.

For decades, uranium mining has laid to waste vast areas of land and aquifers in the Northwest and Southwest. There are more than 1,100 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Reservation, increasing the contamination of an arid region. Tribal lands are also targets for coal development, hosting four of the 10 largest coal strip mines in the U.S. Proposed coal methane developments would contaminate the groundwater of enormous regions including the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. Over the years, tribes have been inundated by major dam projects ranging from the Columbia River in the Northwest to the Great Plains and on into James Bay in the North. Native villages and tribes are also deeply affected by oil-development proposals for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Gwich'in) and the massive nuclear waste dump planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada (Western Shoshone).

Honor the Earth has worked for more than a decade with these front-line groups to oppose further destruction of their land and way of life. We are interested both in addressing the economic issues posed by energy-development choices in Native America, and in challenging tribal governments to move toward a renewable-energy agenda. We are also interested in democratizing power production. The first Native American-owned and -operated large-scale turbine in the country went on line in February 2003 -- the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's 750-kilowatt wind turbine.

Indian country has unemployment rates of 50 percent or more and could benefit both from small-scale assembly work and from the potential for renewable energy's job creation in rural areas. Investing in alternative energy is investing in jobs, since the fuel supply is from the Creator. The European Union estimates that 2.77 jobs are created for every megawatt of wind power produced, 7.24 jobs per megawatt in solar, and 5.67 jobs per megawatt in geothermal. Or, in short, 1,000 megawatts of alternative energy averages 6,000 jobs, or 60 times more high-paying jobs than in fossil fuels and nuclear power. That is basically the difference between putting money back into the community or putting it into the pockets of utilities and energy companies.

Don't spend your time talking about political work -- act today.