Winona LaDuke

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nader's No. 2

She's no Bush fan, but Green Party veep candidate Winona LaDuke wouldn't
necessarily mind if her "spoiler" ticket trips up Al Gore.

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By Alicia Montgomery

July 13, 2000 | Winona LaDuke says she has better things to do than run for
vice president. Though she's won that honor from the Green Party, and will
back up consumer activist and presidential hopeful Ralph Nader for the
second presidential election in a row, LaDuke is a crusader with a rainbow
of capes. The Harvard-educated economist, activist and writer can speak
volumes about the evils of federally funded uranium mining on Indian
reservations and America's insistence on giving military aid to
questionable foreign regimes. In short, LaDuke can tell you everything
that's wrong with the club she's working to join.

But winning's not the point here. For a national candidate, LaDuke seems
strangely ambivalent about the results. She's not having any of that
"spoiler" stuff, the accusation hurled by many Democrats -- and most
prominently, the New York Times editorial page -- that all she and Nader
can do is ruin Al Gore, a man whom she finds inadequate, though preferable
to George W. Bush. But Gore hasn't earned those votes, she'll say, and if
he loses, that's too bad. Besides, to many Americans, it doesn't matter who
is in Washington, anyway.

So why does it matter to her? Veep candidate and would-be valiant loser
LaDuke spoke to Salon about her critics, her qualifications and her own
possible conflict of interest.

How do you feel about those who dismiss you and Ralph Nader as no more than
spoilers who should otherwise not be taken seriously?

I think they should consider the rising number of Americans who just don't
vote anymore because they don't think political insiders and their policies
are relevant. When speaking of who speaks for the American people, we
should reflect on how the American people vote and how they act.

What do you think about the way the media has characterized you as a
candidate? You've certainly been portrayed as an extremist by some.

I find it insulting. Some of the coverage just refers to me as a Native
American woman or a Native American activist. I'm Harvard-educated, I'm an
economist by training. I'm an author, a journalist, as well as being active
in community development. If we use those terminologies, we dismiss the
vast array of Americans who ... we don't have a single label that can be
put in a sound bite. Actually, I consider myself to be pretty politically
conservative.

Would you still be running if you thought your candidacy would effectively
ensure George W. Bush's election?

I'm going to give you an answer that, this is not the answer that Ralph
would give. I'm going to give you an example. We filed a constitutional
rights lawsuit on my reservation, and I had to go out and interview all
these old people. And I found that many of the old people on my reservation
didn't know who was president. That kind of pointed out to me the
irrelevance at times of who is in Washington.

It's quite likely that Bush's record in Texas indicates that he doesn't
care [about] policy making, but things are not great under the present
administration. Nor would they be under a Gore administration for many
millions of American workers who are losing ground in salaries, whether
because of multinational corporations that move their jobs elsewhere, or
the downward mobility of wages. So my question -- and Ralph's question, I
believe -- is that don't we believe we deserve better? And to get to
better, it doesn't happen overnight.

Are you saying that four years of Bush is something you could tolerate in
order to move the debate forward on some issues that are getting overlooked?

Not quite. I would not say "tolerate." I would totally detest four years of
George W. Bush. What I'm saying is that the difference between the two
[candidates] and what we need for America is pretty substantial. Those two
do not actually address the root causes of what is wrong with America. And
it's not about a theoretical state, it is about systemic change in a
country with this vast amount of resources where there is no reason for all
those children to be in poverty, for all those people to be in prison, and
there's no reason for this level of environmental degradation. And, in
order to heal our country and reconcile our country, we have to ask for and
demand that our leaders do better.

I'm not going to say I'd feel bad, because I can't feel bad.

It's really going to be lousy if [Bush] gets in. But I can't stand to
continue this [election] process where the whole thing gets degraded and
goes into a downward spiral. I mean, look at the choices, and they're
getting worse.

Your ancestors were Anishinabeg Indians. Do you feel that American Indians
should be given sovereign nation status? If so, is there a conflict of
interest for you in running for this nation's second highest office?

I think that Indian nations should be treated as sovereign nations, and
that could be a conflict. But in order for Indian people to have more power
in the government, we need to become more visible. Indians didn't even get
the right to vote until 1924. Can you imagine how different history
would've have been had we had the right to vote back when Indians were a
majority? Now, as a tribal leader, you cannot even get a meeting with
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. We're basically blown off by the Clinton
administration because there are just 2 million of us, and that's too small
a voting bloc. It's crucial that we make ourselves heard.

If you lose, what would you like to see come out of your campaign?

I would hope that it opens up the system to third parties -- real third
parties, not just Ross Perot and people with millions of dollars to spend.
We want to encourage people to vote based on their principles and not their
fears, and we want to ensure that all these people who don't vote are not
forgotten. People have a right to vote for what they believe in, for what
they feel is right. It's important to remember that people died for the
right to vote. And getting people back into voting, that's something worth
fighting for.

Most of your work has been in domestic policy areas, like the environment
and social justice. How would you be able to formulate a foreign policy?

We all have strengths in certain areas, and I think that Ralph and I would
surround ourselves with good, qualified advisors to handle some of those
issues. But I do have experience and ideas about foreign policy.

The first thing we have to do is decouple foreign aid from military aid.
Right now, behind Israel, Colombia is one of America's top recipients of
foreign aid; so is Mexico. Most of that money is spent on the military, but
neither of those countries has any foreign enemies. Why do they need that
money for defense? We send most of that money saying that we expect it to
be spent on the drug war, but much of the military force is used against
the civilian populations in those countries. Colombia has the highest rate
of kidnapping in the world and there's a lot of political violence, much of
it carried out by the government. When political murders happen there, many
of the victims are shot with our guns.

How would you try to influence defense?

We really need to cut back on military spending. It's time to switch to a
peacetime economy. Right now, we're spending up to a third of our budget on
defense, even though the Cold War is over. People in Washington don't want
acknowledge that. The Cold War has been over for 10 years.

What would the first anti-LaDuke attack ad look like? What in your past do
you think they would exploit?

Jeez, I don't really know. I'm not perfect; I've made some mistakes in my
life. But I feel really good about the life I've led and I'm not afraid to
have it examined.

Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of
that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate
of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using
thousand-year-old trees to make phone books. I think that's a total waste
of a tree.

What is the first thing you would do as vice president?

I'd pardon Leonard Peltier, but I guess I couldn't do that as vice
president. I'd ask Ralph to do it. He's a victim of COINTELPRO [the FBI
counterintelligence program that infiltrated leftist American groups from
1968 to 1971], and I think it's wrong that he's still in prison. People all
over the world have been asking for his release for years. [The Rev.]
Desmond Tutu even wants him out. The Clinton administration released those
Puerto Rican activists, and I think that was the right thing to do. After
years, Geronimo Pratt was finally let out of jail, too. It's time to end
the COINTELPRO era in this country and release Leonard Peltier.

salon.com | July 13, 2000

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Louis Proyect

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