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Recovering the Sacred
The Power of Naming and Claiming
Winona LaDuke
Pages: 300ISBN: 0-89608-713-1
Format: cloth
Release Date: 2005-07-15
This book is also available in paper
Minnesota Book Awards General Nonfiction Winner
When she invites us to “recover the sacred,” prominent indigenous rights activist Winona LaDuke is demanding far more than the rescue of ancient bones and beaded headbands from museums. For LaDuke, only the power to define and access what is sacred will enable Native American communities to define their own destiny.
Basing her explorations on a wealth of Native American research and hundreds of interviews conducted with indigenous scholars and activists, LaDuke examines the connections between sacred sites, sacred objects, and the sacred bodies of her people—past, present, and future—focusing closely on the conditions under which traditional beliefs can be best practiced.
Well aware of the significant gaps between mainstream and indigenous thinking, LaDuke probes the paradoxes that abound for the Native people of the Americas. How, for instance, can the indigenous imperative to honor the Great Salt Mother be carried out when mining threatens not only access to Nevada’s Great Salt Lake, but the health of the lake water itself? While Congress has belatedly moved to “protect” most Native American religious expression, the US government continues to blatantly forward its own interests above the places and natural resources integral to these same “protected” ceremonies.
As LaDuke shows, federal law has achieved neither protection of sacred sites nor repatriation of Native remains—and certainly these laws do not prohibit the more insidious aspects of cultural theft, from the parading of costumed “Indian” mascots to the naming of professional athletic teams. Calling generously on her lyrical sensibility and sharp wit, LaDuke uses these essays not only to indict persisting injustice, but to map paths toward dignity and liberation.
Table of Contents
What is Sacred?
Part 1: Sacred Lands and Sacred Places
God, Squirrels, and the Universe: The Mt. Graham International Observatory and
the University of Arizona
The Apache and the Wars
Raising Arizona
In Search of the Authentic Apaches
Salt, Water, Blood, and Coal
Mining in the Southwest
“I am as much of the clouds as they are of me.”
Asabakeshiinh, the Spider
The Mormons, the Lawyers, and the Coal
Sucking the Mother Dry
The Salt Mother Still Rests
Klamath Land and Life
The Stronghold
Unhealed Wounds of Federal Policy
Termination: The Trees and the Land
Edison Chiloquin and Tribal Restoration
A River Runs through It
Valuable Stuff
Part 2: Ancestors, Images, and Our Lives
Imperial Anthropology: The Ethics of Collecting
“I am a man”
Ishi’s Descendants
The Ethics of Collecting
Our Relatives are Poisoned
Spoils of War
Quilled Cradleboard Covers, Cultural Patrimony, and Wounded Knee
Cankpe Opi: Wounded Knee
Cante Ognaka: The Heart of Everything That Is
The Road to Wounded Knee
The Killing Fields
The Aftermath and the Medals of Hono...
Winona LaDuke
Click here to view Winona LaDuke's full Author PageWinona LaDuke is one of the most brilliant and articulate representatives of indigenous perspectives. At the age of seventeen she spoke at the UN on behalf of Native Americans. She is a founding member of Women of All Red Nations and director of the Land Recovery Project on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. An inspiring speaker, she was the 1996 and 2000 vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party on the Nader/LaDuke ticket, the first Native American to run for national office. She is the author of Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (South End Press, 2005) and All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (South End Press, 2000).
LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg and the mother of three children. As Program Director of the Honor the Earth Fund, she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, Winona is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves, as co-chair of the Indigenous Women's Network.
In 1994, Winona was nominated by Time magazine as one of America's fifty most promising leaders, under-forty years of age. She was awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the BIHA Community Service Award in 1997, the Ann Bancroft Award for Women's Leadership Fellowship, and the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project. Also in 1997, her novel, Last Standing Woman, was published. In 1998, Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth. She published All Our Relations, a non-fiction book on Native environmental struggles in 1999. The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings was published in 2002.