Page6 RAI February-March 1980 AConnrsation wnh Winona laDuke Last July some 2000 of us participated in the National Gathering of the People, in an attempt to help protect the Black Hills of South Dakota from coal and uranium strip-mining. The Black Hills, site o{ one of the oldest geological formations in the U.S., is also a sarred place fo r many Native Americans. One of the speakers at the Gathering, Winona LaDuke, is a founder of Womrn of All Red Nations (WARN) . When Winona was in Portland in December we arranged the following discllssion at Rainhouse. -MR RAIN: Maybe you could start by telling us a little about the history of WARN (Women of All Red Nations), how and why it got started. WLD: OK. Traditionally the men and women in our nations each had roles. Women are considered to be the backbones of Indian nations because the responsibility for future generations belongs to the women. Now, through history we've had a problem called "colonization" where everything got really messed up over time. And it got to the point where in the past four or five generations the women have become really colonized and are trying to fall into roles that aren't traditional. Also, there's a really high rate now on the reservations of alcoholism, of poverty, of Indian men getting put in prison. So the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was founded in 1968, realized that there was a direct need to have a core group of women that were working with AIM as part of AIM. That's what the Women of All Red Nations is, but in a way so as to bring back the traditional role of women in the Indian nations and in the leadership and guidance of AIM, and to combat this colonization. WARN was founded last year (1978), in September, in Rapid ity, S.D., by about 200 women. Since that time we've grown a lot and have a few thousand people in both South and North America that are involved in WARN now . RAIN: I just want to clarify one thing you said. You said that the goal of WARN is to restore the traditional position of Indian women in Indian culture? WLD: Well, that's part of it. One of the major things that's happened to us is the way the family structure and the relationships in the family have been broken down. So that's where we start out as WARN, right there with the families, and fighting what happens to women especially, like the sterilization of Indian women. One out of every four Native American women has been sterilized. That's not traditional, but we aren't talking about just traditional things, we're talkmg about our survival as a people as a whole. In addition to this, and aside from fighting against the exploitation of uranium which affects women first (the radiation), we are forced to understand the link between repression of the people and theft of the resources. The government targets the men, like Leonard Peltier, and puts them into prison. They create distractions while stealing our resources. Leonard Peltier is a prisoner of the national energy policy. So that's what the women are fighting. And to insure that the women are getting stronger and stronger inside AIM, inside our liberation struggle, that's what WARN is about. RAIN: I'm wondering what kind of response you get from nonIndian feminists in this country. It seems to me that some of them might greet you with open arms while others might be very resistant to a movement that's trying to restore values of the family . . . WLD: That's exactly true. An important distinction between us and many people in the women's 11)0vement is that we view ourselves as an integral part, almost a representation, of the earth. The earth is our mother-a woman. As women are exploited, so is our mother. And we must fight both battles simultaneously. So we get into disagreements about those kinds of things and . what the role of women inside a movement is. And we don't separate ourselves from our men because we can't afford to . RAIN: Has WARN had much contact with the women's health movement? WLD: One of our major concerns now is radiation. This is a really big problem for Indians, a really big problem. On Pine Ridge reservation in September of this year five women were buried and they all had either breast or uterine cancer. Our belief is that if we're not sterilized by the Indian Health Service we're sterilized by the radiation. RAIN: Can you give a little background on the uranium mining? Are you talking about right on the reservation or on federal land lying next to the reservation? WLD: Well, historically speaking, it seems like they always found uranium on the reservation. RAIN: Well, did the federal government have mineral rights written into the treaty? Or did they make an agreement with the tribal structure?
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