Last Standing Woman Quotes

“.. both the making and the unmaking were essential parts of life & necessary to keep the balance.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman

“By snowshoe, canoe, or dog team, they moved through those woods, rivers, and lakes. It was not a life circumscribed by a clock, stamp, fence, or road.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman

“The Anishinaabeg world undulated between material and spiritual shadows, never clear which was more prominent at any time. It was as if the world rested in those periods rather than in the light of day. Dawn and dusk, biidaaban, mooka’ang. The gray of sky and earth was just the same, and the distinction between the worlds was barely discernible.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman

“We should not believe that our lives are lived in a linear fashion; they don’t go that way, not for no reason; therefore, however, we should believe that our lives go in a circular manner. That is the Anishinaabe way of life.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman

“I do not believe that time is linear. Instead, I have come to believe that time is in cycles, and that the future is part of our past and the past is a part of our future. Always, however, we are in new cycles. The cycles omit some pieces and collect other pieces of our stories and our lives.

That is why we keep the names, and that is why we keep the words. To understand our relationship to the whole and our role in the path of life.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman

“D-Day was a short, sturdy man who watched the world from behind thick glasses set in ancient horn rims. Her carried in front of him a belly that had settled like a gunny sack of potatoes. His white, crew cut hair glistened against his dark skin, his weathered hands whispered of years in the woods peeling pulp for logging companies, and his tongue spoke mostly Ojibwe. He preferred the nuance of his own language, and over time, age and amnesia had taken most of the English he knew and returned it to its source, a shelf of yellowing books in a boarding-school library somewhere far away.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman

“Look at the dream net on the window,’ Charlotte said to Kwe, pointing at the spiderweb-like frost formed on the pane. ‘There’s a lot of spirits here now. They’ve come inside to keep company with us and stay warm.”
― Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman