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Ralph Nader’s running mate, Winona LaDuke, speaks
at Antioch College on Thursday.
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Life is a bit chaotic these days for Winona LaDuke, Ralph Nader's vice presidential candidate on the Green Party ticket.
When she's not having her picture taken, talking to reporters, nursing the youngest of her three children or signing autographs on the street, she's holding events with other progressive candidates all over the country, such as Mark O'Keefe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Montana.
Although few in the Tristate likely know LaDuke, she's developed a serious reputation in her home state of Minnesota, where she lives on the Chippewas' White Earth Reservation.
On Thursday, LaDuke is visiting Antioch College in Yellow Springs as part of the school's summer Peace Studies Institute and will give a presentation about Native American activism. She'll also sign her non-fiction book, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, at a Dayton, Ohio, bookstore.
LaDuke's resume is long and impressive. A Harvard University graduate, she spoke in front of the United Nations when she was 18; has been a principal of a reservation school; wrote two books, including a novel; organized an Indigo Girls tour that raised $250,000 for grassroots organizations; founded the Indigenous Women's Network to research small sustainable industries such as solar energy and rice production for use on the reservation; and was Nader's vice presidential candidate in 1996, when the two didn't actively campaign. And that's only a partial biography.
After losing a lawsuit to recover the 800,000 acres the federal government took from the White Earth Reservation, LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project, an effort to buy back as much of the land as possible. So far the organization has acquired 1,300 acres.
So, with so much going on in her life, why run for vice president? After spending years working for grassroots causes, LaDuke watched a lot of politicians pass laws that didn't benefit the general public.
"I found that people get elected and make bad decisions," she said, speaking from a cell phone on the road near Missoula, Mont.
After some prodding by Nader, LaDuke said she joined the Green Party's ticket again. When asked why she accepted the nomination, LaDuke, barely taking a breath, rattles off a long list of problems in America the two major political parties aren't talking about, much less trying to fix, such as:
· The tens of millions of Americans without health insurance;
· The light tax burden American corporations bear compared to most U.S. citizens;
· The weapons, mostly small arms such as M-16s, that U.S. companies export to other countries each year;
· The fact that the military gets one-third of the federal budget; and so on.
"The vast majority of American workers are no longer getting a living wage," she said, adding that most of the new jobs the major parties talk about pay less than $10 an hour.
LaDuke said she's not trying to take votes away from the Democratic Party but that she's aiming at the untapped political majority in America.
"The single largest party in America is the eligible voters who don't vote," she said. "A good portion of Americans no longer vote because they don't think it's relevant."
Green Party politicians have won about 200 seats in European parliaments and are gaining ground in the U.S., LaDuke said.
So far the party's embryonic network of state organizations has gathered enough signatures to put Nader and LaDuke on 34 state ballots, including Ohio, and the Greens expect to be on 45 or 46 ballots by Nov. 7, according to Todd Main, the Green Party's national field coordinator. Twelve of those states didn't have Green Parties before the ballot effort began, he said.
Georgia is the only state where the ticket surely won't be on the ballot, because the party failed to come close to the 39,000 signatures needed. Lawsuits are in progress in a few other states requiring large numbers of signatures early in the election cycle, such as North Carolina, Illinois and Oklahoma, Main said.
Green Party leaders in Ohio collected 12,000 signatures but need only 5,000 to get Nader and LaDuke on the ballot. Southwest Ohio residents accounted for about 1,300 of those signatures, according to Gwen Marshall, the substitute teacher and Hartwell resident in charge of the Green Party's southwest Ohio activities. So far Marshall has been working out of her home, but she hopes to have a campaign office in the fall.
Tim Burke, chair of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, said he's paying attention to the Nader/LaDuke campaign.
"If there is a particularly tight race, (they have) the potential to do damage," Burke said, adding that he was very concerned the Greens would do enough damage to give the Republicans control of Supreme Court appointments for the next four years.
The major task at hand is getting Nader into the presidential debates, and to do that polls must show that Nader has 15 percent of U.S. voters behind him. He's polled as high as 11 percent in Connecticut, but Main believes the parties will have to let Nader in no matter his numbers. Otherwise, they risk looking like hypocrites.
And although Democrats such as Burke say Green Party supporters are throwing away their votes, a 5 percent tally in the presidential election would guarantee the Green Party federal matching campaign funds in 2004.
The fledgling campaign has had its struggles, such as reporters trying to interview LaDuke on the road. Beginning on Aug. 4, four days of calls from CityBeat ended up in her cell phone voicemail box.
After finally reaching her Aug. 8, LaDuke answered questions while finishing up a photo session, nursing her child and getting an Iowa ballot application notarized.
Her cell phone miraculously kept working through all that and a tunnel, when LaDuke mentioned that 95 percent of war casualties today are civilians and that 50 years ago the numbers was reversed. She chided the Republicans for a convention full of sound bites and the Democrats for agreeing to back the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.
As she was going into more detail, she commented that her car seemed to be heading into one of the many wildfires scorching Montana. Within a few seconds, her cell phone signal was reduced to broken syllables.
Then it was gone, and LaDuke disappeared back into the campaign trail, surely still juggling several tasks at once in her effort to speak to America's silent majority of eligible voters. ©
Winona LaDuke will speak at Antioch College from 1-3 p.m. and 7-10 p.m. Thursday at the Glen Helen Building, 405 Corry St., Yellow Springs. Events are free and open to the public. For more information on Antioch's Peace Institute, call Jocelyn Robinson, summer program coordinator, at 937-754-6649.
The local Green Party branch will hold an organizational meeting at Oakley's 20th Century Theater at 7 p.m. Tuesday. For information, contact Gwen Marshall at gmarshall@fuse.net or 761-6978.
For more information on the Green Party and the Nader/LaDuke campaign, visit www.greenparty.org or www.votenader.com.
